In the preface to his novel about the Empress Helena, Evelyn Waugh describes a prominent lady, hostile to the Church, who had recently returned from a trip to Jerusalem; she was claiming that the whole story of the crucifixion was made up by a British woman named Ellen, and that even the local priests admitted it because they called their chapel ‘The Invention of the Cross.’
There is a great deal of invention in Waugh’s novel, but it at least points towards what we remember today – Holy Cross Day. What is known for certain is rather limited. Ellen was in fact Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine. She was born in Bithynia in North Western Turkey in about 250AD. She was not, sadly, the daughter of Old King Cole as some legends have it. She converted to Christianity when she was over 60 in a more serious way than perhaps her son did. She lived simply and generously and in her late 70s made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land where she founded churches on the Mount of Olives and in Bethlehem. Waugh’s novel claims, as did many of the legends, that she discovered the relic of the true cross whose location was revealed to her in a dream. Other more reliable accounts claim that the cross was discovered when the excavations were being dug for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the year before Helena arrived in Jerusalem. As for the word invention – it comes from the Latin, meaning the finding out or discovery of the cross.
However, it isn’t that story on which today’s commemoration is based. For that we have to move forward to the year 629 and the triumphant display of the relic of the cross in Jerusalem after it had been recaptured from the Persians who had taken it in a battle 15 years previously. That came to be commemorated on September 14 which was the day on which Constantine’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre was dedicated. But why we might ask is this really all so important? Not only might we find all these stories rather unlikely but we are unlikely to feel that a piece of wood makes much difference to what we think and feel about the crucifixion. Are we right? How are we to understand this early passion for relics?
There is of course the belief that relics had miraculous powers but the attraction goes deeper than that. A relic reminds you of the presence of holiness, it satisfies a desire to be near something that is special to faith. We should remember how isolated Christian communities were before modern revolutions in travel and communication; when a tiny piece of the true cross came to your city it brought you nearer to the holy places of the faith which you could never hope to visit for yourself. The presence of a relic represented the presence of God’s mercy and consolation to those oppressed by a sense of sin and suffering and hopelessness. In a curious way the presence of a relic of the true cross helped to lighten the burden of the cross which the faithful felt themselves to be carrying.
This year we are perhaps more specially alert to the shape of the cross because we are being reminded over and over again of those fields of white crosses which mark the graves of those who died in the First World War. It was those crosses which also feature in one of the most moving war paintings, created by Stanley Spencer on the east wall of the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, south of Newbury. It is entitled the Resurrection of the Soldiers and at the bottom of the picture behind the altar is a great pile of white crosses being made by the soldiers as they emerge from their graves. Towards the top of the picture you can just see Jesus seated and receiving the soldiers’ crosses as they give them back to him.
It is a way of thinking about the resurrection which may not have occurred to us. New life means handing in your cross. It is not blasphemous to think that those soldiers from whichever side they came, carried a cross on behalf of their nation. Their cross was not just the suffering of trench life, their fear and their wounds; it was the fact that they were doing something on behalf of others – they were carrying out orders to do things they may not have liked or understood; they were put in a position of killing their fellow human beings in hand to hand combat; they experienced the desperate desire to survive even at the cost of killing the man before you, looking into his eyes and shooting or stabbing him, and they had to do that because their nations and their leaders had somehow willed and been lead into this conflict. Their crosses may not have been very noble, they may even have acted cruelly or selfishly but there they were carrying a burden which was not their own sole responsibility. And so Spencer paints their resurrection as a handing in of their crosses. They look into the eyes of the man who first carried ‘the’ cross and they hand back to him the whole bloody mess of their lives and he looks at them with forgiveness and reassurance and love.
None of this of course makes much sense; the trade in relics which may have been invented in our sense of the world, and made for profit, which nevertheless brought to many people comfort and a sense of unity with the rest of Christendom; a crudely physical vision of the resurrection of crowds of morally compromised soldiers handing in their white stone crosses.
And yet Paul says, ‘Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?’ By which he might mean that left to ourselves humanity does not have the capacity to create a wonderful world by it’s own wisdom – even perhaps when we may think our faith makes us wise and strong. Paul’s paradox of the weakness and foolishness of God is intended to shock us into thinking differently. It is not a matter of believing simply because something seems to be impossible. It is rather a willingness to allow our habitual ways of thinking to be turned up-side-down by images and imaginative visions which challenge us to think differently, to move forward with enlarged vision however puzzling that may be. And the cross is the symbol of that way of life. The cross is the symbol of the burdens we carry, the moral chaos of the world in which we live; the empty cross is the reassurance that we do not have to remain on our crosses; we can hand them in and find that abundance of life and fullness of joy which Christ wills for us all. Amen