HolyCrossDay, September 14, 2012,
Sullivan Park Care Center, by Sr. Annette Fricke, OP
Today, the
Church calendar reads that it is Holy Cross Day. This is the actual day; it is not a
transferred Christian Feast. The Roman
Catholic Church calls this day, The Triumph of the Cross. Whatever title you should choose, I think we
are talking about the same thing. It is
a festival of Christ’s passion and cross, giving opportunity for a joyous
commemoration of his redeeming death with a festal emphasis not appropriate
during Holy Week. “The message about the
cross, in reference to I Cor. 1:18, is the central affirmation of Christianity,
demonstrating both the depth of human sin that made the death of Christ
necessary and the infinite value of every human being that caused God to act to
redeem the human race. The cross is
shorthand, symbolic language for the redemptive passion and death of
Christ.” This feast day of the cross is
a celebration of the Gospel of John’s view of the crucifixion of Christ as the
time of his glorification as opposed to his resurrection. The moment of death is seen as Christ’s
moment of triumph and victory. This day
was very important in Church history, being originally one of just three
feasts, the others being Pentecost and St. Lucia, after which there were days
of repentance, fasting and prayer—those days being the following Wednesday,
Friday, and Saturday. These days of repentance were meant to correspond to the
changing seasons, being originally agricultural festivals.[1]
The passage
I mentioned above, I Cor. 1:18 reads, “For the message about the cross is
foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the
power of God.” Basically, Paul’s
argument is that in the wisdom of the world, the cross of Christ is
foolishness. Who wants to follow a Jesus
that sacrifices for all, with no discrimination whatsoever?
In our Bible
Study on Wednesday mornings, we are currently studying the book of
Revelation. One thing that was pointed
out about that book is the view of the early Christians. The early Christians were not a bit about
compromise. Being a Christian meant absolute loyalty to Jesus. You were not to allow any pagan worship or adherence
to the Roman Empire. It was a time in
which the Jewish community hated Christians to the point of turning them in to
the Roman government, to be tortured, imprisoned, and killed. We can see how early Christians became
anti-Semitic, why they hated Jews. This anti-Semitism is spread throughout the
gospel of John, which in other ways is highly revered. Unfortunately, this hatred of Jews continued
in the Christian community for several generations.
Hatred in
some form of various individuals or groups of people continues to this
day. We still have much to learn of what
it means to be a Christian. You can tell
much about a person by the stories they tell.
It is not so much the details that are the giveaway, but the emotional
content indicators. One story I heard
goes like this, “One night, on the way home from the football game, my dad was
driving and the teenagers behind us kept tailgating, so he stomped his foot on
the brake quickly and hard.” For what
purpose? “To teach them a lesson.” What lesson is that? “That they shouldn’t tailgate.” Another person kept telling me about all the
things that bothered her and yet, not once did she try to see these situations
in a different way or consider letting go of something that happened many years
ago until she had gone through the whole litany in my presence one more
time. At that moment, she stopped. At that point, she began a long healing
process. Prior to that, she was
convinced that everyone else in her environment was an obstacle or hurdle. Helping people through anger and grudges is a
delicate task. Sometimes serious
counseling is needed to work through those feelings as well as learning to
build relationships rather than being destructive or ignoring, moving on to
so-called “better” things. Forgiveness
is about mending hurt feelings in the now, not holding onto angry and hurt
feelings about that other person or interpersonal situation. It’s learning that
the world does not revolve around me, but the people around me. God made all of us and we are equally all
God’s children. The world around us
wants us to believe that it is only about ourselves, but that is only 50% of
the picture. It is about the community
in which we live and work; our relationships with our neighbors, our
relationships one government to another government. It is about taking care of our environment so
that we can leave this earth with a good place for our children and our
children’s children to live, work, and play.
We are not called to conquer others, to rape and pillage the land, to
get all we can for ourselves.
Christianity is not about self-love and damning the rest of creation.
There is no
more of a logical conclusion to living and growing as a human being than to
continually engage in loving and forgiving despite all that would have us say,
think, or behave otherwise. God
accomplishes the fulfillment of forgiveness by transforming us into vehicles of
forgiveness. Think about all the people
who have shown kindness to you in the past, even when you clearly felt you did
not deserve it. There are few other
things that help to erase past injustices. Our baptisms unite us to God in such
a way that we are to die to sin daily, and rise again to lead a Godly
life. Sin continues to get in our way,
but we are to do what we can to brush that aside to be the forgiving people
that God bought us back through Jesus Christ to be. When St. Paul said to “Imitate me,” what he
really meant was to imitate Christ. In
fact, there is a whole book with the title, “The Imitation of Christ” that I
highly recommend. Jesus is our model in
all things. Remember, but forgive;
repeat that process every day. Never
tire of reminding yourself of God’s purpose for your life. Live and breathe the words of forgiveness
into every word and action, giving thanks to God for the forgiveness given so
abundantly.
How often
are we to forgive? Seventy times seven
or seventy seven? Seven is a perfect number. What Peter is really asking is this, “Must I
practice perfect forgiveness?” Jesus
implies that it is way more than a specified number of times; we must always
forgive, not because it makes us feel better, but because God forgave us and
expects us to do the same with others.
Let us
remember this: “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to
ourselves. If we live, we live to the
Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we
die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end
Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the
living.” Do not pass judgment and do not
despise your brothers and sisters because we are all accountable before God.
Amen.
[1]
Pfatteicher, Philip H., New Book of Festivals and Commemorations: A Proposed
Common Calendar of Saints, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2008, pp 443-448.
