By Father Brian Straus
Today is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, also known as the Triumph of the Holy Cross. These names may sound completely normal to you, but perhaps they shouldn’t. What I mean is that it’s objectively strange to think of a cross as something triumphant, to exalt an instrument of torture and death. When I was in college, a non-Christian friend of mine asked me why we Christians display the cross. Wouldn’t Jesus be offended that we are using the instrument of His death as our symbol and wearing it around our necks? My friend’s question sounds silly to anybody who is scripturally fluent, but I think it’s quite a logical question coming from somebody who is unfamiliar with the Bible and Christian faith.
But to those well-versed in scripture and tradition, the exaltation of the cross as our Christian symbol is part and parcel of our faith. Today’s first reading from Numbers is the Lord’s command to Moses to mount the bronze serpent on a pole so that all who look at it may be healed by the serpents’ bites. And in today’s passage from John’s Gospel, Jesus declares to Nicodemus that in the same way, the Son of Man must also be lifted up so that all who believe in Him might have eternal life. The New Testament is chock full of praises for the cross of Christ, especially in Paul’s letters. “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal 6:14).
Indeed, we Christians are comfortable with the cross, perhaps too comfortable. Maybe once in a while it strikes you what a strange image the cross is. “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:23-24). When we display Jesus’s cross or crucifix in our homes, around our necks, on earrings and tattoos and t-shirts, we are identifying ourselves, perhaps unconsciously, with the sacrificial death and glorious victory of Christ. But lest we get so comfortable with the sight of the cross as to grow numb to its brazen audacity, it’s worth revisiting the reality of the cross as our saving victory, the one sacrifice that redeems us. It’s worth asking: what’s going on on the cross?
Let me give credit where it’s due. As I prepared these thoughts for a parish talk, I was inspired by a recorded lecture about Redemption by Father Thomas Joseph White O.P., and I borrowed much of the direction and ideas of my talk from him. The lecture can be found on Youtube here:
Providentially, the daily Mass readings this week are from Colossians, and they give us beautiful illustrations of Christ’s redemption of us. On Tuesday, we read this exquisite description: “And even when you were dead in transgressions, he brought you to life along with him, having forgiven us all our transgressions; obliterating the bond against us, with its legal claims, which was opposed to us, he also removed it from our midst, nailing it to the cross; despoiling the principalities and the powers, he made a public spectacle of them, leading them away in triumph by it” (Col 2:13-15). These powerful words carry the weighty force of Christ’s redemption, but they require us to understand what the “bond” and “legal claims” are. In the age-old covenant between God and man, man has failed to walk in holiness with the Lord since Adam and Eve first breached the Adamic covenant, and we have failed to keep the law God gave His people in the Mosaic covenant. The sins of humanity have incurred a debt. God’s dignity is infinite, and any sin causes an infinite offense against His dignity; our human goodness is finite, and no merely human effort can “redeem” or make up for the debt incurred by our sins against the Creator.
Christ the Messiah “came to pay a debt he did not owe, because we owed a debt we could not pay,” as the unattributed Christian adage goes. A brief quote from Isaiah’s Suffering Servant passages illustrates the mission of the Redeemer culminating in the Passion: “Yet it was our pain that he bore, our sufferings he endured. We thought of him as stricken, struck down by God and afflicted, But he was pierced for our sins, crushed for our iniquity. He bore the punishment that makes us whole, by his wounds we were healed. We had all gone astray like sheep, all following our own way; But the LORD laid upon him the guilt of us all” (Isaiah 53:4-6).
The theology of Christ’s incarnation, as one divine Person with two natures, is crucial here. Only as God was Christ capable of offering a sacrifice that paid the infinite debt incurred by sin in a way no merely human sacrifice could. Indeed, what Christ gave in His sacrifice was more than enough to make satisfaction for all the sins of humanity! But only as a human being, who is like us in every way except without sin, could he truly represent the human race, and accomplish something real that substantially changed humanity.
So what if one human being offered a perfect sacrifice? Doesn’t it just affect that individual human being? How does that affect me, who was born twenty centuries later? A simplistic but helpful analogy is the concept of a class-action lawsuit in our day. One person may sue a company or the government over a certain problem. Then it becomes clear that that problem affects many people, for example, every person who rented from a certain landlord, or every person who drove a car with a certain defective part. Then the lawsuit affects a whole “class” of people with something in common. The plaintiff represents the whole class, and the resolution of the lawsuit affects all the people represented by the plaintiff.
