HOMILIES PREACHED BY FATHER ALTIER ON THE FEAST OF THE TRIUMPH OF THE HOLY CROSS

Today, as we celebrate this feast of the Triumph of the Cross, Our Lord reminds us that the very purpose for which He came into the world was to save the world. And there is only one means by which the world is going to be saved: that is, the Cross of Jesus Christ. The Cross stands as the center point of all world history.

When we consider the Cross, Saint Paul reminds us that we are to glory in nothing but the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ; that must be our boast. "For the world," Saint Paul tells us, "that is folly." It seems foolishness to the world. "It is a stumbling block to the Jews and it is folly to the Greeks," he said, "But for those who are being saved, the Cross is the wisdom and the power of God."

For us, who believe in Our Lord, we look at that Cross. We consider what Saint Paul tells us: "He was obedient even unto death, death on a cross." It is that obedience of Our Lord and His willingness to go to the Cross for us that we celebrate in a particular way. What looks like the most humiliating thing and the most foolish thing is, in fact, the most glorious thing in human history. As Saint Paul says, "God's folly is wiser than human wisdom." On the natural level, it does not make sense. It is what Saint Paul, then, would call the "Scandal of the Cross."

Friday September 14, 2001

Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time

Reading I (Numbers 21:4b-9)

Reading II (Philippians 2:6-11)

Gospel (St. John 3:13-17)

That is the part that requires faith. If God came down in glory and He was glowing in the dark and did wonderful things, everybody could say, "Oh, that is God!" But when we look at God and we see that He died on the Cross, it requires great faith to be able to look at that and say, "Yes, I believe." Externally, there is nothing obvious; externally, all that is there is weakness and foolishness, from a worldly point of view. But for one with the eyes of faith and a heart filled with love, the Cross is the glory of Almighty God.

The Cross is the love of God for us. For us who believe, we need to be able to say that we, too, with Our Lord, are willing to take up the Cross; that we are willing to be hung on that Cross with Him, to suffer with Him in order to be raised with Him. So, for us, the Cross truly is the wisdom of God. And for those who are saved, they understand that the Cross is the power of God because it is only by the wounds of Our Lord, inflicted on the Cross, that we have salvation. It truly is the wisdom and the power of God at work in those who believe and the only means of salvation.

So for us, with Saint Paul, then, the Cross is not a point of shame, but it is a point of joy. It is recognized as truly the only means of salvation; the means by which Our Lord did not condemn the world, but stood condemned so that the world could be saved. And for us, the Cross, then, must be a means of glory, a means of hope, and a means of joy because it is the only means of salvation.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

September 14, 2002

Triumph of the Cross

Reading (Numbers 21:4b-9)

Gospel (St. John 3:13-17)

In the Gospel reading this morning, Jesus tells us that just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up. Now if we look at the two different occasions here, as we heard in the first reading from the Book of Numbers, because of the sins of the people God sent the seraph serpents among the people to bite them, and the only way they were healed was to look at the bronze image of the serpent; anyone who looked upon it was healed. One can look at Jesus, then, and we see immediately a difference, because Our Lord tells us that God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through Him. God had originally sent the serpents as a means of destruction among the people, but He sent His Son as a means of salvation for us.

If we look again at what happened, Moses had to make an image of the serpent. But Jesus is not merely an image; He is the reality. He is God and He is man. We did not put an image of a human being up on a tree - we nailed a human being to a tree. More than that, we nailed God to a tree. But He accepted that. He came into this world and allowed Himself to be bitten by the serpent rather than the way it was in the Old Testament where it was the serpent biting His people. This time, God allowed Himself to be bitten by the serpent, and He allowed Himself then to be hung upon the tree.

Another difference is that as time went along, as we read in Sacred Scripture, the prophet Jeremiah had to take the serpent some hundreds of years later and break it up into pieces and destroy it because the people began to worship the serpent. We are told in the Book of Numbers that anyone who looked upon the serpent was healed. The problem was, of course, they did not recognize that it was not a piece of bronze that healed them. God had that serpent put upon the pole so the people had to look upon the means of their affliction, and they had to call out to God. But, as the years went along, they forgot that latter part and all they remembered was that when anyone looked upon the serpent they were healed. Consequently, they started to believe that it was somehow the power of the bronze serpent that healed their forefathers. So they literally and actually began to worship the bronze serpent until the prophet Jeremiah, some 600 years before Our Lord came into this world, destroyed it so that the people would stop worshiping an idol and begin worshiping God.

For us, we too must look upon the Cross. In this case, it is not looking upon the one who has caused the difficulty for us; but rather, it is looking upon the One who has taken on the penance for us, the One who has allowed Himself to be bitten so that we would not, the One who took on the punishment so that we could be healed. And when we look upon the One whom we have put upon the Cross, the One who crushed the head of the serpent, we do indeed worship Him - and we worship Him appropriately and fittingly because He is God and He is the means of our salvation, He is the means of our healing. The people of the Old Testament needed to look beyond the bronze serpent and look to God, who would bring about the healing. But for us, we look upon God who is hung upon the tree and we worship Him.

