READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Numbers 21:4-9
Philippians 2:5-11
- St. John 12:20-36
Grace to you all and Peace from God our Father and our Lord
Jesus, the Christ.
Who speaks to you today, from His Gospel heard in His
Church, saying:
“They came
therefore to Philip and asked him, saying, ‘Sir, we would see Jesus’”
And we laugh at those Greeks saying, “Don’t you know you can
get to God without men??”
Along the same line, if someone were to ask you to defend
your faith and find the cross in the Old Testament, would you be able? Maybe
you know the verse, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree” (Deut 21:23)?
Does today’s Old Testament reading show it? Where do you go to find Jesus, as
He promised to be found, in the Old Testament?
And in order to accomplish such things that we might see
Jesus, we sinfully believe we must improve on His cross. We must make it
accessible and palatable to the next generation. We must bring it down to
people’s level, to our level, so we can find it as “love”, “tolerance”, or
“peaceful”.
How old is crucifixion? I don’t believe the Romans or the
Greeks before them, invented crucifixion. Not only is history riddled with
imaginative ways to hurt or harm our neighbors in their bodies, but there is
also the drive to sinfully be like God. All religions in all civilizations stem
from God’s one, true religion, thus there will be many copies and
twisting.
So it is that before the romanized, sophisticated cross,
there was the pole or the stake. Famously used by Vlad the Impaler from the
15th century. Even more famously mentioned in our Old Testament reading today.
But both metaphorically and for reals, the pole in all cases is a sign. For
Vlad, it was a sign to his enemies. For God it was also, but more than that, a
sign of His actions to come.
The wood was laid on Isaac, in Genesis 22:6, to bear to the
Altar, then he was laid on the wood (v.9). And it is in these and similar
happenings in the Old Testament, which we can see the words of Jesus come true.
That His cross was foretold and everyone should be expecting it, when the Lord
comes into His Temple, a.k.a. the virgin Mary.
But we don’t want that. We’d rather take the path the Jews
took and make the cross of God in the Old Testament a metaphor. God must bear
the cross as in, He must accept that He doesn’t always get His way. So we
imitate that. We go through history, claiming to be His chosen race, but then
whine and complain, in God’s Name, when things don’t go our way. Just like Him.
Repent. We take that Old Testament Cross and improve upon
it, where, we believe, God has left it incomplete. We turn it into a ladder
with Jesus on top and we on the bottom. All we must do is climb up to Him. Hand
over hand, one rung at a time, we move up from a life of rebellion to an
obedient life of discipleship.
Thus, we ascend from being immoral to moral, bad to good,
unholy to holy. The closer we climb to Jesus on the cross-ladder, the more He
blesses us. All He asks is that we give it our best shot. Climb slowly or climb
quickly; it doesn’t matter. Just set your heart on the climb to Christ. He’s
standing up top, cheering us on, shouting down advice and encouragement, and
you’re almost there.
Repent. If we find we’re just a tad lacking there, how about
the cross as a pair of crutches? None of us are perfect, after all. All of us,
in various ways, wind up wounded and broken. But we can stumble our way along
the path of life, if nothing else. And the cross-crutches are there to help us
on the limping walk of faith.
We can’t support our whole weight; we need help. The cross
becomes that help, that stability, that pair of crutches. We do our best;
that’s all anyone can ask. Life is a long pilgrimage toward God. And whatever
we’re lacking in strength for this pilgrimage is made up for in the cross.
Jesus and His cross fill in the gaps. But someday, when we reach Christ, we’ll
throw those crutches away and be complete in him.
I can climb. I can limp. I will get there, whence I’ll be
sure to give all glory to God for helping with my success.
Riddled with the cross, Holy Scripture refuses to allow the
Holy Cross to assist us in our labors or to lend us a hand as we limp. The wood
of the cross will be for Jesus alone. It will be His suffering. It will be His
victory. It will be His Throne of Righteousness. As Psalm 96:10 says, “Say
among the nations, ‘The Lord reigns from a tree’”!
And the cross has only one purpose: death. Death to God, Who
in our flesh our ransom has paid. If we live with Him, let us also die with
Him. And, “This is a trustworthy saying: If we died with him, we will also
live with him" (2 Tim 2:11).
