Quite interestingly, in the tradition of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, it is said that after the death of Jesus, Jewish and Roman authorities sought to obscure or cover up the tomb of Christ in an effort to disavow the claims of the followers of Christ.  The Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross commemorates, among other things, the finding of the ‘true’ cross by Saint Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine in the 4^th Century.  I find it curious, in light of today’s world, how the idea of hiding the cross and finding the cross – indeed, the ‘true’ cross – can be contemporarily observed.

As we look at our world today, we could say that there are attempts to ‘hide’ the ‘true’ cross of Christ as well as attempts to ‘find’ the ‘true’ cross. You may ask what I mean by this.  I am not talking about the literal cross upon which Jesus was killed, but more so the deep significance of what the ‘true’ cross means for anyone who may claim to follow Christ.   So what is the ‘true’ cross and has this cross in fact been hidden?  If so, where is it hidden and who is responsible for hiding it?  Or maybe a more positive approach would be to ask, if we can agree that it may be hidden, how can we go about finding the cross?

The cross at the time of Jesus was the symbol of the most painful and degrading forms of capital punishment – crucifixion.  This form of execution was carried out against the most despised of criminals –those who were considered and convicted of being traitors.  From a theological standpoint, developed over the first few centuries following the life and death of Jesus, the cross came to mark the loving power of God’s intersection with created life.  Specifically, this intersection is the incarnation of God’s love as human, Jesus as the Christ; the ‘crossing-over’ of the Divine into or through the human, which ‘saves’ humanity and indeed all of creation through this loving intimate inter-being with us.

The ‘saving’ aspect of the Incarnation and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus was historically developed along the lines of atonement for wrongdoing, and failings, and unfortunately not seen as ‘saving’ in the loving sense that was actually held in faith and experience prior to the development of atonement theory in the first centuries following Christ.  This earlier sense of how we are ‘saved’ within the incarnation, the life, death and resurrection of Christ is captured in the early Church Fathers who boldly claimed that God became human in order that humans could become divine.[i]

So, this brings us back to the question of the ‘true’ cross that has been hidden or covered up, and seeks to be found.  I wonder if we have historically ‘hidden’ the ‘true’ cross of Divine Love infused into created life behind a cross of fear, shame, reparation and even false pride.  I wonder if we should not still be looking for that ‘true’ cross that involves the radical ‘crossing’ of love. Have we lifted high a ‘cross’ that saves us by excluding others?  Have we perhaps missed the intersecting point of the cross, the center which holds the tension between the crossing over or crossing through (interpenetration) of Divine Love and the human heart?  Are we afraid of the tension where the two meet, failing to realize that creativity can be born out of diversity, that life can become more through diversity?

What exactly does the cross signify for us now?  Do we focus only on the cross-timber that is situated vertically rather than the one that is crossed through – the horizontal line?  If we only look up, and not forward, we run the risk and indeed become just as disenchanted with overwrought expectations as the Israelites that we hear described in the book of Numbers (Nm 21:4b-9):

With their patience worn out by the journey,
the people complained against God and Moses,
“Why have you brought us up from Egypt to die in this desert,
where there is no food or water?
We are disgusted with this wretched food!”  

Like them, we will be ‘bitten’ by the ‘snakes’ of the bankruptcy in delusional thinking that does not look for more life or new life, because we are afraid of the inevitable path to be taken – the Cross.  This is not the cross of necessary suffering as reparation for failings, but the cross of transformation that does require suffering and some type of death, but these ‘requirements’ are grounded in radical divine love leading to deeper and MORE life.

Our fear of suffering and death makes us blindly selfish of something that we really cannot possess – exclusive love from a god of our own making.  We see the cross as a wooden beam lodged in someone else’s eye that punishes without love and draws up unreal separations that do in fact oppress and abuse others and ourselves.  We fail to see the crossing over, the movement through, the flow of love that meets in the center and continues forward seeking more and more centers.

The cross seen only as a symbol of death is something that we have gone to great lengths to avoid.  We marginalize death and suffering and seek only life, without realizing that death is indeed a part of life. The Franciscan theologian, Ilia Delio, reminds us that the last word of life is LIFE, but our fear of suffering and death prevents us from embracing death as the transformative crossroads into NEW life. [ii]   Quoting the French paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, Delio claims that the whole of our lives, the whole cosmos in in the shape of the cross – cruciform – love yearning to relate to more and more life.  The yearning of love mysteriously moves through death to new life.

And this more life, this new life, is the life of God within us that can only blossom and grow in one way only– by sharing!   This sharing is a giving away, a pouring out, that we mistakenly think means that we lose, but instead means precisely the opposite –that we become fuller in the very process, as Paul tells us in the  hymn of Kenosis (Phil 2:6-11):

Christ Jesus…did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.
Rather, he emptied himself…
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to death,
even death on a cross.
Because of this, God greatly exalted him
and bestowed on him the name
that is above every name…”

If we are Christ…and that is what we are claiming as the ‘body of Christ…if we are Christ, then we have the divine capacity of the cross, the ‘true’ cross to pour ourselves out from the abundance of God’s Love and nothing is lost – in fact all is ‘saved’ and even MORE!  When we become ‘obedient to death,’ this does not have to mean that we die because God told us to die.  It doesn’t mean we have to grumble with resentment about the inconvenience caused by our expectations and the resulting exclusion, marginalization and violence that we unconsciously or intentionally inflict upon our world.  Rather, can it mean that we trust in that Love Relationship – the inter-being of God in our lives and in others – so much so that we can give it away, and by holding the vibration of the loving center of the cross with open hands and heart, the ‘true cross’ is found, and exalted, and ‘named,’ and flowed out and forward, creating that eternal Life of Love that is the promise of cruciform divinity that John so famously describes (Jn 3:13-17)?!

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him might not perish
but might have eternal life.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,
but that the world might be saved through him.

[i] St. Athanasius, De Incarnatione or On the Incarnation 54:3, PG 25:192B; also Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraph 460

[ii] Ilia Delio, video presentation “God, Evolution and the Power of Love” on  https://www.omegacenter.info/subscribe-members/