What has happened, however, in our day, is that the false prophets of today have attempted to destroy not the bronze serpent but Jesus Christ, who was hung upon the tree. They try to tell us, as the prophet Jeremiah spoke, that we cannot worship the One who is hung upon the tree; instead, what they want is for us to go back and worship the serpent and forget about God. But when we recognize the One whom we nailed to the tree, the One who became the price of our salvation, when we recognize that the only means to healing is Jesus Christ Himself, then we realize we cannot destroy that image because what has happened is, in Christ, the false image has been destroyed and the reality has been exposed. The reality is human sin. The reality is our own brokenness and our own frailty that has been taken on by Christ when He allowed Himself to be broken, when He allowed His human frailty to be destroyed on the Cross so that in the Resurrection it would all be healed.

But for us, we must always keep in mind that there is no Resurrection without the Cross. And so, we not only look upon the One who was hung upon the tree, but we look at the tree itself and we adore the Cross. We worship the Cross, not in the sense that the Cross is God, but in the sense that the Cross became the only means to our salvation, the means by which Jesus Christ has achieved the salvation of our souls by allowing His body to be destroyed on the Cross. He allowed Himself physically to be destroyed so that what we had done spiritually could be destroyed.

God went to the Cross so that the ancient serpent would be destroyed once and for all. We have nothing to fear of Satan. Certainly, he has power, and we know that he likes to tempt and he can cause us lots of trouble, but we have Jesus Christ and we have the Cross of Jesus Christ. In the Cross is victory. In the Cross is the ultimate power. Saint Paul speaks of it and he says, "It is a scandal to the Jews and it is weakness for the Greeks, but for us who believe, it is the power, it is the glory of God." We cannot remove the scandal of the Cross. We cannot remove the weakness, because we recognize it is only in that - in looking upon the most scandalous thing that we have ever done in human history and in looking upon the weakness of Jesus Christ upon the Cross - only there do we recognize the power of God, the love of God, the glory of God, being expressed in its most perfect form for all of us to understand.

It is only by looking upon the Cross and upon the One who is hung upon the Cross that we have life and salvation. And so, unlike the ancient serpent - the bronze serpent, that is, that Moses hung upon the pole - for us, we can truly look upon the Cross and the One who was hung upon the Cross and we can worship Him. And in worshiping Him, neither He or we are destroyed; but rather, in worshiping Him, sin and the true serpent are destroyed and we have life for our souls.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

The Importance of the Cross

Tuesday September 14, 2004

Triumph of the Most Holy Cross

Reading I (Numbers 21:4b-9)

Reading II (Philippians 2:6-11)

Gospel (St. John 3:13-17)

Today as we celebrate the glorious feast of the Triumph of the Most Holy Cross, Our Lord makes very clear that just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert so He must be lifted up so that He would be able to draw all of us to Himself. We see then that the Cross stands at the very center point of all of history. And, of course, we are told also in the Book of Revelation that the tree of life is in heaven – it is the Cross – the tree of life from which we gain the bread of life. There is no Eucharist without the Cross of Christ. There is no life without the Cross of Christ. It is one of those mysteries, the ironies of our faith. How is it possible that we can have life only through death? But that is the only way. Unless we are willing to die to self, Jesus says, we do not have life; and anyone who would try to save his life will lose it, but anyone who loses his life will save it. How is it that we save our lives? By uniting ourselves with Jesus Christ on His Cross.

When we consider this correlation between the serpent in the desert and Our Lord upon the Cross, we also have to remember what happened with that serpent. The people of Israel began worshiping the serpent as if it were a god, and the prophet Jeremiah finally had to take the bronze serpent and break it up into pieces because the people were worshiping the serpent as though it had some kind of power of its own. Now if we stop to look at what we do, we worship Jesus Christ but we also have adoration for His Cross. But we must keep in mind that the Cross has no power all by itself. There were lots and lots of people who were crucified, but none of their crosses has any power to save anyone. The Cross without Christ on it would be completely devoid of power. It is only because of Our Lord that the Cross has the power and the exaltation that it does; it is because of the power of Christ. And so we certainly have every reason to hold the Cross up. We obviously do not worship the Cross as a god of some sort, but rather we have the greatest reverence for the Cross because on it our God has consummated His union with humanity. On the Cross, He gave His life for His bride so that His bride, of which each one of us is a member, would be without blemish or spot or wrinkle, that we would be made pure and clean so that we would be able to enter into eternity and be able to be united with Him in that perfect bond of marriage, of mystical marriage united with Christ.

