Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (2025) - Fr Robert Krishna, OP

We can often romanticise the past. Take our own history. Many people lived and died with extraordinary heroism to make our own life possible, like the 13 Aboriginal soldiers who died defending the French village of Villers-Bretonneux in 1918, or Annie Egan the Catholic nurse who died, without the last rites, while ministering to those infected with Spanish Flu at the quarantine station in Sydney that same year. But these events happened around one of the deadliest wars of all time, and between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. The people who demonstrated the heroism we celebrate suffered from the evils of their time. The Aboriginal diggers could not then vote or receive the pension. The loyalty of Catholics was frequently questioned during the First World War. In the past, as now, such good as there is stands out against the background of much evil. That is one lesson of today’s feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. We would go further: evil doesn’t overwhelm and outweigh good. Rather, God brings good out of whatever evil there is in the world.

So, are the sufferings of some just the price for the good? People do often use this as a justification, that good came out of something, so it can’t have been all that bad. But evil isn’t necessary for good to exist. God doesn’t do, or even allow, evil, in order to bring about good. Rather, God tolerates the evil we human beings do, knowing he will bring good even out of that evil. This would be cold comfort for those who have to endure the evil. But as Paul points out in today’s second reading, God did not remain alien from the evil of our world, the evil we do and the evil we endure. Rather, he entered it and became human. Having become human, though innocent, he underwent all the evils that we could inflict or suffer, betrayal, humiliation, torture, human loneliness and abandonment, and death on the Cross. The Cross was one of the worst deaths in the Roman world, a death too terrible for a Roman citizen, a death fit for slaves and rebels. It combined torture, a slow and painful death, and public disgrace. Two centuries later, people were still making fun of Christians for worshipping a crucified God: In Rome you can still see the Alexamenos Graffito, showing a slave kneeling before a crucifix bearing a man with a donkey’s head, and beneath, the inscription “Alexamenos worships his God.” The God of the universe underwent this death for us and with us, but he also made the instrument by which such a death was inflicted, the standard of his triumph.

And he gives us a share in that triumph by uniting us to his Cross. Every time we enter a church, bless ourselves, begin a Mass, or celebrate any sacrament, we begin with the sign of the Cross. In Baptism, we are united to Christ’s death on the Cross, so as to share in his resurrection. In Confirmation, we are strengthened for Christian combat by being signed with the sign of the Cross with Chrism. In the Eucharist, we’re given Christ’s body and blood sacrificed on the Cross and risen in triumph. By this repetition, we’re reminded again and again that this is how we’re united to Jesus, through this instrument of his exaltation, the Cross. The evil we suffer can be more than a negative; it can be a share in Christ’s Cross.

But there remains the other side, the evil we have done, and the evil to which we are heirs. Here, our readings remind us that the Cross is like the serpent Moses lifted up in the desert, a reminder of where we have fallen short of following Christ. This recognition, and the sorrow which accompanies it, is not a mere negative, because Christ has triumphed over the evil we have done. In the sacrament of Confession, Christ draws us closer to himself through the sorrow over our sins and our willingness to undo the harm we’ve caused. And what is true on the individual level is true also of societies. Sometimes people fear that by recognising the errors of the past we’re breaking our solidarity with our ancestors or denying that they did any good. But the Scriptures show us the opposite. The biblical authors did not deny their ancestors when they admitted that they had sinned. They took them on as their own. It was in fact the ultimate act of solidarity.

And Christ himself, innocent as he was of all sin, completed this act of solidarity in taking on himself the sins of a guilty world and being crucified for us. Likewise, to acknowledge the errors and sins of the past is not to say that our ancestors were devoid of good, any more than recognising our individual errors involves denying the good we have done. Just as we make reparations and do penance for our own sins in union with Christ, we should make reparations and do penance for the sins to which we are heirs. In this way, we too, gazing on the Cross of Christ writ large across human history, the cross of torture we have hewn out for him in our fellow human beings, come to share in the triumph, the exaltation, Christ won through the Cross.