A reflection for the Exaltation of the Holy Cross — In Exaltatione Sanctæ Crucis, II classis (14 September); Feria Secunda infra Hebdomadam XVI post Octavam Pentecostes
The Introit of this Mass does not open with lamentation. Nos autem gloriari oportet in cruce Domini nostri Iesu Christi — “But it behoves us to glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal. 6:14). The little adversative autem is doing heavy work: it sets this glorying against every other glorying men have attempted. And the Church asks of us, on the face of it, something absurd. She commands us to boast in a gallows.
Good Friday and the fourteenth of September look at the same wood and say different things, and both are true. On Good Friday the Church mourns and the altars are stripped. Today she vests in red, sings Alleluia over the nails, and calls the gibbet dulce lignum — sweet wood, sweet nails, bearing a sweet burden. Nothing has changed in the object. What has changed is that we are being taught to see it from the far side of the Resurrection, where the instrument of a slave’s execution has become the trophy of a King.
I. Two exaltations, and a man who took off his purple
The feast has a double memory. On the thirteenth of September, 335, the basilicas raised by Constantine over Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre were dedicated at Jerusalem, and on the following day the wood discovered by St. Helena was lifted up before the people for veneration — exaltatio in the plain sense of raising a thing high so that a crowd can see it. Then in 614 the Persians under Chosroes carried the relic away as plunder, and it was recovered by the Emperor Heraclius and restored to Jerusalem some fifteen years later.
The Roman Breviary tells the sequel, and whatever the historian makes of its details, the Church has kept it because it is exactly to the point. Heraclius came to carry the Cross up to Calvary himself, robed in gold and imperial purple, and could not go forward; and Zacharias, the bishop of the city, said to him that this ornament did not much resemble the poverty of Jesus Christ bearing His Cross. The emperor laid aside the purple and the shoes, took a common garment, and carried the wood the rest of the way barefoot.
Keep that image at the door of this Mass. The Cross will not be carried in triumph except by a man who has first put down his triumph. The story is the Epistle in miniature.
II. The descent (Philippians 2:5-11)
St. Paul introduces the most exalted Christological passage in his letters as though it were a piece of practical advice about getting along in a quarrelsome parish: Hoc enim sentite in vobis, quod et in Christo Iesu — “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” He gives us a mind before he gives us a doctrine. The dogma is stated here not to be admired but to be imitated.
Then the descent, step by step, each rung lower than the last:
“Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man. He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross.”
The Fathers fought over every clause of this, and their labour is our inheritance. St. John Chrysostom, in his homilies on Philippians, turns the Arian reading inside out with a single symmetry: if forma servi means that Christ was truly and by nature a servant, then forma Dei must mean that He is truly and by nature God, for Paul uses the same word of both. The form is not a costume. And non rapinam arbitratus est — He did not reckon equality with God a thing snatched, because what is possessed by nature is never snatched; a usurper clings to what he has stolen, and the Son had nothing to cling to because He had nothing that was not His own.
Semetipsum exinanivit. He emptied Himself. St. Augustine guards the phrase against the worst misunderstanding: the emptying was accomplished by receiving what He was not, not by losing what He was. The divinity is not diminished by a hair. St. Leo the Great, in the Tome to Flavian, says the same with the precision of a man drafting a definition: the self-emptying was an inclination of compassion, not a failure of power. What is poured out is not the Godhead but the glory that was owed to it; the Son takes a nature capable of hunger, weariness, scourging, and death, and then goes down through that nature to its floor.
And the floor is named twice, because Paul will not let us hurry past it: factus obediens usque ad mortem, mortem autem crucis. Obedient unto death — and then, as if death alone were not low enough, even the death of the cross. This was the punishment reserved for slaves and rebels, and the Law had laid a curse on it: “cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree” (Deut. 21:23), which St. Paul elsewhere applies without flinching (Gal. 3:13). He who had taken the form of a servant accepted the servant’s death. The descent ends in perfect consistency.
III. Propter quod — the hinge of the whole feast
Then the direction reverses on two words.
“For which cause God also hath exalted him, and hath given him a name which is above all names.”
Propter quod. Because of this. Not “in spite of the Cross,” and not “after an unfortunate interval”: the exaltation is given on account of the humiliation, as the crown is given on account of the race. The Gradual of the Mass takes the same text and sings it again, so that no one can miss where the hinge is — Christus factus est pro nobis obediens usque ad mortem, mortem autem crucis. Propter quod et Deus exaltavit illum.
Chrysostom is careful here, and we should be careful with him. The Word is not rewarded; the Word is God and can receive no increase. The exaltation belongs to the humanity He assumed, which is raised to sit at the Father’s right hand, and it is the same Person who descends and ascends, so that what is said of the manhood is truly said of Him. St. Thomas puts the order plainly: it was fitting that the exaltation should answer to the abasement, that men might learn by what road glory is reached (cf. Summa Theologiae III, q. 49). The road runs downward first. There is no other.
And the Church, as always, makes the body confess what the mind holds. At the words ut in nomine Iesu omne genu flectatur — “that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth” — all present genuflect while the Epistle is read. It is a small thing and it is the whole doctrine: at the name of a crucified Man, the three tiers of creation go down.
IV. “Now is the judgment of the world” (John 12:31-36)
The Gospel is taken from the hour when the Greeks had come asking to see Jesus and He answered by speaking of a grain of wheat that must fall into the ground and die. Then:
Nunc iudicium est mundi: nunc princeps huius mundi eicietur foras.
