God So Loved The World - The Exaltation of the Cross

When we are down and depressed, we need someone to lift up our spirits. When we are physically beaten down, we need to be picked up and be healed.

Jesus united both the spiritual and the physical in Himself. When His body was lifted up on the cross, in his seeming humiliation, He was exalted.

He did not seem to be exalted. He did not seem to be a conqueror who was receiving the praise of those He saved. But He was a conqueror, both spiritually, by His work of redemption, and physically, through His resurrection.

Because Christ became Man, He took the worst results of the sin of Adam and Eve and make them our doorways to Heaven. In our difficulties and sorrows, and well as in our joys, we can walk through the door that is Jesus and enter into Heaven on Earth.

Written by Laura Weston, widow of Deacon Michael

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In the readings today we hear the exaltation in both senses. The exaltation of Jesus physically on the cross, the raising up of Jesus on the cross, and then also the exaltation of Jesus through the sacrifice on the cross: that He is lifted up just as Moses lifted up the serpent for our salvation. 

The cross, an instrument of torture and of execution has become the means of our salvation.  The symbol of our salvation.  And in the exaltation of Christ, wholly human and wholly divine, we see what Paul testifies to by his "Christ crucified".  We see the core of the saving power. 

Jesus refers to this as the lifting up of Jesus just like Moses lifted up the serpent.  So "the Son of Man must be lifted up so that everyone who believes in Him may have eternal life."  He has to be crucified so that we have the potential of sanctifying ourselves for eternal life.

There is a direct connection. 

This is why such importance is given to the exaltation of Christ. And one of the things, again this is a cultural thing more than anything else, is that I think that it is advantageous to truly contemplate His sacrifice.  And the easiest way to do it is the Sorrowful Mysteries. 

And I want to focus on one part of the Sorrowful Mysteries to show the extremity of the exaltation of Christ and what His sacrifice was.  In Christ, we have the Agnus Dei.  Christ was the Lamb of God.  And in the Passover, they would find a spotless lamb and sacrifice it.  And part of the sacrifice was the draining of the blood from the lamb, which was used to cleanse the altar.

So we are talking about a very bloody, nasty thing going on at the altar in the temple with the sacrifice on Passover of the lambs.  There is blood everywhere. 

And when we look at Jesus' sacrifice on the cross, his exaltation, we start with the agony in the garden.  What is it? He sweat blood.  But then he was beaten.  He was scourged. 

Now, the Romans scourged people, but they did it not just with a whip, they had a whip that had little rocks tied into it.  And there is a way you scourge somebody and it goes across their back.  Or there is a way to come into and you rip it up. The Roman method was to rip it up.

And so Jesus was doomed to die unless you could have gotten modern medical care to him at that point. And even at that point, his expectation of living was minimal.

So, basically, the act of murder, had it been allowed to just continue, would have been the scourging itself. 

You then have Jesus brought, and exalted, by a crown, because he is the King of the Jews.  The crown were spikes.  When they say a crown of thorns, our thorns, yeah, rose bushes, they are little bitty things.  The thorns they are talking about are probably two or three inches lo, and they would have gone into His head… ripped up His head as they were going in.

Now, as I explained to you, I tend to be a bit of a klutz.  But have you ever had a head wound?  A head wound bleeds more than anything else you can imagine.  It just flows everywhere and it is very difficult to stop because of the quantity of blood. 

So when Jesus is exalted with Pontius Pilate, brought before the crowds with his crown on, there is blood flowing from his head.  It is not just dripping, it is flowing from His head. And He is a bloody mess from having been scourged. 

And He is exalted and proclaimed the King of the Jews.  At that point, that exaltation, right there, is an exaltation of the Lamb of God.  The sacrifice. 

And we see right there, when He was crucified to the cross, this is actually bloodier than a lot of the ones you see in Anglo churches.  They have these little spots of blood on his hands and little spots of blood on his feet and stuff like that. 

No, He was a bloody mess.  There is no way.  I am sure that the Roman soldiers periodically would throw buckets of cold water on Him to try to clean Him off a little bit, but His clothing, everything, would have been just been a bloody mess. 

And, given the way the Romans did it, there is a good chance He didn’t have any clothing on whatsoever. So you just saw a body that was totally covered with blood.

And one thing we miss is executions used to be public. And in the United States, in England, in various places, executions were a great public event. If you were going to have a hanging in the West in the United States, you would be, it basically [would] be like a town fair. Everybody showed up because they were great celebrations. There is no reason to doubt that that is exactly what Jesus faced when He was in front of Pontius Pilate and when He was brought to the cross to be executed.

Again, it was an exaltation before the multitudes. Before us. It wasn’t an isolated event. There weren’t three people up there with the soldiers. There would have been a large crowd looking at the exaltation of Christ on the Cross. The exaltation of Christ as a totally, completely beaten man and a bloody mess.

And this is the sacrifice that God, wholly human and wholly divine, made for us.

In an abstract sense, the idea of Christ dying on the cross for us is very vivid and is magnificent.

But when you contemplate the reality that God suffered on the cross, suffered in the Sorrowful Mysteries as they are described, it goes beyond a level of magnitude.

We understand better by trying to contemplate His exaltation on the cross in its reality. What it meant, when we see in this reading, that God so loved the world He gave his only begotten Son.

He didn’t only give His begotten Son who became wholly human, wholly divine, who came to earth to give us the means of salvation, He gave His only Son in the most dreadful, horrible, nasty, mean manner He could possibly do. And in that horrible means of execution, that horrible, abusive actions that were taken against Christ in the situation that He is presented as the King of the Jews in front of the multitudes, as He is exalted on the cross in front of the group, a total beaten mess, it is in that, what Paul is preaching in Christ crucified.

Because it is in that exaltation of Christ on the Cross, and the exaltation that results from the Resurrection, that brings us salvation, that we see Him as the King.

And it is a contradiction of the cross because on the normal sense it makes no sense that someone who is abused that body, that badly, could be the source of something wonderful. But that exaltation both in the physical sense and the exaltation of the Resurrection is the key to our salvation. And that is exactly what we are celebrating today is that God so loved the world He gave His only-begotten Son, not just His humanity, but His death in literally the most horrible way you can imagine.

September 14, 2018