But as Saint Augustine said some sixteen hundred years ago, the Cross then is the marriage bed upon which Christ consummated His marriage. We are the bride; we have to be upon the same marriage bed with the Bridegroom. We have to be united with Him. It means that we have to be pierced with Him, hands and feet, united upon the Cross, stretched in every direction, held between heaven and earth, lifted up from the earth so we can be united with Him Who has three times been lifted up from the earth to draw us to Himself. That is the way of the spiritual life. If we are not willing to share in the Cross of Christ, if we are not willing to recognize the power, the authority, and the glory of the Holy Cross, the power and authority and glory which it has only because of the One Who was crucified upon it, then we will have no share in the life. It is just like the bride who has no part in the marriage bed. How can she be a bride? How can there be life? There cannot. Unless there is a union between the bride and the bridegroom, there can be no life. If we want eternal life, if we want divine life within our souls now, there is only one way and that is to be united with our Bridegroom, the Bridegroom of our souls, and to be crucified with Him on the Cross. He humbled Himself taking the form of a slave, Saint Paul says, and was obedient even to death on the Cross. We have to humble ourselves, but in doing so we will be exalted, lifted up. We will be exalted by becoming divine, by sharing in the divine nature, and by being obedient even unto life, life through the Cross.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

Wednesday September 14, 2005

Triumph of the Holy Cross

Reading I (Numbers 21:4b-9)

Reading II (Philippians 2:6-11)

Gospel (St. John 3:13-17)

In the first reading today from the Book of Numbers, we hear right at the very beginning that with their patience worn out by the journey, the people complained against God and Moses. This is a very important line because as we continue to journey through this world that is so infested with sin, so broken, it can get very, very frustrating for us. What can happen is that in the midst of it, if we are trying to do what is right and we are getting rejected and pushed around, we start to complain against God.

If we look at what has gone on over the last number of years, there are lots of good people who wanted to be faithful to Our Lord who have fallen away because the lure of the world and of what everyone else was doing was just a little too much for them. They were not able to withstand the social pressure, the peer pressure that was on them to be just like everyone else. Well, as things continue to get worse in the world, this is going to be a problem for all of us. We would all like to be able to think how firm our faith is, but we also know from our own experience that it might not be quite as solid as we would like to think that it is.

So today the Church places before us this glorious feast of the Triumph of the Cross to remind us of where our faith is centered. It is centered in the person of Jesus Christ crucified. If we take our eyes off of Our Lord – and particularly off of Our Lord crucified for us on the Cross – we are going to fall. It may be that we do not like to look at the Cross. We prefer to look at the Resurrection; we prefer to look at the glorification of Our Lord in heaven because it is more pleasant. This world is called the vale of tears, not the place of glory. As long as we are in this world, we are going to have to suffer. While it is a good thing to look forward to the glory which will be ours to share if we remain faithful to Our Lord, in this world we must always keep our eyes on the Cross.

Now we all know that we should be offering things up, but that is not easy. It is an easy thing to say; it is not so easy to remember in the midst of the difficult times. So when Saint Paul tells us that Jesus became obedient even unto death, death on a cross, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in the heavens, on the earth, and under the earth, and every tongue proclaim to the glory of God the Father that Jesus Christ is Lord, He is Lord only because of the Cross. The fact that He came into this world and taught the truth was not enough; that was not the fulfillment of God’s Will for Him. He proved His love and demonstrated that He is the Messiah by going to the Cross for us. Anything apart from the Cross is not the Christ. He is the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One only because of the Cross. If we are going to profess that Jesus Christ is Lord it can only be because of the Cross and it cannot be separated from the Cross. We cannot just look at His teaching and we cannot just look at the Resurrection (that could not have happened without the Cross in the first place!); we have to keep focused and the focus must be the Cross. Our Lord told us precisely in the Gospel: As Moses raised up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be raised up, so that anyone believing in Him might not perish but might have eternal life. To believe in Him is to believe in His crucifixion. And He said when He is raised up from the earth He will draw all men to Himself. If we do not look at Him raised up from the earth on the Cross, we have no part of Him.

Right now, as things continue to get worse in the world, as things become more chaotic in our own lives, not only do we have to learn to keep our focus on the Cross, but we have to learn to unite our sufferings and our struggles with that of Jesus. This is the time to learn because when things get really bad, if we have not learned the lesson now, we will not be able to do it then. That is why God is giving us this time. So we need to look at Jesus. We need to look at the Cross – and not just from far away – we need to be united with Jesus on the Cross. That is the only way. We need to make sure that this lesson is deeply rooted within our hearts, that we are offering up our struggles and our sufferings, that we are uniting ourselves with Christ. Then when things get really bad that will be our first movement: to go right to the Cross. Then it does not matter how bad things get; our faith will be unshakeable because it is firmly rooted in Christ, in Jesus Christ crucified.

That is what we have to be about. It is exactly what Saint Paul told us to do, that we would boast in nothing else but Jesus Christ and Him crucified; not Jesus Christ and Him risen, not Jesus Christ and Him glorified – Jesus Christ and Him crucified; and that we would boast in nothing but the Cross of Christ, through which he said, I have been crucified to the world and the world to me. We do not want to be part of what is going on in the world right now; therefore, we have to be crucified to the world and the world to us. There is only one possible way that can happen, and that is to be united with Jesus in the triumph of His Cross.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

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