Nostalgia for Christendom or Following Jesus

Holy Cross
14 September 2025

Numbers 21:4b-9
Psalm 78:1-2, 34-38
1 Corinthians 1:18-24
John 3:13-17

When you think about it, the roots of Holy Cross Day are peculiar. The day commemorates three historical events: the discovery of the True Cross in 326, its initial exaltation for public veneration in 335, and the recovery of the Cross from the Persians in 628.

In 326 Saint Helena, the mother of emperor Constantine and a devout Christian, embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to identify sites from Christ’s life referenced in the Gospels in order to establish churches in these places. Things you can do when you are the mother of the emperor who had just declared religious freedom for Christians.
Helena sought to find the actual cross of Christ. Not an easy feat 300 years later. The story goes that upon identifying Mount Calvary and the empty tomb, she discovered three discarded and buried crosses. It was confirmed by the local bishop that these were the crosses used to crucify Jesus and the two criminals on either side. But since it was unclear as to which of the three crosses was Christ’s, Helena had a sick woman brought in to touch all three. The woman was healed upon touching one of the three, thereby identifying the cross on which Jesus had been crucified. It is not known whether Helena brought in more sick people to also be healed.

Her son, Emperor Constantine, then ordered the construction of a church to encompass all three places: the location where the cross was found, Mount Calvary, and the empty tomb. This church was to house the “True Cross.” The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was dedicated on the 13^th of September 335. Legend tells that the following day Christ’s Cross was brought outside the newly built church for the faithful to venerate. And so the first exaltation of the Holy Cross likely occurred on the 14^th of September of that year. And this is how the festival landed on this day.

In 614 the Persians invaded Jerusalem and took the True Cross as a trophy. And since Persians were not Christians it was believed that one could not let them keep the cross of Christ and in 622 the Eastern Roman Emperor Heraclius began his campaign to recapture Jerusalem and to recapture Christ’s cross. (What’s the killing of a few infidels to recapture the cross of a Messiah who died forgiving those who crucified him?) Heraclius entered Jerusalem with “the True Cross” in 628 and restored it to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. After this military victory Holy Cross Day became a universal celebration across the Church.

Understanding that I live in a different time, and that I may have thought the above to be perfectly sensible had I lived in the centuries just described, I cannot help but think that in these stories the cross of Christ seems little more than a talisman, a good luck charm, and an object that possess magical powers.
Of course, I speak both as a Protestant and as someone who grew up in the scientific paradigm. Yet as I admitted a little while ago, I do actually think there is a point to relics, for they seem to transport us closer to the Saviour and the saints we love and venerate. The reason we seek such closeness is that we seek to be like the God we love. “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” says Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. The perfection we seek is less the perfection of doing than the perfection of being; of being the new creation.
Of course, our church does not have relics, but Jackie and I just returned from the Sunshine Coast where we remembered Elias on his birthday and it remains comforting to me to be in places where Elias has been. This is not unlike people who travel to the Holy Land to walk where Jesus walked.

Yet the odd thing about all this that at least the stories about the origins of Holy Cross Day do not so much seem to take us closer to Jesus, closer to God, but seem about the veneration of an object that possesses magic powers, which is why earlier I described it as a talisman or a good luck charm.

Helena was a devout Christian but she travelled with the power and privilege of the empire. Her son was the emperor and the cross was no obstacle to killing the enemies of the empire. This, I think, is the most significant problem of the story. As Stanley Hauerwas has said, prior to Constantine it took exceptional courage to be a Christian. After Constantine it took exceptional courage to be a pagan.

And so we see that there is a contradiction built into the story of Holy Cross Day. Jesus was murdered as an enemy of the empire. Now the empire wants to build him a shrine. With any such elevation by an empire comes a neutering of the Gospel. The cross no longer signifies the glory Jesus speaks of in the Gospel of John. We recall that when Judas had left the room to betray Jesus, Jesus said, ‘Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. ³²If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. (John 13)
And we remember that in Jesus on the cross God is revealed as who God truly is. In John eight Jesus replies to his opponents, When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own, but I speak these things as the Father instructed me. (v.28) “Lifted up” means lifted up on the cross. On the cross we shall see God’s glory.

On the Sunshine Coast last week, at a lunch spot last Wednesday I waited for the washroom outside of which was a bulletin board. The offers on the bulletin board made the region appear like new age central, which is probably not far from the truth. It was evidence that a consensus of world view that past times have known is long gone, not just on the Sunshine Coast.
I think that some of the politics of the right are borne of this realization with a desire to bring back the days when movies were in black and white and so was everything else, to quote the poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron. I can sympathize with that. Even in my life time the world once seemed a simpler place. But those who wish to go back always seem to want to go back to Constantine, to a time when faith and world views were prescribed, when it took courage to be a pagan, not to be a Christian, and when the cross was just a distant memory that once had accomplished our salvation, but in a transactional way, not in a way that we might ever have to bear it. Those who want to go back generally want to go back to Constantine, not to Jesus.

And that is what Christian Nationalism is about and it is one reason it is a heresy. Shane Claiborne, a Christian writer and a member of the New Monasticism movement, said a little while ago,
“I can’t imagine Jesus waving an American flag anymore than I can imagine him wear a ‘God bless Rome’ shirt. Patriotism is too small. Our Bible does not say, ‘For God so loved America,’ … it says, ‘For God so loved the world.’ America First is a theological heresy.”
Of course, we can substitute Canada or any other nation.

The New Testamant scholars N.T. Wright and Michael F. Bird write, “Christian nationalism is impoverished as it seeks a kingdom without a cross. It pursues a victory without mercy. It acclaims God’s love of power rather than the power of God’s love. We must remember that Jesus refused those who wanted to ‘make him king’ by force just as much as he refused to become king by calling upon ‘twelve legions of angels’. Jesus needs no army, arms or armoured cavalry to bring about the kingdom of God. As such, we should resist Christian nationalism as giving a Christian façade to nakedly political, ethnocentric and impious ventures.”¹

But there is another thing. Of the partnership of church and state in the colonization of the Americas, Presbyterian minister and scholar John A. Mackay says, “The sword and the cross entered into partnership. It was this partnership formed in the name of evangelism in which the sword opened the way for the cross and the cross sanctified the work of the sword that constituted the originality of Spanish Christianity.”
In all of this, profit was the main motor. Mackay continues, “The royal coffers of Spain brimmed over with gold and that became her ruin. She emerged from her cavern to conquer and Catholicize the new world. She conquered it and in its Catholicization dechristianized itself.”²

That is to say that the marriage of power and Gospel will always be weighted toward power and thereby betray the Gospel. And that is the irony of the historic origin of this festival.

But we know better. We know better because of Jesus’ words and example. We know better because Paul’s witness in today’s epistle, “²⁵For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” And we know better because of the witness of the saints who followed the words Jesus spoke to the disciples,

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. ²⁵For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. ²⁶For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? (Matthew 25)

That’s the pattern of discipleship and it takes all we have to learn it. But it is the way of Life.

Thanks be to God.