Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

Mass Celebrated by Archbishop Denis Hart
a t Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne,
on Sunday, 14th September, 2003 at 11.00am


Introduction

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Today we interrupt the cycle of Sundays to celebrate the important feast of the Holy Cross, which has been celebrated for almost seventeen hundred years.

Christ made the Cross, which was an instrument of humiliation and death, to be the instrument of our salvation. We celebrate the triumph of humble obedience to the Father’s Will, as we see in our suffering something which makes us like him and which can be redemptive, bringing salvation, light and resurrection.

It is an appropriate day for four of our Seminarians to be accepted by the Church as candidates for diaconate and priesthood, which will take place after the homily

As we call to mind our sins, let us ask that we will die to self and live for Christ and for others.

Homily

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

While meditating under a big tree on the bank of the River Ganges in India, an old man saw a scorpion floating helplessly on the river. He stretched himself out on one of the tree’s long roots and reached out to try and rescue the drowning creature. As soon as he touched it the scorpion stung him and instinctively the man pulled away.

However, when he retained his balance he stretched out again to save the scorpion and again he was stung for his efforts, so badly that his hand swelled up painfully.

A passerby who had seen all this said, “Only a fool would risk his life for the sake of such a creature.” The man replied calmly, “My friend just because it is in the scorpion’s nature to sting that does not change my nature to save.”

The Cross gives us a similar lesson. The passerby who sees Jesus stretched out on its beams in order to save sinful mankind and who shouts, “Only a madman would risk life for the sake of such creatures”, we can almost hear Jesus answer, “My friend, just because it is mankind’s nature to sin and wound, that does not change my nature to save.”

As on Good Friday we remembered all that Jesus did to redeem us on the Cross, so today we remember its powerful effect and the call to obedience, which Jesus offers us from the Cross. “Father, if it be possible let this cross pass me by, but not my will but yours be done.” Because Jesus in all his divinity and humanity went to the Cross that action of perfect love of his Father and obedience to him brought redemption to us from sin and death.

We note that Jesus did not overcome his enemy by the force of arms or by bodily strength, but by love and patience, by humility and obedience, by the merits of his life in which he spilled his blood for love of us.

When Saint Paul says, “He humbled himself to become obedient unto death, even the death of the cross”, he not only won victory over a powerful enemy he won us salvation.

Herein lies a telling and powerful lesson. Theodore Ostudios says, “In the Cross there is no mingling of good and evil as in the tree of paradise in Genesis: it is wholly beautiful to see and good to taste. The fruit of the Cross is not death but life, not darkness but light. This tree does not cast us out of paradise, but opens the way for our return.” He goes on to say that “the knowledge of all good, which is the fruit of the Cross, has cut away the shoots of wickedness.”

Today we know that the Cross is powerful to save us. It is the origin of all that we do in our Mass, the fountain from which the lifeblood of the Sacraments flows.

Yet in our personal life there is loss, suffering, burden, puzzlement, inadequacy. The great lesson for us on the Cross is that despite the agony and sufferings of the present moment Jesus resolutely set himself to the big picture, the fulfilment of the Will of the Father. When crosses and suffering come in our life the same challenge is given us: to fulfil the purpose that God can see to which I am blind in this particular suffering or trial, not merely to offer it up in some stoic fashion, good though this may be, but to go beyond to see that we, by this suffering, not understood, often a terrible burden, are sharing in redemption of the world and of ourselves because we are like the Saviour and our minds then become the same as that of Jesus. (Second Reading)

The two Readings today pick out the Cross as the tree of victory and underline for us the importance of living through and seeing in faith through our daily lives to a greater and broader purpose as Jesus did.

Through the Cross the Lord has opened heaven for us. Through our suffering in a perplexing and puzzling way we are invited to share in that work and to have a vision of heaven. That is why “our glory must be in the Cross of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, in whom is salvation, light and resurrection, by whom we are saved and delivered.”

+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne.