The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, Saturday, September 14, 2024

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.

For the Mass celebrating this feast the Church chooses Numbers 21, 4–9 as the First Reading.  These verses tell of the plague of serpents which Almighty God unleashed upon the Hebrews as they crossed the Sinai Desert on their way to the Promised Land.  They incurred this punishment because of their complaints against the care God was providing them, that it was not enough.  When the people repented, God told Moses to make a bronze serpent and mount it on a pole so that those who looked upon it might be saved.  The bronze serpent represented the sin they had committed — and what they had become through their sin — as well as the punishment they had suffered.  By acknowledging their sin and admitting that their punishment was just, they were saved.

In the Second Reading, the Church gives us Philippians 2, 6–11, in which St. Paul recounts the glorious mystery in which the Son of God, in obedience to his Father, in abject humility clothed himself in our nature and flesh in order to die for the sin we had created.  Every knee must bow before the image of our slain Lord so that, be admitting the sins which we committed, for which he died, and acknowledging him as the Savior of the world, the Incarnate Son of God, we might be saved.  And by looking upon him, we see what would have happened to us without his Death — eternal death in hell — as well as what he would have us become: members of his Body.

Far from being a merely legal procedure, we are saved by the love of a God who would indeed trade us eternal Son of those who have sinned against him: “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.”  The Cross stands before us today as a sign that God will do anything in order that we might reign with him in heaven.  In the Parable of the Wedding Feast, the Lord Jesus speaks of how his Father is begging us to come to heaven: “He sent his servants to call them that were invited to the marriage: and they would not come. Again he sent other servants, saying: Tell them that were invited, Behold, I have prepared my dinner: my oxen and fated calves are killed, and all things are ready. Come ye to the marriage feast” (Matthew 22, 3-4).  The Cross is the preeminent Sign of his begging.

Let us look upon this Sign and grieve over the sins we have committed against our most loving Lord so that we might receive forgiveness and experience his loving embrace.