Holy Cross

by Anne Le Bas

Most people like a good story, one that has a beginning, a middle and an
end, with all three bits joined up logically. We like to hear stories, and
we like to tell them as well. They help us to make some sort of pattern out
of the things that happen to us. Counsellors help us to tell the story of
our lives; news reporters try to make the things they report into a story so
we can get our heads round them more easily. Spinning a yarn, telling a
story is a fundamental part of human nature.

Today is Holy Cross Day, and it's a day around which many stories have been
spun. It's a feast that goes back to the fourth Century when St Helena, the
mother of the Emperor Constantine, allegedly "discovered" the True Cross,
buried near the supposed site of Jesus' tomb. Of course there's no proof
that either the cross or the tomb site were genuine, but people were quite
content to believe in them at the time. Soon little splinters of the wood
she'd found were dispersed all over the Christian world to be venerated as
relics, enshrined in golden cases, and, inevitably, people began to create
stories around them - because that's what human beings like to do. 

So, I'm going to tell you one of those stories. It was written down by
Jacobus de Voragine in the 13th Century, and I'm pretty sure there's not a
shred of fact in it, but I'm going to tell it anyway, because, like all good
tales, a story can be true even if it isn't real. It can tell us important
things, even if it didn't happen like this at all.  

This is a story that starts where every story should; at the beginning - in
this case at the very beginning, in the Garden of Eden. In this garden were
a man and a woman, and a tree from which they were forbidden to eat, the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil. We all know what happened next. They
couldn't resist the temptation and they ate, and as a result they were
driven out of that paradise into a world where they had to labour and struggle. 

That much is in the Bible, of course, but at this point, like all good
storytellers, our medieval forebears began to improvise.

Adam, they said, eventually grew old and as he lay dying, he thought with
longing about that garden from which he had been exiled. So he sent his son Seth back to
the gates to beg the Archangel Michael for a little bit of Eden - something
to remember it by. But all Michael would give him was one seed from that
tree that he'd had eaten from - probably the only thing in the garden Adam
didn't want to remember. Seth brought the seed back, and, as Adam sank into
death he put the seed into his mouth. Adam died and was buried, but the seed
germinated and began to grow strong and tall.

Many centuries passed as the tree grew and no one remembered any more where
it had come from. Eventually the great king Solomon came to the throne. He
decided to build a magnificent Temple in Jerusalem. He needed timber and his
eye fell on the tree, which was just right for the purpose. So he had it
felled and cut up and built a bridge with it that led into the Temple.
One day who should come to the bridge, but the Queen of Sheba, come to
marvel at Solomon's wealth and wisdom. But as she went to cross the bridge
she had an awful premonition. She went straight to Solomon and told him that
this timber would one day lead to the destruction of his Temple, and to
something new in its place.  

Solomon was horrified by this, the story says - he'd only just finished the
Temple. It was his pride and joy, his monument - so he ordered that the
timber be torn out and the wood buried. The timber was put deep in the
ground and once again it was completely forgotten.

Time passed and it happened that people dug a pool for watering their
animals just where the buried timber lay. Soon they discovered that the
water in the pool had strange healing properties. The sick would crowd
around the pool, waiting for their chance to get into it and be cured. For
many years it was a place of healing until the day when Jesus of Nazareth
came to it, and finding a man there who had no one to help him get into the
water, he healed him anyway. That story's in the Gospel but the legend adds
that as soon as he had done this, the wood buried at the bottom rose to the
surface - if Jesus could heal people what need was there for this pool
anymore?

The wood was fished out and left to dry. And that's how it came to be
conveniently lying around when a local carpenter, who'd been ordered to make
crosses for the Romans, found himself looking for a strong piece of timber
for an upright. They were crucifying this Jesus of Nazareth, a troublemaker
who'd claimed to be king of the Jews, or Son of God, or some such - the
carpenter didn't know what it was all about, and he didn't care either. He
was just doing his job, and this timber would do just fine. So the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil, the tree that had borne the fruit that began
all the trouble, in the end bore Christ, the fruit of God's love, the fruit
which healed the world.

Of course all that is complete invention - absolute taradiddle. But it's
taradiddle with a profound and important point to make. As I said at the
beginning, just because a story isn't real doesn't mean it isn't true, that
it can't tell us things we need to know. 

What this story reminds us is that, in Christ, God comes to us in the very
place where we need him most, the place where it has all gone wrong in our
lives and in our world, in order to set us right. He doesn't sit high up in
his heaven looking disapprovingly on us from a distance, exhorting us to try
harder, to struggle to make our own way out of the mess we've made. As St
Paul says in our second reading, "he humbled himself and became obedient to
the point of death, even death on a cross." He comes to us at the point of
our need. 

That's why those medieval storytellers wanted to link the tree of Eden and
the tree of Calvary - to sort out the mess you have to go to the place where
it all began, to its very heart.  

It's on the cross that Jesus shows the transforming power of God's love,
because it is only here that he can face the destructive force of evil, the
evil of an oppressive Roman state, the evil which treats people as rubbish,
outcasts. And he shows that no amount of evil can destroy the love of God as
he comes through into the new life of the resurrection. Out of the mess
comes the salvation. Out of the disease comes the remedy. It is only by
dying, only on the cross, that we can see this. 

In our Gospel reading, John uses the same sort of parallelism. He recalls
the story of the people of Israel in the wilderness that we heard in our
first reading today. They had been bitten by poisonous snakes, and Moses was
told that the only way to cure them was to make an image of a snake and put
it on a pole - those who looked at the snake, the source of the trouble,
would be healed. As we look at the cross, and Jesus lifted up on it, we see
both the problem of evil - the horror of what human beings are capable of
doing to one another -  and its remedy too - the love which faces that evil
for the sake of others.

But what's all that got to do with us? What difference does it make to the
way we live our lives? One of the things I have learned in my ministry is
that human life is full of mess. Not all the time; there's plenty that's
good too. But whether we look outside at our society, or inside at ourselves
we find that there are many dark corners, places where we'd rather not go,
painful memories, failures, things we are ashamed of or regret - our own
crosses, places where everything seems to be are dead or dying. And many
people spend huge amounts of energy trying to avoid those places. Often they
will try to use faith as a cover-up, a bolt-on, a distraction from the
problems. They try to build a fence between faith and life, as if they could
hide these things from God - surely he wouldn't want to go there either. And
as a result nothing ever really changes for them. The shocking message of
the cross, though, is that God not only can go into those dark places and
live to tell the tale, but that these are the very places where he needs to
be and wants to be, the places where we need him to be too. 

Our medieval forebears probably seem very strange to us, going to all that
trouble to venerate what were probably completely ordinary little bits of
wood, but perhaps they have something to teach us. As they contemplated
those precious splinters they were reminded that the real "true crosses"
were the ones in their own lives - the places of pain and failure in
themselves and their world. They were reminded too that these were the
places to which come, just as he had to the Cross of Calvary, to restore and
heal. I have no relics to offer you today - just the strange story they told
- but I hope it will help us to see where the true cross is for us, the
place where we most need God's presence, and that we will let God come to us
there, so that his love can transform us too. Amen.
	
(Comments to Anne at annelebas@DSL.PIPEX.COM.)