O Crux ave, spes unica!

Homily for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross 2025 preached by Fr Christopher Woods, the Vicar at St Barnabas Jericho on Sunday 14 September 2025

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

A few weeks ago, someone challenged me by saying that Christianity seemed gloomy, obsessed with suffering. With little time to explain, I replied: “It is not meant to be gloomy. Ours is a faith of joy and hope. Yet we live in a world marked by struggle, and God does not ignore that. Instead, God transforms it into something hopeful. When you think you see only gloom, you have not yet seen the whole story.”

That conversation brought to mind the words inscribed in the Holy Cross Chapel: O Crux ave, spes unica – Hail, O Cross, our only hope.

Here is the paradox of today’s feast. The Cross – once a tool of torture and shame – has become for us the sign of life, healing, and hope. The word “exaltation” joined with “cross” sounds strange, even suspicious, as if we were exalting suffering itself. But we do not. We exalt the Cross of Christ because upon it Jesus revealed the fullness of God’s love.

Our readings lead us into this mystery. In the wilderness, the Israelites, weary and fearful, are bitten by serpents. God tells Moses to lift up a bronze serpent, and all who look upon it are healed. The very image of affliction becomes the means of cure.

Jesus takes up this image when he tells Nicodemus: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” On the Cross, humanity’s violence and rejection are nailed to the wood. Yet in that lifting up, the instrument of death becomes the means of eternal life.

This is the heart of the Gospel: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” The Cross is not first a sign of judgment, but of relentless, generous, self-emptying love.

The Cross is no accident, no divine miscalculation. It is the alternative to self-glorification: the way of humility, service, and solidarity. And because of this, Paul proclaims, “God has highly exalted him.” To exalt the Cross is to exalt the way of Jesus – love poured out, love that stoops to lift us up.

But what does this mean for us?

First, the Cross assures us that God is with us in suffering. Christianity is not masochism. We do not glorify pain. We proclaim that even in our darkest moments, Christ is beside us. To gaze on the Cross is not to feel guilty, but to feel accompanied: “You, Lord, chose to be with me, to stand where others flee.”

Second, the Cross reframes daily life. To “take up our cross” is not to seek suffering, but to carry with dignity and compassion the responsibilities and sacrifices love demands.

Third, the Cross is our compass. Just as the bronze serpent lifted the people’s eyes upward, so the Cross directs our vision higher. It does not erase our wounds, but it gives us strength to endure, to hope, to rise again.

Yet the question presses: how can we call holy what embodies all that is brutal in our world? We are bombarded daily with images of violence. Many people say they saw too much of the footage of Charlie Kirk’s killing over the last couple of days. Unlike the Israelites, we do not find healing in replaying them. But the Cross unmasks the lie: peace built on violence is false. It shows us the truth about ourselves – that our unity so often depends on exclusion and cruelty – and the truth about God: that God meets violence not with vengeance, but with mercy, forgiveness, resurrection.

As Rowan Williams has written: “On the Cross, God does not explain suffering; God shares it.”

The deepest mystery of the Cross is this: violence, sin, and death are overcome only by mercy. Vengeance cannot heal. Grace alone dissolves the cycle of hate.

The Cross stands as a quiet but mighty contradiction. It proclaims: love is stronger than hate, mercy deeper than judgment, life greater than death. The Cross is exalted not as a trophy, but when its shape is traced in our own lives of compassion, gentleness, and generosity.

So today let us lift our eyes to the Cross with thanksgiving. Let us exalt it not with words alone, but with lives that show forth its fruit – lives that bear witness, even in weakness, to the strength of Christ’s love. And let us make our own the ancient prayer carved in this place:

O Crux ave, spes unica.

Hail, O Cross, our only hope.