Words on the Word
Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Genesis 21.4-9: Make a fiery serpent and put it on a standard.
Philippians 2.5-11: Put on the mind of the Lord Jesus Christ.
John 3.13-17: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.
A sermon is no history lesson, but today’s feast is so deeply rooted in particular circumstances that a little background is required. Please bear with me.
In the early seventh century, the century of Gregory the Great and Maximus the Confessor, the Persian empire, Antiquity’s Iran, was a mighty power. Persia fought against Byzantium, the continuation of Rome. The empires resemble two bulls fighting, horns interlocked. Byzantium was western in character, Persia was Oriental. Byzantium was Christian, signed with the sign of the Cross. Persia held on to its dualistic Zoroastrian creed.
In 614 the Persian Emperor Chosroes II invaded Jerusalem, then claimed as Byzantine. Chosroes was a Zoroastrian, but his wife was Christian. He understood Christian symbols, so knew what he was doing when he stole Christendom’s prime relic: the Cross of Jesus. For fifteen years the Cross remained in Persian captivity. Chosroes could have found no clearer sign of his supremacy. He displayed to his colleague, the Byzantine Emperor Heraklios, this message: ‘The crown jewel is with me!’
Only in the autumn of 629 was Heraklios able to get the cross back. He brought it to Constantinople and elevated it in Hagia Sophia. The faithful venerated the Cross, and sang. Thus the festival was founded that we keep still, with wonderful texts and tunes, like those we heard here in the cathedral at vespers last night: ‘O glorious Cross, O venerable Cross! O precious Tree and wondrous Sign! By you the evil one was conquered and the world was redeemed by the Blood of Christ.’
‘Well’, you might think, ‘that’s very nice. All worked out for the best in the end. But does this mean anything now?’
Oh yes, it does. Very much so. The story of the Cross that was looted, held hostage, instrumentalised politically; then freed and raised up in the Church, regained as a focus and criterion of faith, challenges us to think critically about how symbols of faith are used in public life. It has had that function for centuries.
Yesterday I was moved to look up the ‘Exaltation of the Cross’ in the Old Norse Book of Homilies, a collection written up in about 1200, when Trondheim, as ecclesiastical capital, was at the height of its influence and the old cathedral had acquired its own relic of the Passion in the form of a drop of Christ’s Precious Blood. The preacher takes it for granted that Norwegian churchgoers 800 years ago knew their way around the geopolitics of Antiquity. This is how he begins his homily:
[Chosroes] was the name of a heathen king of Persia. He pillaged all the way to Jerusalem, destroyed many churches, and brought away our Lord’s Cross and much other loot. Taking pride in his victory, he thought of himself as god. On a high mountain he had a glass dome built, with images of the astral bodies; there he had a seat of gold. He had water led there by means of hidden plumbing. He occasionally opened the holes in the pipes. It seemed, then, as if he provided rain from heaven, like God, and he let himself be worshiped as god.
This was what you might hear in a stave church in these parts at about the time when the first Cistercians came to Tautra. The homily lets Chosroes resemble the Old Testament King Belshazzar who, consciously blaspheming, profaned vessels pilfered from the temple in Jerusalem. He wished to prove himself superior to any institution, earthly or heavenly. You remember what happened to him. Once Belshazzar had committed abomination, ‘the fingers of a human hand appeared, and began to write on the plaster of the palace wall’. The message — mene, tekel, ufarsin — spoke of measurement, weighing, and division. It did not voice an angry judgement, simply affirmed that there are limits which for human beings are final. To transgress is to hurl oneself, and others, headlong into destruction.
According to The Old Norse Book of Homilies Khusrou ended up much like Belshazzar. It had to be. When a man thinks he is god, and makes others believe it, he falls captive to his own conceit, absolutising what is in essence pathetically finite. A painfully humiliating fall is predictable.
Belshazzar and Cosroes are recognisable as political typologies today. There is no shortage of rulers, real or aspiring, who vaunt their victories and think themselves god, who sit upon seats of pure gold and pretend to govern the heavenly bodies, squirting a little rain-pretence on the common crowd now and again.
The human model is unoriginal. What is new these days is that the Cross is again taken hostage in political discourse. This sacred sign, the image of our salvation is used (sometimes unknowingly, sometimes with cynical deliberateness) to manipulate and spur to anger, to nurture bitterness, to generate strife. This is an iniquity like that of Chosroes when from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre he stole the instrument of God’s Son’s timeless sacrifice, brought for reconciliation and the forgiveness of sin, that Adam’s fratricidal children might at last live in peace and not count as loot what is an expression of pure, unmerited grace.
As Christians, we shall bow before Christ’s Cross alone, not before any powers claiming it as theirs.
We who would truly honour the Cross shall put on the mind of Christ Jesus, not that of any demagogue.
This is a contemporaneously relevant message.
In the name of Christ! Amen.
Adam Elsheimer, The Frankfurt Altarpiece of the Exaltation of the True Cross: Heraclius on Horseback with the Cross (1603–05)