Chapel of the Cross - Spiritual Formation

Holy Cross Day
September 17, 2006
By The Rev. Alston Johnson

Standing beneath it you would have had to look up about four stories to see the top; to see the golden hooks from which it hung. If you were privileged you possibly could have walked to one side and stood next to, or touched, one of the golden covered acacia wood columns that held it up.

Standing away from it, you would have seen the beautiful colors: red, purple, blue, made of the rarest and finest dyes, the colors of royalty. On it you would see finest and most intricate needlework found in the ancient world. And on it you would see “a panorama of the entire heavens,” said Flavius Josephus, a high born Jerusalem Jew who became, both a leader of Jewish armies and a prominent Roman citizen and historian.

In his eyewitness account of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in approximately 70AD, Josephus describes the great veil, a curtain, hanging on the outer Temple wall.

And what is portrayed on this curtain - a panorama of the cosmos - a rendition of the known world, both heavenly and earthly. Josephus writes that this curtain was not without a mystical meaning, in that it typified the universe; their own version of a planetarium, or map of the heavens.

But you see it makes perfect sense. Placing a beautiful and ornate veil or curtain depicting the beauty and wonder of this world, as the very thing that one passes through, that one goes behind, in order to worship the One who stands as creator and sustainer of this very world. God, El Shadai, Yahweh is both the craftsman of this veil, this curtain of life, as well as the One who is met whey you go behind and beneath it.

Mark 15:37-39: “And Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost. And the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom. And when the centurion, which stood over against him, saw that he so cried out, and gave up the ghost, he said, Truly this man was the Son of God.”

The writer of Mark’s Gospel, whether through symbolism, or whether in reality, or perhaps through both, is telling us that whatever happened to Jesus on the cross ripped through the fabric of the known cosmos; in their minds eye, “the heavens were torn” by this man Jesus dying upon a cross.

We are a chapel of such a cross; and today we celebrate The Feast of the Holy Cross.

The cross of Christ is such a paradoxical thing. It is not a babbling brook, it is not a lotus flower, it is not a mountain shrine, it is not the sword of triumphant military victory; it is an instrument of suffering, that is transformed by this one person among the millions through history who have suffered upon it.

Most of us know the old stories about crucifixion in the ancient world. How the Romans used crucifixion as a spectacle of discipline, a means of torture, a deterrent to the burgeoning mass of commoners over whom they ruled. Some of us know the stories. How the Roman emperor Crassus crucified some 6000 slaves between Capua and Rome along the Via Appia after defeating Spartacus.

How people were crucified along the streets of Rome and then lit to provide torch light for nighttime travelers and revelers.

But the most well known story about crucifixion and the cross throughout history is about a Galilean preacher and friend to the lowly who was crucified by some twisting of religious and political laws, only to return as that which he prophesied: the King of Creation. We all know that story. And that is why a few rough-hewn boards of wood nailed together with hand-forged nails, perhaps used before and again after Jesus’ death, is transformed into something beautiful, a symbol of hope and triumph for all of the lost and all of the suffering since that day.

Johann H. Schroeder, a 17th Century Lutheran pastor and writer of hymns once said that “The cross of Christ has revealed to good people that their goodness has not been good enough.”

The cross that stands at the center of our faith tells us always, forever, that human beings left to their own devices, their own interpretation and experience of life and God, come up short of something, of something that could only be given and accomplished by God. We are enough to receive the peace of God, but we are not enough, alone, to achieve it.

As people of the cross, we live with an invitation to imitate our Lord; to bear a cross in this life, for the sake of a reality that we do not yet fully know. It will cause the veils of our temples, whatever those temples may be, to be “torn in twain.” It is not an easy way; but our Lord, who has gone before us, goes with us.

Our Lord came so that we might all have a place to sit or stand at the foot of his cross, that we all might have a place to step into that intersection between this life and the next, that we all might discover the sanctuary and peace of being done with the burden of this life by accepting the gift of the next life.

Or as one of the saints, Thomas A Kempis, has said, “Carry the cross patiently and with perfect submission, and in the end it shall carry you.”