In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
This year we took as the theme for our festivities, “the Living Cross”. It’s a nice sounding phrase, but what does it mean? Words and phrases – and especially religious words and phrases – have a tendency, through frequent repetition, to kind of go in one ear and out the other. It doesn’t help that we live in a particularly technological age, when our collective poetic imagination has grown somewhat dull, displaced by a surpassing interest in facts and figures. What often seems most concrete – most REAL – to us modern people, are things like interest rates, gas mileage, and hard drive space: things that are measurable, empirically or instrumentally verifiable. The character Uncle Monty, in one of my favorite films, “Withnail and I,” expresses this intuition in his characteristically misguided and appetitive way, when he says to the title characters, “We’re at the end of an age. We live in a land of weather forecasts and breakfasts that set in…. And here we are, we three, perhaps the last island of beauty in the world.”
To understand what might be meant by “The Living Cross”, we must resist this post-enlightenment urge to empiricism and quantification to the exclusion of all else. And there is a resistance to this urge that lives, I believe, in every human heart, deep down; an inexplicable, perhaps ineffable, intuition that makes us restless, but is the bedrock of our satisfaction when we know ourselves to have caught a glimmer of transcendence in something undeniably true, or good, or beautiful. This is the intuition, whispering to us that there is something far less precise in Phi memorized to 12,000 digits, than there is in lines of real poetry:
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
(T.S. Eliot in Little Gidding)
The practice of Christianity presupposes the truth of this ineffable intuition. It somehow justifies the ancient, immortal, scientifically impossible exhortations of the “Benedicite” –
O ye showers and dew, bless ye the Lord:
O ye winds of God, bless ye the Lord.
O ye fire and heat, bless ye the Lord:
O ye winter and summer, bless ye the Lord.
O ye dews and frosts, bless ye the Lord:
O ye frost and cold, bless ye the Lord.
O ye ice and snow, bless ye the Lord:
O ye nights and days, bless ye the Lord.
O ye light and darkness, bless ye the Lord.
O ye lightnings and clouds, bless ye the Lord.
O let the earth bless the Lord:
Yea, let is praise him, and magnify him forever.
Jesus Christ is both the ground and the fulfillment of this intuition, because by him and with him and in him, alone, we find the indissoluble union of corporeality and Spirit – of palpability and transcendence. It is in virtue of his living flesh – perfectly and completely animated by the Holy Spirit – that physical createdness is gathered together into a unity, and offered as a perfect oblation of love, a sacrifice acceptable to God. In him – and only in him – fire and heat, frost and cold, lightenings and clouds, and all the whole earth, bless the Lord, praise him and magnify him forever.
The cross of Christ – in its material particularity – is “living” because of its connection with that one perfect oblation of love, the sacrifice that gives life to the world (John 6.51), in view of the merits of which God reconciled “to himself ALL THINGS, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1.20), and in virtue of which Jesus is called the “firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1.15). In Jesus Christ we are able to see beyond the fabric of materiality, and to transcend the modern hegemony of empiricism and comodification, joining in the cosmic song now become “expansive and great” – as we heard Pope Benedict say last week – the chorus of praise that “becomes our union with the language of all creatures… [for] God cannot be spoken of in an abstract way; [but] speaking of God is always… [a hymn]… SINGING for God with the great hymn of [all] creatures which is reflected and made concrete in liturgical PRAISE.”
Jesus Christ, the firstborn of all creation, is the one by whom, and with whom, and in whom all creation joins in the great and eternal hymn of joyful thanksgiving (Eucharist) to the Father, by the power of the Spirit. In Jesus therefore the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, that in the days of the Messiah, “you shall go out in joy, and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands” (Isaiah 55.12).
The Living Cross is therefore the first born of the trees of the field which clap their hands. Drenched in the life-giving blood of the Savior of the whole creation, we can see beyond the mere woodenness of the cross to the truest truth, and we can discern the hymnic joy sung by all the world in, and with, and through the perfect oblation of the Firstborn by which he draws all men to himself, as he says in today’s Gospel, and by which indeed the whole world is gathered into a unity and led forth in peace.
The cross of Christ is indeed the “tree of life” set within the margins of paradise (Gen. 2.9; Rev. 2.7), of whom all who conquer with Christ are granted to eat – and it is in virtue of this truth that, in the ancient Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood”, the visionary poet sees the cross come to life, and hears the Living Cross speak of its own glory:
Now has the time come
when they will honor me far and wide,
men over [all the] earth, and all this great creation,
will pray for themselves to this beacon. [For] on me God's Son
suffered awhile. [And] therefore I, glorious now,
rise under heaven, [that] I may heal
any of those who will reverence me.
(“Dream of the Rood”, lines 80-86)
The cross of Christ is indeed a “Living Cross” – THE Living Cross, because of its situation at the very center of the world’s reception of the Savior’s blood. The cross is the instrument by which God pours his life out on the world that he made, the tree from whose branches we eat the bread of angels, the fruit of immortality. Let us therefore revere the Living Cross. Let us glory in the Living Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, for from it – and from him who died on it – we receive life, salvation, and resurrection.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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