Manor College Certification Program
Homily for Holy Cross
I would like to begin at the second verse of the twelfth chapter of the magnificent Letter to the Hebrews where says, “For the joy that lay ahead of him, Jesus endured the cross, disregarding it shame.” Just what was this joy? That he should be raised from the dead and come back to life? Sinless as he was, he didn’t have to die, so that can’t be the reason. For the sense of satisfaction that he overcame death? What kind of a bargain is that? As we hear in the Gospel for the Sunday after Holy Cross, Jesus himself points out, that there is no profit in a bargain in which someone gains the whole world but gets killed in the deal. I don’t think many would want to endure what he endured just to be able to boast afterwards that he or she was able to survived the torture, to put up with it. So what is this joy that lay ahead of him?
Saint Basil says we interpret Scripture best when we bring a verse into alignment with other verses of Scripture. Consider the line that has been occurring all week as we have venerated the wood of the cross, “Lord, save your people and bless your inheritance.” The line occurs first in verse 9 of psalm 27(28), and it has become the first line in our troparion for the Holy Cross. Think hard on what an inheritance is: something one receives from a forebear which one did not work for nor earn, to which one has no claim except by the legal instrument of the one who writes a will. So then, how can God have an inheritance? How is it possible give God something he has no legal claim to? The recent collapse of certain parts of the economy give us the answer.
Only God could have arranged things to put himself at risk. In other words, God made an investment, but an investment he could not control. God did this in creating us with a will of our own. God made us free to choose either to use the opportunities and gifts he provided, or else to ignore them or even abuse them. Consider this: parents might slave to save enough money to provide their children with a good education and perhaps some venture capital to begin their lives. Some children will do well on both counts, and the parents are justly proud. On the other hand, some children will grievously disappoint their parents, and those parents must feel the sorrow of seeing all their labor and resources—capital they could have spent on their own lives to travel, to enjoy a bigger or better home, whatever—go down the drain, wasted. Do you remember the story we heard only a few weeks back, in which Jesus told of a business person going away for awhile who entrusted various amounts of money to different members of his staff? It is the same story: God investing in us. He freely and generously provides us with the investment capital and he looks forward to receiving it back with interest and—more than that, I think—of feeling good for what he did for us, of being proud of our accomplishments like any good parent. God has not insured this venture, he set himself up either to lose his investment and take the loss, or—if we use it wisely—to realize a profit, a gain. This is how God gains an inheritance from us, his children.
The joy that lay ahead of Jesus, that motivated him to make the supreme sacrifice of his life and person, was the gathering into the treasury of God as many people as possible: people who responded to God with love and gratitude. In the Letter to the Hebrews, the author had just gone through a catalogue of the heroes of faith. In the Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul says something quite similar, that God has gathered all those who respond to him well to be his children with Jesus as the eldest brother, “that he might be the first born among many brothers (and sisters).” You and I have been called into this treasury, led there by Jesus. As we succeed in faith, Jesus succeeds as Lord and the Father is delighted.
So consider the paragraph in which we read “For the joy that lay ahead of him, Jesus endured the cross, disregarding it shame.” The text exhorts us who have been invited, with such a crowd of models around us, to lighten the load of sin that so easily entangles us, and to run the race with endurance to what lies ahead of us, keeping our eyes on Jesus, the architect and purpose of our faith. For the joy that lay ahead of him he disregarded the shame and embarrassment of the cross and endured it. Let us not simply kiss the cross, but embrace it as passionately as we can, and then to run with it, all the way to heaven.