A Homily for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Readings: Numbers 21:4b-9  Philippians 2:6-11  John 3:13-17

The spot is two miles south and three-quarters of a mile west of the farmhouse, a stretch of country road that Ana has always hated because of its sugar sand, so often found south of the Arkansas River in Kansas. Instead of solid ground beneath the gravel of most county roads, there’s only hourglass sand. Anyone could lose control of a car or truck on it. Adam, Ana’s 33-year-old husband, did.

The car rolled several times, ejecting him. He died instantly. Yes, we all need to remember the importance of wearing seatbelts, but what do we have to learn about the cross of Christ in our lives? Adam leaves behind Roz, his 4-year-old daughter, and his newborn twin boys, Rowan and Rylee. 

We know that tragedies happen. To some extent, to each of us, but clearly some suffer so much more. And it is not just tragedies, unexpected and unexplainable suffering. If we live long enough, most of us will face the loss of liberty that comes with surrendering a vehicle, maybe even the great injury to identity that is leaving your home for a care facility.  

To be human is to suffer. We do so in a way that other animals do not because we are not confined to the present moment. We struggle simply to accept the past, much less to move into a future that, because our minds can malignly fantasize, fills us with dread. We suffer spiritually because we are souls, creatures—as St. Thomas Aquinas would say—who are oriented toward all that is.  

So, what are we to say? That life is too short—even for the longest lived—and filled with inescapable sorrow? That it is, as we say in the beloved Catholic prayer, “a vale of tears.” Certainly true, even if this ignores the joys and blessings that also mark our time on earth.  

What does the cross of Christ say to us? What difference does it make? Because some would say that Christ’s violent and unjust death is no more than one more lamentable link in an endless chain of human suffering.   

Of course, as Christians, we insist that in the light of his resurrection, Christ’s death is redeemed, transformed into something significant, something to be exalted, as we say today. 

But could Christ not have been lauded without the cross? Could glory and joy not have come without the terrible pain?   

Indeed, they could. But think what that would mean. God would have entered our history as unconquerable, irresistible.   

But in Christ, God entered our world as both man and God. And that can only mean that, as a man, he must suffer the fate of all men and women. He must fully taste the tragedy at the heart of human life.   

In this way, the resurrection becomes more than an undoing of the sorrow. It reveals what will happen when the humanity claimed by Christ, the God-man—our humanity—is drawn back into the life of God. 

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 (Jn 3:16-18). 

Thus, the cross of Christ becomes the great cipher for the meaning of our existence. Yes, suffering is our lot. But now, in the face of all sorrow, we are confronted with a choice. Either we open ourselves, our hopes and our intellects to the mystery revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Christ, or we close in upon ourselves, despairing of anything outside ourselves, beyond our fate. 

The cross of Christ does not take away suffering. No, it makes it meaningful because it announces what had never really been revealed before: the senseless enigma of human sin. We do not need to suffer under the reign of sin, which magnifies physical suffering, introducing the sorrow of the spirit. 

Earlier, I said that we humans suffer more than the animals because we simply are more. In our interior lives we are oriented, past and future, toward all that is. But there is more to say here about the texture of human tragedy. 

We die differently from the animals. We are assailed by despair, and they are not. Why? Because animals do not potentially possess the entire world. Lacking that God-given orientation, they never turned away from the world’s origin and its destiny, severing a spiritual lifeline, in the way we did. An animal can die in excruciating physical, but not spiritual, pain. 

The way Christ and his saints accept death is different from so many of us. We go down into a darkness that is more than our fate as humans; it is an ever-contagious gloom that comes from our all-too-human, freely chosen alienation from God.

Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint John of the Cross both expired with the excruciating pain that was so often the lot of humans before the advent of modern medicine. They also died with broken hearts, having cause to be so bitterly disappointed in the prospects for their reform of the Church.   

But Francis asked his brothers to lift his broken body from the pallet, upon which it lay, and to place him upon the floor so that he could die on wood, in imitation of his Lord.   

His Carmelite brothers had begun to recite the penitential psalms, which the church chooses to accompany the dying from the world. John asked them to recite instead the Song of Songs, because he was, he said, like a young bride, entering the chamber where the bridegroom awaited.   

We call him John of the Cross because of his sublime teaching about the role that suffering can play in our lives if we choose to embrace the cross of Christ. And of course, Francis so configured his life to that cross that it stigmatized his very body, placing the physical wounds of Christ upon it.   

I sat for a long time with Ana the weekend her husband died. I wanted so desperately to take away her pain. But I knew that I could not even fathom the depths of her sorrow, either in that moment or in the endless ones to come. It is in the very nature of spiritual suffering that we do it alone. An enigma that cries out for analysis, that suggests the presence of sin, of alienation from God, in our lives. Spiritual suffering isolates. 

We exalt the cross because now we need not suffer alone; we need not be isolated from others or from our deepest identity, which is those who have been claimed by the cross of Christ. Physical suffering does not change for those who have been baptized into the blood of Christ, but its meaning does. Thank God. Its meaning does. Because that is who we are in the world. That spot, that small moment, that looks for meaning. 

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.