14 September, Numbers 21.4-9; Psalm 22.23-28; Philippians 2.6-11; John 3.13-17

CHRISTIANS can celebrate the resurrection at any time, but Easter Day is the focus of festivity. The incarnation is eternal truth, yet Christmas Day is the prism refracting divine light into colours. Holy Cross Day, on 14 September, is so called because that was when Helena (mother of the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine) discovered a cross in Jerusalem. But this, too, is every day.

Some say that Helena’s pilgrimage was a literal “guilt trip”, driven by her involvement in Constantine’s murder of his son and wife. No one knows the truth of that double killing, but, if it did inspire her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, it shows how repentance can lead someone to strive for good.

The world is full of crosses, not just in churches but on walls of houses, at wayside shrines, hung around necks, carried in purses, clutched in prayer. They are all “holy”, because they all communicate the meaning of the cross. Although the first Christians knew the cross as an instrument of execution, they still combed the scriptures for clues to its sacred significance. For them, divine-human history contained fragments of the cross — in the tree of Eden, the oak at Mamre, the outstretched arms of Moses. In east and west alike, they identified it in Elisha’s axe-head (2 Kings 6.1-7). And, of course, they recognised it in Moses’s serpent-staff (Numbers 21.9).

The cross is everywhere, and always: and it is meaning-full. In 1 Corinthians 1.18, Paul says, “The meaning [or ‘message’ or ‘preaching’ or ‘reason’] of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but for us who are being saved it is the power of God.” We perceive it figuratively in acts of judicial cruelty and undeserved suffering, partly because human cruelty and suffering, too, are everywhere and always. We also observe it materially, for our vision is attuned to detecting that sacred shape, outside churches as well as within.

But the cross of Christ is also more than a fortuitous formation detected by our pattern-hungry eyes. We can understand better how the cross works by reading Philippians 2 and asking what it means for us to have “the same mind” as Christ Jesus. If that sounds too challenging, Paul’s words can be expressed another way: if we “think like Jesus” we shall share in his death on the cross, and, by that means, come to share in his resurrection.

Crosses are everywhere, but there is only one Holy Cross. Would it matter if what Helena found was a cross, not the cross? Would that make its many pieces, fractured and distributed among the faithful like consecrated bread, worthless? No. The meaning of every sacred object that we use devotionally, however venerable, is the same: to point us beyond material reality to ultimate reality, for “we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4.18).

When Paul proclaims that Christ Jesus became “obedient to the point of death —even death on a cross”, his focus is firmly on the body of Christ. He is not investing blood-soaked wood with miraculous power. Even the one true cross is only ever a means to an end, an instrument of God’s purpose. Kissing the cross on Good Friday is worshipping not the wood but the Son of God who died to save us. That is why we should seek and celebrate crosses everywhere, inside and outside church, for every glimpse of intersection is a fresh restatement of the promise.

That promise is simple. As the Son came into the world hallowing human flesh, so he died hallowing the world that human beings inhabit. He made what is supremely ordinary — wood, material stuff — into a cradle of holiness.

Flesh and blood will not inherit the Kingdom (1 Corinthians 15.50). Even touching the wood of the one true cross does not automatically, miraculously, make us something which in truth we are not. The last chronological word on the cross in scripture is 1 Peter 2.24: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross.” But the Last Word — in the sense of ultimate message — is about people, not wood: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3.16).