Triumph of the Holy Cross
September 14, 2015
Very Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB
Today we celebrate a very significant and an ancient feast.
Today it is tempting to spend some time weaving
an eloquent yarn about the triumphant discovery of the Holy Cross by Saint
Helen
It is tempting to speak about the relic of the
True Cross making its ways across the scarred crusader battlefields of Holy
Lands spurring on to victory the bedraggled armies of Christendom. It is tempting
It is tempting to try and find in our mind’s eye
the golden reliquary of the True Cross, displayed in procession in the streets
of Rome and taken to edge of the Jewish Ghetto as the sign of condemnation and
victory. It is tempting
It is tempting to imagine the tears and shouts of
triumph that have accompanied that fragmented wood as it has traversed
cathedrals and tents and huts and homes through the years. It is tempting to
think of these things on this very significant and ancient feast.
All of it is tempting, but I will not do it.
Today as we celebrate this significant and
ancient feast
It might be useful to bring out the arsenal of
readings, John 3, 16, God so loved the world, and he did.
It might be useful
It might be useful to recount the great hymn of
the Church of Philippi as St. Paul does in the second chapter of his letter and
to hear in those familiar strophes the hopes of generations, the regrets of
sinners. It might be useful
It might be useful to remember today the
beginnings of the Church’s calendar for our Eastern Rite brothers and sisters,
a year that begins and ends with the cross of Christ rising above the clouded
landscape of strife and warfare. It might be useful.
It might be useful, but I will not do it.
Instead, go on a little journey with me if you
will, a little trip back in time.
Let’s imagine that we are sitting today in a
little clapboard church, the New Chapel Freewill Baptist Church nestled into a
red clay hill in rural Tennessee.
Go with me there to a sweltering Sunday morning
in July 1969 where a mighty mountain of a man is preaching about redemption and
where the fires of hell he is so eloquently evoking seem very real to the old
ladies furiously waving their funeral home fans and their husbands, trying to
be stoical are looking to get at a just right angle to feel the effects of that
waving.
Go with me to the front pew of that
Christ-drenched place of worship where a Christ-besotted little boy of six is
sitting with his parents. He is fat and bald and dressed in a little blue suit.
He is wearing oversized spectacles the shape and thickness of Coke bottles. He
has no front teeth. His rapture at the
preacher’s words is compounded by the fact that the old man is his grandfather.
The sermon is winding to a close after an hour
and a half. They have sung many songs thus far, his grandmother, just steps
away from him banging away at an old upright piano.
So far they have been leaning on the everlasting
arms.
Softly and tenderly Jesus has been calling
They have received blessed assurance that Jesus was
theirs
They have intoned the doxology while solemnly
dropping their money into the gold plate.
Now it is time for the invitation,
This is the time of conversion. This is a time of
making decisions, a time for listening to the voice of God’s spirit speaking on
your heart, a time when many of their co-religionists would drag out that perineal
Baptist favorite, Just As I Am.
But not the old man. He always preferred another
song, equally familiar, equally stirring. The Old Rugged Cross.
And so the song began, his grandmother in top
form, the hoarse voices of the worshipers knowing this was the moment of
truth.
On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, The emblem of suff’ring and shame;
And there in the New Chapel the little boy felt
that shame, that suffering.
He felt it for the first time flush over him with
awesome recognition.
He knew at once and intimately the landscape of
that hill with its cross outlined in the blood-drenched sky and he knew,
perhaps deeply for the first time, the man who suffered there and who he was,
that he was not a usual type person, but someone else, God himself on a hill
far away.
And I love that old cross where the Dearest and Best For a world of lost sinners was slain.
Standing there on the front row the little boy
knew about the dying of Jesus and he understood what it meant because he read,
or at least looked at the pictures in his Sunday School book, but today, that
dying made his face flush, a blush completely unrelated to the heat of the day.
It was the heat of passion, the fire of the passion warming him from the crown
of his bald head to the soles of his saddle-oxford-ed feet.
And he in that knowing he knew something else. He
knew he had to move though he knew he was too young. His grandfather was
calling the sinners forward to repent and he wanted to repent, he had an
irrepressible desire to repent.
It was the triumph of the cross in his childish
mind. He had to walk the aisle and so he stepped out in faith. He didn’t have
far to go as the strains of that old song continued to grind forward like the
locomotive engine of fate.
So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross, Till my trophies at last I lay down;
He was only six years old but he knew what his
trophies were and where they must be laid down, laid at the altar, laid at the
foot of that cross. He knew the trophies of petty little sins. He knew the
trophies of childish lies. He knew their contours and outlines well. And here
was the invitation.
It was only a few steps from the front row, but
it was steps away from his mother and father, steps away from all that was
familiar and comfortable, steps that took that pudgy, bespectacled six-year-old
from childhood to the windswept hill of Calvary.
It was only a few steps, but steps that tripped
over the bodies of those crusaders of old lying on the killing fields of
history.
It was only a few steps but steps that crossed
the many ghettos of this world’s desire to categorize and constrain
It was only a few steps but in those steps was
all of humanity’s triumph and tragedy.
It was only a few steps before he collapsed in
the arms of his old grandfather, reaching out, like God almighty to catch him.
And in that embrace he heard at last the triumph
of the cross in the last strains of that old hymn
I will cling to the old rugged cross, And exchange it someday for a crown.
He heard it again today before the hot wind of
memory blew in a different direction.
Brothers and sisters, that crown is the triumph
of the cross, that triumph is our only reason to live.
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