If you are a little puzzled hearing that today is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, and wondering where you have been that you missed this being a regular Sunday thing, you could be excused. In the Roman church this feast is celebrated on September 14, and when that’s a Sunday, as it is every now and then, it takes precedence over the usual Sunday of Ordinary Time.
One feature of this feast is that we hear a scripture reading that we don’t otherwise hear on any Sunday, and it’s that first reading from the Book of Numbers. The people of Israel are in the desert, and because of their complaining and discouragement about the difficulty of their lives, and even about the quality of the food available, as punishment they have been attacked by poisonous serpents. God ultimately relents about this punishment, as he always does with his chosen people, but instead of just making the serpents go away, he tells Moses to mount an image of a serpent on a pole and raise it in the air. If people look at the serpent, the poison of the serpent will no longer have power over them. It’s almost as if it’s only by looking directly at the thing they fear the most that they can experience God’s power to overcome it.
And when you think about it, strange as this serpent on the pole image sounds to us, that is very much what we are still doing here in our church with this cross. Instead of a church where we could put up a symbol that tells us only about the joy of the resurrection and the creative love of God, we put up something that tells us a lot more about the life we really live. Because when you think about it, the cross, like the serpent, is an image of all the things we fear the most and hate the most. Because we see the cross all the time, up here, on necklaces, literally everywhere, it has lost its power to shock us.
When we raise up the cross, think about what it is meant to remind us of. It’s a reminder of death, it’s a reminder of a dictator and an emperor oppressing someone who did not deserve it, it’s a reminder of public disgrace, of people laughing and jeering at someone suffering because he was supposedly a criminal and so his suffering was good for entertainment. It is a reminder of a young person loved by his friends dying much too young for no good reason. The cross is life at its worst. Why would we put this up everywhere, and wear it around our necks, and make the sign of it on ourselves?
Because it’s only by looking at this cross, looking at all of this head on, like the people of Israel were told to look at the serpent, that we are given by God the power of overcoming it. This is what God can do, take the worst that life has to offer be in the middle of it with us, strengthening us, if we are willing to turn towards this cross and see the power of God in it.
The gospel today has a passage we all know by heart, the famous John 3:16, God so loved the world that he sent his only son to bring us eternal life. But Jesus did this by being lifted up on the cross, to win some victory over death that only he could win. It’s good that we feel love and gratitude for a God who loves us this much, but we can feel something else in addition to that, the cross can also give us courage. There is nothing in this world that has ultimate power over us either. The serpent can bite us, but with the power and love of God we will live.
I don’t know what power of this world is afflicting you right now. There are many of them. We are weighed down by fear of illness, or anger about injustice, or our own internal burdens that we can’t seem to put away. There are serpents everywhere. We overcome them not by running from them, or by saying that they can’t be defeated, but by looking right at them as Moses told the people to look at the serpent and as we are told to look at the cross, and put ourselves in God’s hands, knowing that he exists for our redemption and protection, not in some future world but in this world. The poison of the serpent has no power over us, as long as we remember whose love has overcome everything.