The magnificent Sermon of His Excellency, Bishop Joseph Perry,
Auxiliary Bishop of Chicago.
on The Feast of The Exaltation of The Holy Cross,
14 September 2017,
at The Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, Philadelphia.
The Feast Of The Holy Cross.
The Triumph Of The Cross.
“We Adore Thee O Christ And We Bless Thee !
Because By Thy Holy Cross,
Thou Hast Redeemed The World !”
Most Reverend Joseph N. Perry.
Auxiliary Bishop of Chicago.
A Priest had very much admired a Crucifix that hung in his sister’s home for many years. With the children all grown up, his sister and brother-in-law decided to sell the home for a smaller one. The Priest approached his sister asking . . . if she did not want to take the Crucifix hanging on the wall, he would be happy to take it. The Priest was astonished when his sister said: “What Crucifix ? We don’t have a Crucifix.” “Yes, you do” said her Priest brother, “right there, next to the front door.”
His sister, both dumbfounded and embarrassed, said finally: “I guess I’ve walked past it so many years that I didn’t notice it.”
Are we a Christian people so used to our symbols that we don’t see them anymore ? What disconnect with the Jesus we love and admire does this portend ? Do we notice the Crucifix in our Church ? It is most conspicuous for a reason. In our Catholic Tradition, do we notice that we make use of a Cross with a figure of The Crucified Lord on it, unlike our Protestant neighbours who use a Cross without the figure of The Crucified Lord ?
More worrisome, how many of us have grown so used to hearing about The Death of Jesus that it does not seem real to us ? Could we be de-sensitised by so many tragic deaths in our Streets that we read and hear about ?
The Cross of Jesus Christ was more than just the death of a decent young man. It was a confrontation between two reigning principles of life. It was a death struggle between Love and Hate. Both of these passions course through life, not sufficiently given notice for their impact. But, on that fateful day back then, there was no backing away. One had to win and the other had to lose.
So, they arrested Him, hailed Him before Religious and Civil Authorities, and subjected Him to profound physical and verbal abuse. They whipped Him, viciously ripping apart His back and shins, hammered a Crown made of Thorns into His Head and Temples, and took him before a mob, so many of whom cried for His Blood.
They forced Him to carry a Heavy Cross Beam, threw Him down violently upon it and drove Large Nails through His Hands and Feet, fastening Him to The Gibbet, suspended Him between Heaven and Earth, watched Him agonise for three hours, or thereabouts, mocking Him until He Died, then they thrust a Spear into His Heart to make sure He was dead. For that time, Crucifixion represented about the worse human beings could mete out to another human being.
But, then again, He submerged Himself into our mess. And it was our mess that killed Him. Surprisingly, God worked no revenge upon us for what we did to His Son. He only had Mercy on us.
Before cruel deaths of people like Joan of Arc, Thomas More, the Slave Holocaust of the African Middle Passage, the twenty-two young men speared to death or burnt alive in Uganda, East Africa, for reasons of their Catholic Faith, Father Maximilian Kolbe’s execution in the Nazi Concentration Camp (Auschwitz), the Jewish Holocaust . . . or, when one considers the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, James Meredith, in Mississippi, the vicious lynching and drowning of Emmett Till, in Mississippi, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the My Lai Massacre of innocent women and children during the Vietnam War, or several thousand lives lost in The World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, the tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the brutal killing of nine Christians in Bible Study at a Black Church by an avowed racist.
All these tragic deaths that stunned human consciousness and reduced wholesale crowds to numbing silence, unable to offer an excuse for the human irrationality displayed – even considering the waste of life of young Black and Latino men on our streets – somehow, Jesus Christ died all over again through the deaths of all of these.
Our task, it seems to me, is to make sense of these echoes of Good Friday, and each our own
Good Fridays, to find meaning in our agonies, taking strength from The Saving Agony of
Jesus Christ. Otherwise, how can we love Him ? How can we admire Him ? How can we see Him connected to us ?
God The Father took this One Death, that day, and permitted it Saving Merit for the rest of us. The death of no man has ever meant so much for so many. We knew nothing of this mysterious God till that day we call Good Friday happened.
