Lift High the Cross!
This Sunday we celebrate the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Readings for Sunday here.
The Cross of Jesus
Among all the religious symbols in the world none is more universal than the cross. You see crosses everywhere, on walls, on hillsides, in churches, in houses, in bedrooms, on chains around peoples’ necks, on rings, on ear-rings, on old people, on young people, on believers, and on people who aren’t sure in what they believe. Not everyone can explain what the cross means or why they choose to wear one, but most everyone has an inchoate sense that it is a symbol, perhaps the ultimate symbol, for depth, love, fidelity, and faith.
And the cross is exactly that, the ultimate symbol of depth, love, fidelity, and faith. Rene Girard, an anthropologist, once commented that ‘the cross of Jesus is the single most revolutionary moral event in all of history.’ The world measures time by it. We are in the year 2007 (roughly) since Jesus died on a cross and ever-increasing numbers of people began to organize their lives around its significance.
What is so morally revolutionary in the cross?
Precisely because it such a deep mystery, the cross is not easy to grasp intellectually. The deeper things in life, love, fidelity, morality, and faith are not mathematics, but mysteries whose unfathomable depths always leave room for more still to be understood. We never quite arrive at an adequate understanding of them.
But that doesn’t mean that we don’t know them. Knowing is different than understanding and we intuit a lot more than we can intellectually imagine or express.
Ronald Rohlheiser
Questions– How can we imitate the model of Jesus’ unselfish love, in our families and in our relationships with friends?
got faith 