A reflection for the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.
We Christians have made the Cross so familiar that perhaps we have forgotten to be shocked by it. We see crucifixes in our churches, in our homes, around our necks, and we make the sign of the cross almost without thinking.
The image is so woven into Catholic life that it can become part of the furniture of faith. But the Cross was never meant to be comfortable.
It was an instrument of torture and public humiliation, used by empire to frighten people into submission. It was intended to strip a person of dignity and make an example of them, and yet on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, the Church asks us not to look away.
We are asked to lift up the Cross and see in it the mystery of God.
That should unsettle us.
What would happen if we really looked? Not only at the polished crucifix above the altar, but at the suffering body hanging upon it; not only at the wounds of Christ, but at the wounds of our world.
Who is being crucified today? The refugee turned away at a border, the woman trapped in an abusive home, the child growing up in war, the person who cannot afford food or medicine.
We might also think of the LGBTQ person who has been told there is no place for them in their family or their church, the lonely elderly person whom no one visits, or the person whose suffering is inconvenient and whose story makes us uncomfortable. These are people we can too easily fail to see.
Christ is there.
That is one of the most disturbing claims of our faith. God is not simply above suffering, looking down upon it from a safe distance; God enters it.
On the Cross, Jesus does not stand with the powerful. He becomes one of the powerless: mocked, stripped, rejected, and executed.
The God we encounter there is not a God of domination, but a God of vulnerability. And that raises difficult questions for us as Church, because we proclaim a crucified Christ while still being drawn, at times, to power, prestige, authority, and control.
We exalt a man who washed feet, yet we have sometimes built structures in which status matters enormously. We preach a Savior who listened to women, touched the excluded, and challenged religious authorities, yet people can still feel unseen or unheard within our own communities.
The Cross does not allow the Church simply to point outward at the sins of the world. It also asks us to look at ourselves.
There are wounds the Church has helped to heal, certainly, but there are also wounds the Church has caused. Women have had their voices dismissed, survivors have had their suffering ignored, gay and lesbian Catholics have felt rejected, and people who asked honest questions have sometimes been treated as though questioning were the opposite of faith.
To stand before the Cross is to resist the temptation to defend ourselves too quickly. It is to listen, and to ask where Christ is suffering now.
There is another danger in our devotion to the Cross. Christians have sometimes spoken about suffering as though it were good in itself, and many of us grew up hearing phrases such as “offer it up” or “this is your cross to bear.”
There can be wisdom in accepting suffering we cannot change. But those words can also become dangerous when they persuade people to remain silent in the face of cruelty, abuse, or injustice.
Jesus never taught us to glorify suffering for its own sake.
The Cross is holy not because pain is holy, but because love refuses to abandon us in pain.
That distinction matters. Sometimes taking up the Cross means enduring what cannot be avoided, but sometimes it means speaking when silence would be easier, leaving what is destructive, defending someone who has been pushed aside, or challenging a system that protects itself at the expense of the vulnerable.
The Cross is not an invitation to become passive in the face of suffering. It is an invitation to love courageously.
Perhaps this is why the feast is called the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. We lift up the Cross not because suffering has won, but because love has entered the worst that human beings can do and has not been defeated by it.
Christian hope is not the belief that everything will turn out neatly. Anyone who has lived for a while knows better than that.
People we love die, families fracture, prayers seem unanswered, and institutions disappoint us. Sometimes there is no tidy ending, and the Cross does not give us a simple explanation for these things.
It gives us something else.
It gives us a God who stays. A God who enters the place of abandonment and stands among the wounded.
And perhaps that is where we are called to stand as well.
The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross asks more of us than reverence for a sacred symbol. It asks whether we are willing to recognize Christ in the suffering people around us, and whether our faith will bring us closer to those on the margins rather than farther from them.
It asks whether we will look when it would be easier to turn away.
So perhaps the question for this feast is not simply whether we are willing to carry the Cross. Perhaps it is this:
If we exalt the Cross, are we also willing to stand beside those who are being crucified?
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