Finding the True Cross

It may seem odd to be thinking about the cross at this time of year. But Holy Cross Day is not focused on Passiontide or Good Friday, but on something quite different, a 4th century legend which resonates with Christian experience.  Holy Cross Day used to be called The Invention of the Cross: Invention translating the Latin for discovery. The discovery of the true cross. The legend is that in about 326 AD the empress Helena discovered the true cross of Christ in the ruins of a pagan temple in Jerusalem. Helena was the daughter of a British king we know of as Old King Cole. Colchester is named after him and there are a number of churches dedicated to Helena round the country. 

Helena was also the mother of the emperor Constantine who had ended the persecution of Christians in the Roman empire and adopted the Christian faith himself, encouraging his mother to do the same. It was towards the end of her life she made a pilgrimage to the holy Land and after a great deal of enquiring and archaeological excavation she discovered three crosses, one of which proved to be the cross of Christ because it was the only one of the three that could heal illness.

Well it’s a nice story. But don’t just dismiss it, however much it might have shocked or Protestant forebears with their dread of non-Biblical saints and superstition. Behind the story is a spiritual challenge. Which is that Christian life leads us to discover the true cross for ourselves. 

We were all marked with the sign of the cross at our baptism. And usually we take that as a sign of our decision to follow Christ, to ‘take up our cross and follow him’ in an active sense. But there us another dimension to that ‘following’ which is not about doing, but more about being. It is a call to recognise the cross already present in our lives. Our lives are cross-shaped, full of contradiction. There is the rubble of our disbelief, the selfishness, terror and cruelty that are scored into our being, the paganism in the many gods we secretly worship. All the cruel things we have done and cruel things which have been done to us. 

In our first reading from Numbers the people of Israel are complaining to Moses about the lack of food and water in the desert. God responds by sending a plague of poisonous snakes, not because God is cruel, though it must have looked like that, but because God wants to convert his people, to realise that the real thing which is poisoning their pilgrimage is their mutterings and discontent. That’s why God commands Moses to make the strange image of a bronze serpent. The people see their sin held up before them, and once they see it they are healed. The diagnosis is the cure. This story has become part of our culture – you can a version of it in one of our windows in memory of Dr William Smith one of the founders of the Portsmouth Grammar School. You can see something like it in pharmacies on the continent where an illuminated green pole is intertwined with two snakes. 

Then look at our Gospel where Jesus compares the bronze serpent in the wilderness with the Son of Man being lifted up on the cross. Like the serpent which is at the same time both poison and cure, the cross has two aspects: we see in one image both sin and salvation. 

The journey to find the true cross took Helena on a pilgrimage and a long dig through the rubble. And we find our true cross by an excavation of our history. When we discover how we have been wounded and how we have wounded others in turn. Things done to us, deliberately or accidentally, and things we have done to others. We are all both victims and perpetrators. This is why week by week we confess our sins, whether or not we are conscious of particular sins. The cycle of human sin is passed down from generation to generation. But – and here is the miracle – as Jesus explains to Nicodemus. ‘God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world should be saved through him’. It’s not absolutely clear from the text whether Jesus is saying this to Nicodemus or whether John, the gospel writer, is interpreting Jesus’s words. And so with the preceding verse, the Gospel in a nutshell as it is sometimes described, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have everlasting life’. 

The mystery for us is how the cross, this instrument of pain and a tortured death, can bring us bring life. Once again, scripture gives us the clue in our New Testament reading. The one we see on the cross is also the one who is equal with God, the son of God who takes on our likeness and is born in human form, and is both humbled and exalted. 

The challenge for us is to recognise that this living and dying is going on in us all the time. The whole human race is crucified on the cross of its own history. Look around us and we see how the myth of endless upward progress is constantly challenged by the reality of grievance, injustice and barbarity. The challenge for us is to find that cross, amid the rubble of Gaza and Ukraine, in the pollution of nature, in the unexpected tragedies that cross our path. Every one of us has a cross to bear, in our bodies, in our minds, in our experience. Some spiritual writers suggest that there is a cross which belongs uniquely to each one of us. 

We may know what cross is, or it may be a lifetime’s pilgrimage to find it, but once we begin to know the shape of it, to feel the rough edges of it, to recognise it by its visible scars or because of the deep inner pain it causes us, we are beginning to find what it is to know Christ as our Saviour, and to find with him the power to endure. Because the cross that Helena found was an empty cross, just two pieces of wood, the symbol of an enduring hope, a victory won, and the promise of eternal life.