Homily for the Triumph of the Cross

Fr. Kurt Pritzl, O. P.

September 14, 2009

At the end of his book The Kingdom of God in America published in 1937 the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr summed up and lamented what had become of the gospel in non-Catholic, non-evangelical Christianity in America with words that have become rather famous: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”1

The last words of this description hold its most important part—“through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”  What God has done for us in and through Christ is in and through his suffering and death on the cross.  This is why we hang crucifixes in our churches and homes and behold them in reverence.  And so we celebrate today the feast of the exaltation and triumph of the cross.

But it is not just a tendency of liberal Protestant Christianity to downplay the cross, which was a gruesome and horrible event, whose beholding anyone with good and proper sensibilities should want to avoid.  One could be forgiven for thinking that there must be some other way that God can save us than subjecting his beloved Son made man, totally innocent and sinless, ever the cause of complete goodness since the foundation of the world, to this consummate suffering at the hands of all the forces of evil.  As we heard in yesterday’s gospel for the twenty-fourth Sunday in ordinary time, even Peter (who was not a Protestant—in fact, who was the first pope) could not accept Christ’s unequivocal pronouncement of the need for him to suffer and die (Mark 8.27-35).

What makes the cross so objectionable is what is true of it itself—its sheer gruesomeness with pain of all kinds onto death, its wanton cruelty, its total injustice, all accepted freely out of love by one who became obedient onto it but who could have escaped all of it.  What also makes the cross so objectionable is what it says about us insofar as we have sinned against the living God—our sins, what we did and do in our rebellion against God, brought on and made fitting such an atonement.

What is be truly objectionable for us believers, however, would indeed be to varnish over, downplay, and pretty-up the cross, for do so is also to diminish in our understanding and appreciation its unique divine saving power.  The psalm response for this feast wisely tells us: “Do not forget the works of the Lord!”  The primary work of the Lord is the saving death on the cross, and we are prone to forget.

Annie Dillard in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk writes:  “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions.  Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?  Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.  For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”2

It is the power of the cross that Dillard is referring to, of which we Christians may not be “sufficiently sensible.”  Do we believe a word of it?  Even a small bit of belief in the saving power of Jesus on the cross does and has changed our lives.  This is the great blessing of genuine faith-sharing among believers, who in all humility talk about how Christ and Christ alone got them through difficulties in life or blessed them in ways unimaginable.  This is the great blessing of being with the poor and those who are ill, who sometimes would not get through the day without the crucified Christ at their side, the crucified Christ who understands fully what they go through and who has conquered all the malign forces that work on them, not by evading them but by going through them in all their fury.

I think that Annie Dillard is right to express the unique power of the Christian gospel to save us and to transform our lives in terms of crash helmets and signal flares.  Most of us need to be shook up from time to time to supernatural realities.  We do tend to domesticate the cross and bring things down to our way of thinking (this is the explanation that Jesus gives when he says to Peter, the Satan who is to get behind and out of the way of the suffering and death that must come, “You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do”).

But we do not need just to be shook up from time to time, or all the time.  The cross is lifted up high also for our comfort, our relief, and our hope.  As Jesus says in today’s gospel: “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. . . . For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”

Mother Theodore Guerin, who came from France in 1840 and established the Sisters of Providence in Indiana, was canonized on October 15, 2006 (there is a beautiful statue of Saint Mother Theodore outside behind the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception across the street).  She and the sisters who came with her from their beloved France endured incredible hardships in establishing their congregation and serving Christ’s people (far from home, without English, without financial support, with anti-Catholic prejudice and illness, and harsh unfair treatment even from their bishop in Indiana, who was eventually removed by Rome).  In 1848 Saint Mother Theodore wrote to her sisters after the worst seemed over and some success with their schools and orphanages was being achieved: “It [our Congregation] has grown in the shadow of the Cross, which still covers it.”3  This is an allusion to all their sufferings, but even more it is an allusion to their endurance and success through the grace and strength given them by Christ himself.  The cross lifted up provides the shade, comfort, succor, encouragement and protection that anyone who would follow the Lord needs, a shade and relief even in the worst times.

May we also find all of this true as we celebrate the feast of the exaltation and triumph of the cross.  The cross is there to change our lives forever with its divine power and it is lifted up high to give us shadow and shade, whatever befalls us in life as we follow our Lord.  Let us always know its power and always live in its shade, and by our faith in Christ on the cross, we pray, draw others to live with us in its shade too.