The precise Mystery about God’s Existence is the Depth of His Love that the Scriptures reveal. Every real Manifestation of God is one of Love – Love deep enough to Create us in order to share Life with us, Love limitless enough to continue to invite us back to Himself despite our sin. We Christians have been listening to the story of God’s Love, proclaimed in our Churches, our whole lives, with eyes wide with Wonder.
The Cross we raise up today is the ultimate proof of God’s affection for us: Love so complete, that God becomes one of us: Love so passionate, that He dies for us in order To Rise for us. The Cross is proof of the persistent, tenacious Love of God: A Love that is un-explainable in its completeness, but real in its presence, proven through use of our human language, our human gestures, our human agony.
As we adults have come to know . . . Love means little unless it is purified in pain. Love makes all the sense in the World, when the person who claims to love me has bled for me. Until then, it remains merely a sweetness, a Hallmark Card, a Valentine, but not yet tried and tested in The Crucible of Life. We speak of The Cross that we so easily glance at quickly, but fail to be punctured by its glaring message.
Actually, this Feast of The Cross is a frightening Meditation, for it touches the raw nerve of pain and misfortune and hurt found in each of us. It doesn’t take much effort to recognise such Crosses, for they come all too frequently.
In my family. growing up, seafood was a feature of the home diet. We were raised on tuna fish, salmon, whitefish, occasionally a whole crab on special days. I remember fondly, my Late Mother loved oysters. As a kid, I was frightened of those dark things swimming in milk on the stove and, therefore, never allowed myself to develop a taste for oysters. But, since then, I have come to understand better the mystery of oysters.
An oyster is soft, tender, and vulnerable. Without the sanctuary of its shell, it couldn’t survive. But, oysters must open their shells in order to breathe water. Sometimes, while an oyster is breathing, a grain of sand will enter its shell and become part of the oyster’s life from then on.
You marine biologists among us know that such grains of sand, though microscopic, cause the oyster a great deal of pain. But, the oyster does not change its soft nature because of a particle of sand. It does not become hard and leathery, in order not to feel. It continues to open its shell to the ocean, to breathe in order to live.
Now, the oyster does respond to that suffering. Over time, the oyster wraps the grain of sand in thin translucent layers until it has created something of great value in the place where it is most vulnerable to its pain – a Pearl. A Pearl might be thought of as an oyster's response to its suffering.
We all have grains of sand that hurt and irritate and diminish our lives; all of us have experienced, or will experience, loss and hopelessness. Such grains of sand are a part of everyone’s life; the challenge of the pain and disappointment we confront is not to sink into self-pity, or deny our sadness, or passively accept the role of victim, but to accept the reality of our suffering and transform it into Pearls of generous compassion, humble growth, and selfless consolation, and deeper service for The Cause of Christ.
What Pearls have we individually brought to Mass this evening . . . all kinds of Crosses born by fragile people who search for meaning and a sense of God in our lives ?
Now, if I were to see the disappointments, deprivations, and deaths that touch my life personally, and in the lives of those around me, only with my physical eyes, that is, without an aching hope in God, such Crosses would be unbearable. Their Mystery, their agony, their power to disrupt my tranquillity and that of others, would lead me, sooner or later, into numbness and despair.
But, I can also look upon such Crosses with The Eyes of Faith. Nothing guarantees me that I will do so. We are so distracted by other images and symbols in life, that serve to anesthetise the pain, so that we miss seeing The Cross of Jesus. It is a choice I must make – you must make, an option I must choose – you must choose.
Sometimes, it is not easy to do so. Sometimes, the bitter disappointments of life are so real, so enduring, that it’s hard to see such Crosses with any ounce of hope. I firmly believe it is God’s Grace that enables you and me to see life’s distressing moments with hope. How do we do this ?
Well, first of all, we are Christians, so our viewpoint on life is of a higher level.