Sinners don’t need help, self or otherwise. They need to
die. The sinful nature within us, which hates the cross and wants it to be
anything else but the cross, needs to be crucified. It is the only way. “I
am crucified with Christ”, says Galatians 2:20. We need the nails, the
thorns, and the blood of Jesus, from the cross. We don’t want to die, to self
or any other metaphor, but death with Christ is the only Way.
And it is the best way. When we die with Christ, we die to
ourselves and live in him. We are given what we always lacked. He fills us with
the peace of knowing that God is happy with us as a father is pleased with his
children. He adopts us into the divine family and bids us call Him Abba,
Father. All the stupid mistakes we’ve made, the evil we have participated in,
the shame we feel for what we’ve done—all of that dies on the cross as well.
Jesus takes it away. We are clothed with him. We wear Jesus. His Name and
identity become ours.
What does this mean, then, regarding the Old Testament? It
means that now we are no longer solely looking for an actual wooden cross, as
the Romans gave us, in the words of God. Now, whenever we see suffering, we see
the cross. Whenever we see mercy from God, we see the cross. Whenever a sign is
given, or victory achieved, or a blessing administered, it is the cross.
The Book of Wisdom 14:7 flat out says, “blessed is the
wood by which righteousness comes”. In Exodus 12, the blood of the Lamb is
spread on the wood of door and lintel. Isaiah 22:20, 23 rightly prophesies, “Then
it shall be in that day, that I will call My servant… [and] I will fasten him
as a peg in a secure place and he will become a glorious throne to his father’s
house.”
Moses was commanded to stretch out his hands to initiate the
wonders of God and to part the Red Sea. Have you ever wondered what that looked
like and why Pastor prays this way at the Altar?
The cross was always the plan and it was always the center
of prophesy, as Jesus taught in St. Luke 24:46, “Thus it is written, and
thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the
third day”.
The cross was used to mark the Messiah and that same cross
is now used to mark us, His followers. Bear your cross and follow me, He says.
This means several things at once. It means that the suffering of our God and
the sufferings in this world is real. It means that the Way of the Cross is the
Way of God most High. It means that evil is real and our sins nailed Him
there.
It means that His Way is the Way of Salvation. It means that
salvation purchased on the cross is our redemption. It means that all things of
God flow from the cross. And since on it is the Word of God Who takes away the
sins of the world, we hear the cross in His Word.
From Deuteronomy 11:18-20, “Fix these words of mine in
your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your
foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home
and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write
them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates:”
Jesus, there, is talking about His cross. Thus, the cross is
not only for the Old Testament or only for the New, but for you. “In the
cross of Christ I glory”, says our Introit. When we hear His Word and
believe, we are marked with the cross. When we receive His baptism, we are
marked with the cross. When we commune with Him, we are marked with the cross.
And to show that to ourselves, we make a way for it to be
visible to us and cross ourselves. This way, not only our spirits, but our
bodies will have a reminder that we too bear the cross and we too share the
promise of the resurrection, in Jesus Christ our Lord.
To do so, we take our right hand. The first three fingers
are brought together in a point, to remind us of the Three in One, Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit. The last two fingers are brought together to remind us of one
Jesus Christ with two natures, God and Man, Who was crucified, nailed to the
cross through His palms.
Making the sign, we begin at our head: Christ, and the
forehead which we are commanded to fix His Word. We travel to the belly, our
true, false god in sin, we are taught of in Philippians 3:19, because Jesus
travelled to the depths of our sin and hell to redeem us. We continue to the
right shoulder, because Jesus sits at the Right Hand of God and finish on the
left, for it is there in our heart that He has promised to dwell, in Ephesians
3:17.
Now you may mark yourself, should anyone ask you where the
cross of the Old and New Testament is. It is not in a vatican vault, it is not
in the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, or the Basilica of the Holy
Cross in Rome, or the Monastery of Santo Toribio de Liébana in Spain, or any
place else but, on your forehead and on your heart, to mark you as one redeemed
by Christ the Crucified.
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