Scripture Reflection - September 14, 2025

Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

First Reading: Numbers 21:4b-9

Psalm: Psalm 78

Second Reading: Philippians 2:6-11

Gospel: John 3:13-17

Alexander Maclaren, a pre-eminent Scottish minister, wrote of this remarkable, biblical section, John 3:13-17: “Nowhere else do the blended lights of our Lord’s superhuman dignity and human tenderness shine with such lambent brightness. Nowhere else is his speech at once so simple and so deep. Nowhere else have we the heart of God so unveiled to us. On no other page, even of the Bible, have so many eyes, glistening with tears, looked and had the tears dried. The immortal words which Christ spoke in that upper chamber are his highest self-revelation in speech, even as the Cross to which they led up is his most perfect self-revelation in act.”

A crucified Jesus raises outstretched arms to encircle our lives with a visual sign of the reality of Eucharist, of faith, and of salvation. In meditating upon the Christ event, we walk with him on his journey along the roads to Nazareth, Cana, Galilee, Gethsemane, Calvary, and Emmaus, knowing full well that the paths lie deep within the shadow and the shelter of the cross, this tree of death and life. We never fully understand, for our splinters of that cross are painful, sometimes unaccepted or unseen, but nonetheless, the challenge is quite clear. To be a disciple of Jesus, we must recognize our brokenness and acknowledge our need to be healed and forgiven. To embrace Jesus is to embrace the cross, our humanity, our every struggle, so much a part of life.

Like the Church we see evolving, we know Christ is its cornerstone and we are its form. As living stones, we must be about the business of reflecting church, sacrifice, and the meaning of suffering.  It is we who are challenged to bear the burdens of the sorrowful, to alleviate the anguish of the wounded, the alienated, and the oppressed. Transgressions against humanity are the serpents of our day. We must hear the soulful cries of the poor and share the love of fellow pilgrims on the journey. Our hands, hearts, and lives must sow the seed and till the soil until we reap the harvest. In short, we must bear the sweet burden of the cross! Not only are we the beneficiaries of the triumph of God’s love on Calvary; we are the bearers of his promise.

The words triumph or exaltation do not in any way align with the definition of the powerful central belief that it is through the ‘cross’ that redeeming love burst forth from the hill of Golgotha over 2000 years ago. From the cross, Jesus draws all of us into the infinite and life-giving promise of eternal life. In his own words, this reality is proclaimed and challenges us to mirror his love in the joyful acceptance of our own cross. “When I am lifted from the earth I will draw all people to myself.” “Pick up your cross and follow me.” All we need to do is let ourselves be drawn into the mystery of redemption. To accept the challenges that the cross entails, we must face our delusions, our illusions, our sinfulness, our yielding to moments of uncertainty and lack of trust. We grow disheartened and impatient in our personal deserts of discontent and discouragement. The reminder of the presence of serpents, as reflected in the Old Testament, and the impact of the death they carried, is a significant emblem of despair that marked that perilous time. The serpents of distrust can be seen today in the many ways that contemporary society tries to minimize the infinite grandeur of divine mercy offered to us by a Jesus who vigorously defeated the ignominy of the serpent pole.  This was a temporary healing that restored life to Moses and his people, but its significance goes far beyond the scripture reference; it was the precursor to our salvation through Christ’s amazing acceptance of His brutal cross. It is through Christ’s cross that we learn love, not hatred; we learn compassion, not rejection or indifference; we learn forgiveness, not retribution, accusation, or vengeance.

By gazing on the cross of Christ, we can resist and destroy the poisonous bite of the evil serpents that assail us. These serpents are indeed legion, and they rear their ugly head through humanity’s refusal to recognize the humble, universal love emblazoned in the power of the cross. This demands that the forces of diabolical evil, status, war, prestige, destructive removal of human dignity, and rejection of Christ-like love and compassion will never mar our desire to embrace the cross of the crucified Christ. In confronting our misery in whatever manner our cross manifests, itself, we need only look to the wood of Christ’s cross which destroyed the venom from the serpent of evil. As Moses lifted the serpent pole in the wilderness, “so must the Son of Man be lifted, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” As followers of Christ, we must live without venom and embrace the mandates and the truth of the cross. 

Bishop Fulton Sheen expressed his belief in the power of Christ’s cross by writing: “Unless there is a Good Friday in our lives, there will never be an Easter Sunday. The cross is the condition of the empty tomb, and the crown of thorns is the preface to the halo of light. The crossless Christ leaves us with unforgiven guilt; The Christless Cross cannot save; it ends as it did in the human atrocities of the centuries, the holocaust camps of Dachau, Buchenwald and Aushwitz, with the Gulag Archipelago, the endless wars, and the squeezing of the lives of millions like grapes to make the collective wine of the state.” Wherever hatred prevails, the venom of the serpent is still an overpowering presence and purveyor of evil.

Christ’s death revealed a divine love that endured even in the face of the unspeakable torture, in which every vile and hateful act of murderous revenge was suffered by this Christ. That is why we can speak of exaltation and triumph over death as an explosion of love. It is the cross that reveals the glorious expression of the depth of God’s overwhelming, infinite love; this love embraces the world, embraces every human soul, unconditionally and without exception. We can readily say with Paul’s letter to the Galatians, “I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and offered his life for me.”

In closing, let us return to Alexander Maclaren who writes: “We believe that the history of the world is but the history of his influence and that the center of the whole universe is the cross of Calvary.”

With your life, embrace the cross and gain eternal life!

Sr. Anne Daniel Young, OP