Most of all, we apply hope to our agonies of life by picking up The Cross of Jesus. By pondering what that Cross meant for Him. It meant pure and untainted love. That Cross meant the total upheaval of all Jesus wanted to accomplish. It meant the overwhelming paradox of Absolute Goodness being overcome by narrow-minded, stubborn egotistical perversity. It meant succumbing to The Powers of Evil represented in human nature, of being absolutely helpless to withstand the awful power of human corruption.
Translated to your life and mine, The Cross of Jesus also means, believing through it all, that God’s Goodness can never be thwarted by Evil. It means that, no matter how powerful sin might be, Grace will ultimately triumph. It means that, no matter how dark the present moment, the light will one day break through and shine. It means that, by continuing to be one’s best self in the presence of some intolerable condition, righteousness will overcome all wrongs.
We Speak Of The Triumph Of The Cross.
This is how Jesus looked upon his Own ordeal. With hope in God, Jesus climbed Golgotha, knowing His Father loved him and would save Him some day, some hour. Without this confidence, no-one could have endured such savage torture. With hope in the centre of what seemed to be hopelessness. With confidence in God, more than in Himself, His Cross turned out Triumphant.
Not because His Cross, your Cross, or my Cross, must be Triumphant. Indeed, Crosses can crush and destroy people, can pull people down and drive people to despair, even to suicide. But, in taking up His Cross, Jesus took up ours, too. He identified with suffering, sinful, humanity. He bore the sin of us all and He accepted the consequences of others’ sins. He was broken under The Weight of Evil, but He was not conquered by it.
So, it is when we appear to be weakened, that we are strongest, because we rely on the strength and faithfulness of God. Along Our Journey In Faith, we must make an important decision, at some point, to place it all at The foot Of His Cross.
Thus far, I’ve been speaking about how Jesus saw His Cross, and how we can look upon our own Crosses, emphasising that, when we do so with hope, as did Jesus, we can come to an awareness of how our Cross can be redeeming.
We must always remember, however, that God grants Merit to all our Crosses, including Crosses we cannot see with Eyes of Faith, Crosses we see only as unbearable, and these Crosses, too, can be Triumphant.
Only God can turn our Good Fridays into Easter. Left to ourselves, our nature is so distorted, distracted, and Evil, prone to be that we only guarantee misery for each other. But, whatever your Cross is, or has been, you cannot stop hoping on account of any Cross you bear.
Thus, we raise up The Cross of Jesus, this evening, and all the Crosses we experience in Life. Ultimately, our Crosses are praiseworthy, not because of how we see them, but because of how God sees them. It certainly helps us to look upon them with Faith, for such a conviction enables us to carry them with greater Peace and confidence. And God certainly wants us to bring Faith and hope to our Calvarys, as did Jesus.
In the end, the Triumph of any Cross is due to the Love and Power of God, that overcomes its Evil and pain. Ultimately, we find the Triumph of any Cross in God’s Love, not in our perspective. Taking up your Cross, however heavy, along what Calvary-bound road that Cross takes you, is one of Life’s most profound acts of Religion.
In this day and age, notice the Cross has become a form of decoration. We wear it around our necks in Wood, Gold or Silver. We put it on writing paper and dashboards, wherever we want to create the effect of a modicum of piety. As a result, there is always the danger of The Cross of our Faith becoming trivialised.
Some people wear a Cross around their neck, merely as a piece of jewellery, but they don’t grasp the power of what they wear. The Cross then becomes invisible, passes unnoticed – like the sister of the Priest in the illustration, reduced to a geometric form, signifying exactly nothing.
For the Religiously-conscientious among us, The Cross of our Faith proclaims to those with Faith that The One who Created The Stars of Night and The Reaches of Outer Space, Whose Power is inexpressible, Whose very Name can hardly be spoken, has come among us, taken the form of a slave and died a death, alone and afraid. And this has been done out of a Love, so infinite in its self-giving, as to render us speechless with gratitude.
When next your eye glimpses a Crucifix, or a Cross, whether here in Church or on a Church Steeple, in a Cemetery, or the wall of your home, or around someone’s neck, think of the human and Divine Gift it signifies.
2017 Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, Philadelphia.
Bishop Joseph N. Perry.
Auxiliary Bishop of Chicago.
