The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, Wednesday, September 14, 2022

John 3, 13–17

Jesus said to Nicodemus: “No one has gone up to heaven except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man. 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 so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might 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.

The story of the bronze serpent to which the Lord Jesus alludes is found in Numbers 21, 4-9, and this is used for this feast as the First Reading.  The story is a sign or figure for the redemption brought about for us by the Lord.  In sum, the Israelites complain about the free gift of food God has provided for them in the wilderness after saving them from their slavery in Egypt.  God then releases upon them serpents which he had formerly protected them from.  When the Israelites cry out to Moses for relief, God tells him to make a bronze image of the type of serpent attacking them, mount it on a pole, and to have the people look upon it.  This resulted in their cure from the bite of the serpents.  The bite, incidentally, resulted in such pain that these serpents were called saraphs, “the burning ones”.  This  event helps us to understand what the Lord did for us on the Cross and continues to do for us in heaven.  For, by our sins we ungratefully rebel against God and all the good he has done for us.  Then, in the suffering we bring upon ourselves, we implore this same God for help.  His divine Son “emptied himself”, as St. Paul puts it, in today’s Second Reading, and took our sin upon himself, dying on the Cross for us.  And just as the Israelites looked upon the image of the serpent that represented their sin, so we look upon the Cross at Jesus Christ: “For our sake the Father made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5, 21).  The Lord Jesus so thoroughly took on our sin that he became sin for us, and that “everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

This Feast is held on this date because it was on this date, in the early fourth century, that the basilica built by the Emperor Constantine to contain the Holy Cross was consecrated.  There is an account by a pilgrim to Jerusalem in the late fourth century of how the Cross was lifted out of its silver case and set on the altar of the basilica for people to touch.  Over time, the Cross was broken up so that pieces of it might be venerated in churches and shrines throughout the Christian world.