Holy Cross
Beauséant and Buckler—1 September AD 2022
The Holy Cross
September marks the beginning of the liturgical year for the Christians of the East, and the de facto kickoff of educational programming amongst Christians of the West. In either case, this fresh start coincides with an ancient feast: the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on 14 September, known in English as Holy Cross Day or simply Holyrood. I will tell you here the story as it was told to me in Jerusalem.
Our Lord Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, was crucified atop the rock of Golgotha, also known as Calvary, which both mean “skull.” This site was in fact a rock quarry located just beyond the walls of Jerusalem, along a well-traveled road—an ideal location for the public execution of criminals. This much is well known.
What we might not realize is that Jesus and the two thieves on either side of Him were the last people put to death at Golgotha. The earthquake reported in the Gospels split a crack in the rock from the quarry to the Temple, a crack which pilgrims can still reach down and touch today. Shortly after the Crucifixion, another wall was built expanding the limits of the city, and the old quarry became a water reservoir for this new neighborhood. A temple to Venus, we are told, was erected over the site in order to discourage any lingering Christian veneration.
Some three centuries later, Christianity experienced quite a turn in fortune. The Emperor Constantine, in response to a battle-vision, legalized the persecuted faith, and his mother Helen—who just so happened to be a Christian herself—made a beeline to Jerusalem for her first holy pilgrimage. There she found the tomb which local Christians insisted had been Christ’s own, a tomb matching the description of the Gospels.
Moreover, with imperial records in hand, she excavated the foundations of the old temple to Venus, beneath which she uncovered a water reservoir. This she promptly drained—and discovered at the bottom the wood of ancient crosses. It seems that at the decommissioning of Golgotha, the Romans had simply tossed the crosses into the quarry and filled it up.
Today the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, despite having been razed and rebuilt half a dozen times, remains the holiest sanctuary in Christendom, encompassing the twin sites of Jesus’ Crucifixion and Resurrection—Golgotha itself having been whittled down to a spindle of rock by various monastics who carved their little cells into the stone—as well as a basement chapel in the former quarry where St Helen found the Holy Cross.
Thousands upon thousands of little crosses have been engraved in the walls of this chapel by centuries of pious pilgrims. It is something to run one’s hand over them. St Helen found the Cross on 14 September; her son Constantine dedicated the first Church of the Holy Sepulchre over it on another 14 September; and centuries later, a relic of the True Cross was returned to Jerusalem, after having fallen into the hands of the Persians, once again on 14 September. So it’s a banner day all around.
In times of prosperity and places of peace, where Christians do not face martyrdom for the profession of our faith, the Cross we must carry is that of humility, the crucifixion of the ego. We are to bear this cheerfully, knowing that it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives within us. We need not seek out additional punishments and mortifications; today’s trouble is enough for today. But we are to live out our faith in God each and every day by loving our neighbors as ourselves, as Christ has first loved us.
Behold, the life-giving Cross, on which was hung the Savior of the whole world.
In Jesus. Amen.
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