Infinite Tide

Photo by Nikolai Endegor

Lections: The Exaltation of the Holy Cross (Holyrood), AD 2026 A

You may find the accompanying children’s sermon here.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

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

Allow me this morning to tell you a tale: one that begins in familiar waters, but then veers off along paths now largely forgotten. I shall recount it to you as I heard it in the Holy Land.

By traditional reckoning, Jesus Christ was arrested on a Thursday evening, tried secretly overnight, and brought to execution midmorning that Friday. He then suffered the most painful and humiliating punishment that Rome in all of her calculating, sadistic 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 their wrists. Clusters of nerves make damage to these areas particularly excruciating.

Crucifixion killed through suffocation. Involuntarily, inevitably, 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 wretch nailed to the cross.

In Jerusalem, crucifixions took place outside the city wall, by the public road, in a rock quarry called Golgotha, or Calvary, both of which mean “skull.” Jesus, and the two thieves crucified alongside Him, were in fact the last men killed in that particular location. The city was already in an uproar, what with the ecstatic events of Palm Sunday and the powderkeg tensions of 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 in twain the massive curtain that hung before the Holy of Holies, woven there by Temple virgins to delineate Heaven from earth. You can imagine how well that went over with the people.

Then came the sightings, breathless and half-crazed, barely three days later, of this same Jesus risen again from the dead. It was really all too much for the Romans, who by now just wanted to sweep the entire mess under the rug. They had other people to kill, after all. Construction offered a convenient opportunity. In truth, Jerusalem had been expanding beyond the city wall for some time now. A new line of fortification would need to extend farther out, to encompass the settlements, and a new spot thus selected for public executions.

So they pulled down the crosses, filled in the quarry with water as a reservoir for the new city expansion, and just for good measure built a temple to the Roman goddess Venus atop the spot. Hopefully that would discourage any lingering disciples or devotees.

Time passed. The community Jesus had founded grew. Within four decades of Christ’s Crucifixion, Jerusalem was destroyed by Rome and rebuilt as a pagan city in the midst of the Romano-Jewish Wars. Christianity was branded illegal and severely persecuted. The followers of Christ took to the catacombs for some 300 years. 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 Helena converted to the faith.

Constantine legalized Christianity throughout the Empire, and Helena eagerly made a beeline to Jerusalem, bearing with her 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 at great expense, and empty for all these centuries. Here too she found the foundations of a temple to Venus, just as history had recorded. Beneath that, she uncovered an old water reservoir, which she promptly drained.

And there at the bottom of this ancient quarry lay—what else?—crosses. The same three crosses plucked from Golgotha, thrown in the pit and drowned, now lay uncovered for the first time in nearly 300 years. Hers might’ve been the most successful pilgrimage of all time.

As a result, Constantine erected the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, encompassing the triple sites of Jesus’ Crucifixion, His 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 the Church both East and West as the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, otherwise known as Holyrood or Holy Cross Day.

This, then, is the day when we celebrate Jesus’ Holy Cross. And that, I think, should strike us as perhaps a little odd. For 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. One would not dream of celebrating the guillotine, the gas-chamber, or the gulag as life-giving or sacred. Yet here, bizarrely, we hold up perhaps the foulest method of state-sanctioned murder ever devised, and we do so with joy: truly a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. But to we who are called, it is the wisdom and power of God.

We crucified our Lord, and He forgave us for it—forgave us even from the Cross itself. We crowned Him in mockery with thorns, yet they now stand 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 dead resplendent in His train!

Our God has turned death into life, suffering into joy, hatred into love, despair into hope. And He has done all of this not with celestial armies wielding flaming swords, but by opening His arms wide to the worst that we could devise for Him, embracing, in selfless heroism and perfect love, the rough-hewn wood of the Cross. He took all of our violence, all of our hatred, all of our inhumanity into His own Body, and there He drowned it in the ocean of His love. What can mere mortals do in the face of such inexorable grace? How could we ever hope to hold back an infinite tide?

So often we imagine that what set Christ apart were His miracles, when really just the opposite is true. Wonderworkers back then were a dime a dozen. And everybody preached a god of power: Zeus was a god of power; Ba’al was a god of power; Ra was a god of power. Yet no other god set all that aside and took up the Cross for us. No other god wept with us, suffered with us, died at our hands and for our sake, even when all of us put together were not worthy of a single sacred tear nor one divine drop of blood.

No other god ever loved us even when we struck Him, scourged Him, nailed Him to a piece of wood. The Cross is what makes us Christian. The Cross is what pulls us to Christ. The Cross is what reveals to us the deepest, truest, godliest love mankind has ever known.

There have always been, and will always be, people who think that a true god shows his power by knocking down buildings, by shattering families, by burning the world in stuttering rage. But that sort of god couldn’t make a cosmos. That sort of god couldn’t even make a friend. There’s all the difference in the world between a god who crucifies and the God who is crucified. Christ comes to us not in the fire but in the rubble; not with the brutal but with the broken; not aloft and aloof in the heavens, but down here in the mud and the blood, nailed upon the Cross—a sign for us in the darkest of times that amor vincit omnia.

Bearing our Lord as its strange fruit, nourished with the Blood and water from His pierced side, the Cross is now the herald of our hope, the banner of our triumph, and the Tree of Life restored for all of humanity, all of Creation! The legions of Satan have broken upon this rod. Death is defeated, sin forgiven, Hell harrowed, and our everlasting salvation secured. The whole world turns upon the axis of this murderous chunk of wood—for the one we put to death, pours out His life for all.

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.

Full disclosure: This homily is a reworking and recombination of two sermons that I preached on Holyrood roughly a decade ago.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RDGStout/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA

X: https://twitter.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran

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Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/

Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026