The sentence is a reversal so complete that we generally fail to notice it. At Calvary the world is convening a tribunal to judge Christ. Our Lord says that the tribunal is His, and that the accused is the world and its prince.
St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this passage, explains the justice of it in the manner the Fathers loved. The devil held mankind under a claim, because men were debtors to death by their sins. Then he laid hands on One who owed him nothing, who had not sinned and was not liable to die — and by exceeding his right he forfeited it. He is cast out, not by a display of force that would prove nothing, but by a judgment, because the tyrant overreached and the case went against him.
St. Augustine, in his tractates on St. John, asks where exactly the prince of this world is cast out of, since the devil plainly still prowls about the world. He answers that he is cast out of the hearts of those who believe — driven from his interior possession of men, so that he may rage outside but no longer reign within. This is why the Church has always treated the sign of the Cross as a weapon and not an ornament: Per signum Crucis de inimicis nostris libera nos, Deus noster, as the Communion antiphon prays today.
V. Omnia traham ad meipsum
“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself.”
And then St. John, who knows we will spiritualize it, nails it down: Hoc autem dicebat, significans qua morte esset moriturus — “Now this he said, signifying what death he should die.”
Here is the second and deeper sense of the word that gives the feast its name. Exaltatus a terra: lifted up from the earth on a cross, and lifted up to the right hand of the Father, and it is one lifting. The Cross is not the ladder’s bottom rung but the throne itself. The Fathers found the figure already prepared in the wilderness, where Moses raised the brazen serpent on a pole and the bitten looked and lived (Num. 21:9; John 3:14). Augustine presses the detail: the serpent lifted up had the likeness of the venomous creature but no venom in it — as Christ came “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3) and had no sin. Those wounded by the serpent are healed by looking on a serpent; those dead through a man are raised by a Man; those ruined by a tree are redeemed on a tree.
Omnia traham. Augustine will not let “all” be read as a promise that none shall perish, for our Lord elsewhere says otherwise. He reads it as all that are His — men of every kind, every nation and condition and temperament, drawn from the whole spread of the human race. And note the verb. He does not say I will drive, or I will compel. He draws, as a man is drawn by what he loves; and what draws is the sight of God bleeding for him. This is why the Church exposes the crucifix rather than merely explaining it. An argument persuades the intellect. A Man nailed to a beam for you draws the whole soul after Him.
VI. “Walk whilst you have the light”
The crowd answers with an objection that is, on its own terms, entirely orthodox: they had heard out of the Law that Christus manet in aeternum — the Christ abideth for ever — so how can this Son of Man be lifted up? They had the premise right and could not make the conclusion fit. A Messiah who dies is no Messiah. They wanted permanence without the Passion, which is what every one of us wants.
Our Lord does not answer the question. He changes the subject to their own danger, and the change is itself the answer:
“Yet a little while, the light is among you. Walk whilst you have the light, that the darkness overtake you not… Whilst you have the light, believe in the light, that you may be the children of light.”
They asked who the Son of Man is; He tells them how long they have. It is a mercy in the form of a warning. The light is not permanent in their streets; the question they are treating as an interesting difficulty is a door that is closing. St. Augustine takes the sentence as addressed to every hearer who supposes that faith can be postponed until the speculative difficulties are cleared away. The difficulties may or may not clear. The light is measured.
VII. A word for practice
The feast makes a demand that is perfectly concrete, and it is not to admire the Cross. It is to be conformed to its shape: down first, then up; and never up by any other road.
First, examine yourself on the Introit: where do I actually glory? Not what would I say if asked, but what do I turn over in my mind with satisfaction, what would I be most humiliated to lose. St. Paul had a list of such things and called it loss (Phil. 3:7-8). Name one of yours today.
Second, take the cross that is actually being given to you, which is almost never the one you would have chosen. A chosen penance flatters; an unchosen humiliation sanctifies. Something today will be inconvenient, unjust, tedious, or beneath your dignity. Accept that one, in silence, in union with mortem autem crucis.
Third, make the sign of the Cross deliberately at least once today — slowly, with the words, as a confession of the Trinity and a claim of the victory that cast out the prince of this world. Most of us have worn the gesture down to a twitch. Today it is the feast of what it means.
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the day — Deus, qui nos hodierna die Exaltationis sanctæ Crucis annua solemnitate lætificas: præsta, quæsumus; ut, cuius mysterium in terra cognovimus, eius redemptionis præmia in cælo mereamur. “O God, who on this day dost gladden us by the yearly festival of the Exaltation of the holy Cross: grant, we beseech Thee, that we who have known its mystery on earth may deserve to obtain in heaven the rewards of its redemption.”
Suggested devotion: the Sorrowful Mysteries, or the Stations of the Cross; and Venantius Fortunatus’ Vexilla Regis, written for the reception of a relic of the true Cross at Poitiers. On feasts of the Cross the great stanza is sung not in the Passiontide form but in the form proper to today: O Crux, ave, spes unica, in hac triumphi gloria — “Hail, O Cross, our only hope, in this glory of thy triumph.”
If you wish to go deeper, this feast opens onto two of our paths. The Sacred Liturgy path treats the Mass itself as the unbloody re-presentation of what happened on this wood, and takes up the crucifix, the altar, and the sign of the Cross in the rites. The Theology and Doctrine path takes the Epistle’s dogmatic content directly: the hypostatic union, the kenosis rightly understood, and St. Thomas’ treatment of why the Passion was the fitting means of our redemption when God might have chosen another.
Adoramus te, Christe, et benedicimus tibi: quia per sanctam Crucem tuam redemisti mundum.