Holyrood

Propers: Holyrood, A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Let me tell you a story: one that begins in familiar waters, but then veers off along paths largely forgotten.

Jesus was arrested on a Thursday evening, tried secretly overnight, and brought to execution midmorning that Friday. He suffered the most painful and humiliating punishment that Rome in all her calculating wickedness could devise. The cross was a sign of horror throughout the Roman world. Victims of crucifixion, ragged and bloody from torture, were nailed naked to the post and crossbar through their ankles and wrists. Clusters of nerves make damage to these areas particularly excruciating.

The cross killed through suffocation. The crucified would push up with their feet to relieve the horrible pain in their wrists, then transfer weight to their wrists to relieve the horrible pain in their ankles. The result was a sort of ghastly little dance, writhing naked in the air for all the world to see. It could take hours or even days until exhaustion and blood loss finally proved too much, and the body’s own weight smothered the poor man nailed to the cross.

In Jerusalem, crucifixions took place outside the city wall, by the public road, in rock quarry called Golgotha. Jesus, and the two thieves crucified alongside Him, were in fact that last men killed in that particular location. The city was already in an uproar, what with the events of Palm Sunday and the messianic tensions of the Passover. Scripture tells us that the sky went black while Christ hung on the Cross, and an earthquake—not at all uncommon in that part of the world—split a crack from the rock of Golgotha straight into the heart of the holy Temple, rending the curtain before the Holy of Holies in two. You can imagine how well that went over with the people.

And then there were the sightings, hardly three days later, of this Jesus Risen again from the dead. It was really all too much for the Romans, who wanted to sweep the entire mess under the rug. In truth, Jerusalem had been expanding beyond the city wall for some time now. A new wall would need to reach farther out, and a new spot selected for public executions anyway. So they pulled down the crosses, filled in the quarry with water as a reservoir for the new city expansion, and built a temple to the goddess Venus upon the spot for good measure.

Time passed. The following of Jesus grew. Within four decades of Christ’s Crucifixion, Jerusalem was destroyed by Rome and rebuilt as a pagan city in the midst of the so-called Jewish Wars. Christianity was branded illegal and severely persecuted. Then one day all of that changed when a young emperor named Constantine took the throne—a man who had visions of the Christian God, and whose own mother was a convert to the new religion.

The Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity throughout the Empire, and his mother Helena eagerly traveled to Jerusalem bearing the official Roman records from the time of Jesus. Here she found the unusual tomb in which Christ had been buried, hewn from the rock and empty all these centuries. Here she found the foundations of a temple to Venus, just as history recorded. Beneath that she uncovered a water reservoir, which she promptly drained. And there in the bottom of this ancient quarry lay—what else?—crosses. The three crosses plucked from Golgotha, thrown in the pit, and drowned, now lay uncovered for the first time in nearly 300 years.

Helena erected a great church over the spot, encompassing the site of Jesus’ Crucifixion, the Tomb not 100 yards away, and the emptied reservoir where the True Cross had been found. The date of that church’s consecration—September 14th—has ever since been marked by both East and West as the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, otherwise known as Holyrood or Holy Cross Day.

This is the night when we celebrate the Holy Cross. And that alone should strike us as a little odd. This is not Good Friday, when we mourn our Savior’s Passion, but Holyrood, when we rejoice in the Cross, venerate the Cross, raise high the Cross as the emblem of our faith and true Tree of Life that brings healing to the nations. One would not dream of celebrating a noose, or a gas chamber, or a lethal injection as something life-giving and sacred. Yet here we hold up perhaps the foulest method of state-sanctioned murder ever devised, and do so with joy.

We crucified our God, and He forgave us for it—forgave us even from the Cross itself. We crowned Him in mockery with thorns, yet they stand now as the holiest of coronations. In our handing Christ over to death, He has conquered death, harrowed hell, battered down the gates of Hades, and Risen triumphant with all the ransomed souls of old resplendent in His train. Our God has turned death into life, suffering into joy, hatred into love, despair into hope. He has done all of this not with mighty armies and flaming swords, but by opening His arms wide to the worst we could devise for Him, and embracing in selfless heroism and perfect love the rough-hewn wood of the Cross.

Bearing our Lord as its strange fruit, nourished with the Blood and water from His pierced side, the Cross is now the herald of hope and banner of triumph for all of humanity, for all the cosmos! The legions of sin and death have been broken upon this rod, raised aloft by the victorious Christ. Death is defeated, sin forgiven, hell harrowed, and peace and holiness and life restored. The world has turned upon the axis of the Cross. Behold, the life-giving Cross, on which was hanged the Savior of the whole world. O, come, let us worship Him.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.