We are so used to seeing the cross on buildings, hanging on our walls, even wearing them around our necks, that it can be easy to forget just how frightful and tortuous death on a cross really was.
In our liturgy today, though, we are transported to Golgotha, to the central and crucial moment of all of human history – that moment toward which all of time, before and since, flows like rivers and streams to the ocean.
And like the people who passed by Golgotha that Friday afternoon we come face to face with the very harsh reality of the cross, and with them we are faced with a choice.
We can jeer, and deride, and mock the cross, and Him who hung upon it; or we can simply ignore it and pass it by, which is really the same thing; or we can heed the summons and stand in awed silence and adore the holy cross.
Make no mistake about it, just as on that day people in our own time, even in our own city pass by the cross and ignore it. They refuse to take seriously that a man killed 2,000 years ago is in fact the origin and turning point of all of history.
Worse, they still laugh and scoff at the cross, because they know that truly adoring it demands an end to their self-centeredness, and ultimately requires them to pick up their own cross and to face their own suffering.
Or, worse still, like the criminal killed along side Him, they taunt and blaspheme the cross: “If you were really the Son of God you wouldn’t have been executed like a common thief! If you were really the Son of God, you wouldn’t allow so many to suffer and die of starvation, and disease and war! If you were really the Messiah, I wouldn’t be suffering the burdens of my own cross.”
By our being here today we have made a different choice. We have chosen to heed the summons, to come and stand at the foot of the cross and silently adore Him whom we have pierced.
We have come to stand here at the cross because we know that on the cross hangs the Word of God, the only word that can be spoken to answer all of those jeering questions – Jesus, who is Himself the Word made flesh, who suffered with and for us.
And we know, therefore, that it is only from this vantage point of the cross that the rest of human history, the rest of our own lives, can be seen in such a way that they make any sense at all.
And so we come to stand at the foot of the cross.
The little ones, even those too young to fully understand, come to adore the cross, because there they find Him who called the children to Himself and compared the Kingdom of God to them.
The homeless, the hungry, the refugees come to adore the cross because there they find Him who was born so poor that He had no place to lay His head. They find Him who fled war into Egypt, and knew the hunger of fasting in the desert.
Those who feel they are on the margins, those who feel burdened by guilt, they come to adore the cross, which, though it is outside the gates of the holy city, is in fact the very center of the universe, and on the cross they find Him who ate with tax-collectors, and Samaritans and sinners like us.
The sick and the suffering, those who are blind or lame in body or in spirit, come to adore the cross, because there they find Him who made the blind to see and the lame to walk.
The lonely and the fearful come to adore the cross, because on it they encounter Him who hallowed all fear as He sweat blood that night in the garden – they find Him whom even the Apostles abandoned or denied.
Widows, and widowers – mothers and fathers who have buried children – all those who mourn and are filled with grief come and stand at the foot of the cross, because there they are with Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows and with her they see the eyes of her Son, which wept over the death of Lazarus – and they can see those same eyes filled with love and compassion for them too.
All of us, come to the foot of the cross because we know that if we do not shirk the cross, or despise and deride it, but if we embrace it and adore it, and even join Christ and carry the cross in our own suffering and death, we will thereby be able to share in Christ’s glory as well – and so we see in His cross not merely an instrument of torture and death but a thrown of glory that Jesus mounts triumphantly.
“Behold, behold the wood of the Cross, on which is hung our Salvation. Come, Let us adore.”
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