Christ Crucified

It was Saint Helena, mother of the Roman emperor Constantine, who encouraged her son to build the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre over the site of the tomb of Jesus. During excavations, workers found three crosses. Legend has it the one on which Jesus died was identified when its touch healed a dying woman. To this day the Eastern Churches (Catholic and Orthodox alike) celebrate the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on the September anniversary of the Basilica’s dedication. We call this feast the Exaltation of the Cross. To exalt something is to ‘raise on high’.

In the first reading of this weekend’s Mass, we read how God commands Moses to make a bronze image of a serpent which the people are to look upon if they are to recover from the fatal bites of the serpents. The symbol of what they suffer becomes the symbol that saves them. Just as the Israelites gazed at the bronze serpent and lived so we are called to gaze on Christ crucified. Pope Benedict said:

Lifting up our gaze to God expresses a very important truth: we are invited to enter back into relationship with Him. We need to stop turning in on ourselves, uselessly nurturing a sense of guilt and forgetting that, ‘Even if our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts, and He knows all things’ (1 Jn 3:20). Let us lift up our eyes toward the stars (remember Abraham and the promise of many descendants) knowing how to cast every worry onto God.

I often tell the story of how, in a parish where I worked, they fitted out a new nursery classroom. Some of the nursery staff who were not Catholic were worried that putting a crucifix (a cross on which hung the figure of Jesus crucified) on the wall would upset or frighten the children. The Cross — because of what it represents — is the most potent and universal symbol of the Christian faith. It has inspired both liturgical and private devotions. For example the Sign of the Cross, which is an invocation of the Holy Trinity; the ‘little’ Sign of the Cross (on head, lips, and heart at the reading of the Gospel); praying the Stations of the Cross; and the Veneration of the Cross by the faithful on Good Friday who kiss the feet of the image of Our Saviour crucified. When I visited a man who was dying, he asked me for a ‘holding cross’ which he clasped in his hand till the moment of his death.

Here is a traditional prayer that can be said before a crucifix.

Look down upon me, good and gentle Jesus while before Your face I humbly kneel and, with burning soul, pray and beseech You to fix deep in my heart lively sentiments of faith, hope, and charity; true contrition for my sins, and a firm purpose of amendment. While I contemplate, with great love and tender pity, Your five most precious wounds, pondering over them within me and calling to mind the words which David, Your prophet, said to You, my Jesus: They have pierced My hands and My feet, they have numbered all My bones. Amen.