While a contrived analogy, this can help us perceive how Christ stands in as our representative for all humanity. Of course Christ represents us not because of something external or accidental as in the example above, but because He fully assumed human nature and all that it entails; He has completely become one of us. And through His self-gift on behalf of humanity, He accomplishes the sacrifice that settles the debt for all! Christ gave God more than what was required to satisfy the debt incurred by the whole human race.
Another important soteriological note is just how the Catholic Church explains this process of atonement. We don’t hold to the penal substitution theory popularized in Calvinist theology, which teaches that Christ received the punishment due to us on our behalf, and that the Father unleashed His wrath upon Christ because somebody had to be punished. While the Catholic Church does teach that Christ substitutes for us by taking our place, we understand that His sacrifice was a voluntary act of perfect obedience and love to suffer on our behalf. The Father looked at Christ crucified with love, not wrath. When Christ willingly bore the suffering due to sin with His charity, He fully reversed the disobedience we had shown to God. It’s a fine-lined difference that’s tricky to articulate, but it’s important for joining ourselves spiritually to Christ’s sacrifice.
One more observation about Christ’s sacrifice. The Catholic tradition teaches reverently that Christ’s greatest suffering in the crucifixion wasn’t His physical afflictions, but in His mind and heart as He bore our sins spiritually. Christ in His humanity knew and felt with human intellect and will, but as God He also possessed the Divine omniscience. He didn’t suffer for “sin” abstractly, nor as a mere example, but He spiritually and mentally bore your sins and mine as He redeemed us from them.
Christ said, “I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own” (Jn 10:17-18). The crucifixion was not an accident or coincidence, as though Jesus preached the Gospel too much and the Romans tragically cut His life short by crucifixion. We Christians aren’t trying to recoup Christ’s demise by retconning the meaning of His execution. Although the crucifixion was tragic in the sense of being a horrible execution of an innocent man by corrupt leaders, it was also the deliberate plan of the Redeemer, the fundamental direction of Christ’s incarnation, and the culmination of salvation history. The Son of Man was exalted (ex-altus, lifted on high) that we may look upon the salvific cross and be healed unto eternal life.
This mystery of the faith doesn’t stay immured in ancient history; rather it is a substantial reality in our lives today. In another gem from Colossians (read at Monday’s Mass), Paul says, “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his Body, which is the Church” (Col 1:24). What could be lacking in the afflictions of Christ? Nothing at all, as I explained above. “Now once for all he has appeared at the end of the ages to take away sin by his sacrifice” (Heb 9:26). His redemption was more than enough.
However, by His sacrificial act in charity, Christ bestows on us not only justification but sanctification, and animates our souls with His same charity. That is the basis of the theological concept of merit. My own will and efforts cannot possibly “merit” or earn salvation or even an iota of grace. But when I am justified by grace, living the gift of faith and, by grace, turning my will to Christ, my works become grace-filled, supercharged and meritorious through what Christ has done for and in me. The beginning, middle, and end of this merit is Christ’s freely given grace. But just as St. Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa can become a living image of Christ’s self-sacrificial love, Christ’s grace can spurn us on to supernatural acts of charity which are indeed meritorious and salvific for the world.
So what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions on behalf of the Church? Nothing, except that which Christ desires to share with us. His sacrifice is sufficient once-for-all, but there remains the gracious salvation of the world that He wishes to share with us, to give us a part in (only by and through His gracious sacrifice). St. John Paul II, in his encyclical Salvifici Doloris on the mystery of redemptive suffering, explains this passage from Paul and how it opens up the meaning of all human suffering: “In the mystery of the Church as his Body, Christ has in a sense opened his own redemptive suffering to all human suffering. Insofar as we become a sharer in Christ’s sufferings, to that extent we in our own way complete the suffering through which Christ accomplished the redemption of the world” (SD 24).
To paraphrase another passage from this paragraph, John Paul II explains that the redemption which has already been completely accomplished is, in a certain sense, constantly being accomplished, by being joined to all human love in suffering. Christ completely satisfied what was required, but also joined to Himself all human suffering in love. What a profound mystery that while Christ already objectively redeemed all humanity from sin, He wishes to impart to us a special role of sharing in that sacrificial love by all kinds of human sufferings! In this way we fill up what is still lacking in the plan that God has laid out for us to participate in His work of redemption.
We don’t have to look very far to find suffering in this life, but thankfully, Christ has poured out His charity like a libation that drenches our sufferings in beauty and sacrificial power. He has anointed us with a crown of thorns and a carefully chosen cross of a special size and weight, so we can reign as baptized kings and queens in the image of the King who came not to be served, but to serve. The cross is the triumph of Christians and the key to redemption, so let us lift it on high and dare to boast in it!
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A good thorough explanation of today’s feast. The section covering the Catholic view of merit was very helpful. I even learned a new word--retconning.