The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, Thursday, September 14, 2023

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.

This Feast commemorates the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 335, built on the location of the discovery of the Cross of Christ by St. Helena nine years before.  We who believe in the Lord Jesus glory in this instrument of shame and death because our Savior willed to die upon it for our salvation.  He chose this particular way of dying in order to show that there was nothing that he would not do so that we might spend eternity with him in heaven.  Through the Cross he also shows his absolute obedience to the Father as an example for us.  And because his dying on the Cross offers salvation to all of us, it reminds us of how we owe one another charity, echoing his.

“No one has gone up to heaven except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man.”  The Lord has just made the first visit to Jerusalem of his Public Life, and upon reaching the Temple he cast out of its precincts the money changers and sellers of animals, in so doing proclaiming that he had come to put an end to the Temple worship which required a constant flow of animals as victims.  On the evening of that day the Pharisee Nicodemus came to him — not as an emissary of the group but on his own initiative.  No one had ever done in the Temple what the Lord Jesus had done there, and Nicodemus had heard stories of the Lord’s healings as well.  The Pharisee was genuinely curious and wanted to know who this was.  The Messiah?  In this verse, Jesus indicates that he is the Son of Man who has come down from heaven.  He is the Messiah, and something more than that: “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.”  The Greek word translated here as “lifted up” can also mean “exalted”, and so in one word we have reason for mourning and for rejoicing.  The raised “serpent” refers to the bronze serpent that God commanded Moses to make so that all the Israelites bitten during an onslaught of serpents might be healed (cf. Numbers 21, 9).  The serpents came in response to the complaints by the Israelites against God’s care for them in the wilderness.  The Lord invokes this comparison in order to teach that those who sinned might look upon the Cross (and him on it) and be saved.  Of course, the “looking upon the Cross” entails believing in Jesus as the Son of God who became incarnate to die for our sins.

“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.”  While the preceding verses are clearly spoken by the Lord Jesus, some scholars think that this verse and the verses that follow are St. John’s commentary on what Jesus has said.  It forms a very brief, though very moving homily.  Now, the Greek word usually translated in this verse as “gave” can also mean “offered”.  In this sense, the Father offers his Son to us in order to show his love for us and to teach us how to live so as to please him, but we rejected his offering, nailing him to the Cross with the hammer and nails of our sins.  Yet the Son himself intercedes for us with his Father so that all who repent and believe in him may be saved.  “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”  In the Parable of the Tenants (Matthew 21, 33-46) the father sends his son to collect the rent for the field from the tenant farmers after they had already killed several of the servants the father had already sent.  He did not send him to punish them, though they deserved it.  And so the Son was not sent to punish the wicked world but simply to receive what was due to his Father.

When we make the Sign of the Cross let us do so solemnly as an act of worship of our divine Redeemer who suffered in such pain and such love upon it.