Numbers 21:4b–9 | Philippians 2:6–11 | John 3:13–17
Every Christian life begins and ends beneath the same sign. On the day of our baptism, before we could speak a word or understand a doctrine, someone traced the cross upon our forehead and claimed us for Christ. And on the day we die, if we are fortunate, that same sign will be traced upon us once more — in the anointing of the sick, in the final commendation, on the lid of the casket that carries us to the grave. We enter our earthly pilgrimage under the sign of the cross, and we are carried out of it under the same sign. Everything in between is meant to be lived in its shadow and in its light.
Long before children learn the Creed or the Commandments, parents teach them this one gesture. A mother takes her infant’s small hand and guides it — forehead, heart, shoulder to shoulder — and murmurs the words along with the motion. It is very likely the first prayer any of us ever “prayed,” though we prayed it with someone else’s hand moving our own. We did not choose the cross; the cross was given to us, marked into our flesh by love, before we were capable of understanding what it cost or what it meant. Perhaps that is exactly right. The cross is never first our achievement. It is first a gift we receive.
And what a strange gift it is. Today’s feast asks us to sit with the central paradox of our faith: the very instrument by which the Roman Empire executed criminals and slaves — an instrument engineered for maximum shame and maximum suffering — has become for us the sacrament of salvation. We do not merely tolerate the cross as a regrettable necessity on the way to Easter. We exalt it. We venerate wood that once held the broken body of God. If someone from outside the household of faith stopped to consider this honestly, they might well find it scandalous, even today. St. Paul himself called it exactly that: a stumbling block, a folly — and yet, for those who believe, the power and the wisdom of God.
The first reading gives us the ancient figure for this mystery. In the desert, the people are dying from the bite of serpents — the very symbol, since Eden, of sin and death entering the world through disobedience. And God does not remove the serpents. He tells Moses to fashion a serpent of bronze and lift it up on a pole, so that anyone who has been bitten need only look upon it to live. The thing that kills becomes, when raised up and gazed upon in faith, the very means of healing. Jesus himself claims this image as a prophecy of his own crucifixion: “so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” The cross does not erase the wound. It transforms the very shape of the wound into an occasion of healing, if only we will lift our eyes to it.
This is what Paul means in that great hymn to the Philippians: Christ, though he was in the form of God, emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. He did not stay at a safe distance from our condition. He stooped — all the way down — to embrace our humanity in its entirety, including its most humiliating, most agonizing extremity: death, and death on a cross. He refused no part of what it means to be human, not even the part we most fear. And because he descended so completely, God exalted him — and in him, exalted us. He went down to lift us up. He embraced our lowest place so that our lowest place would never again be godforsaken.
And then John gives us the reason behind the mystery, the motive that explains everything else: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” Not out of necessity. Not because some cosmic ledger demanded a payment. Out of love — the same love a parent has when tracing a cross on a child’s forehead, a love that goes ahead of us and marks us before we can consent to it. Every time we bow before the cross, every time our lips touch the crucifix in veneration, we are offering a kind of kiss to wood and to the One who hung upon it. And here is the wonder: that kiss is not lost into empty silence. It is returned. The Father, through the Son, embraces our mortality and does not merely comfort it from the outside — he transforms it from within, filling our dying with his own risen life. Our kiss of the cross meets the kiss of the Father, and in that meeting, death itself is remade.
So, my brothers and sisters, we do not exalt an instrument of cruelty. We exalt the place where cruelty was met by a love greater than itself and was overcome. We began our life in faith with the cross traced by another’s loving hand. May we end it the same way — having spent our years learning, slowly, to trace that sign not only on our foreheads, but on every wound, every failure, every fear we carry, until we, too, can say with confidence: in this sign, I have life.
Amen.
