A lot of us hear this every year during Holy Week: “Lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim, ’til all the world adore His sacred name…”
We’re reminded that one of the fundamental aspects of our faith is the cross. Lent is a time when those two intersecting beams of wood take on a new power and prominence; some of us walk to Calvary weekly in our churches for the Way of the Cross, and we can’t escape its overwhelming presence during the liturgy of Good Friday.
But now all these weeks later, on an otherwise unremarkable Sunday in the middle of Ordinary Time, we find a feast day dedicated to the cross. It’s jarring — and necessarily so. We need this jolt. Though the cross can seem commonplace in our churches and our homes, we can easily take for granted what it really means to us.
So this Sunday, we lift high the cross, we “exalt” it. And we realize something important:
We are people of the cross.
Reliving our baptism
This is where Christ’s life ended, and a new one for all of us began. When you think about it, it’s a little overwhelming. It’s also a contradiction — one that, I suppose, non-believers find baffling or even odd: We embrace as a defining symbol of our faith an instrument of suffering and death — two pieces of wood that Jesus Christ transformed into a single source of life and transcendent hope.
| September 14, 2025 – Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross |
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| Nm 21:4b-9 Ps 78:1bc-2, 34-35, 36-37, 38 Phil 2:6-11 Jn 3:13-17 |
It’s that way from the start — the very beginning of our lives as Christians.
When we come to the Church to be baptized, our foreheads are marked with the sign of the cross — signifying that we are claimed for Christ.
Then, as we get older, we dip our fingers into the font by the church door and learn to make the sign of the cross, reliving our baptism with every gesture and feeling again the drops of water that helped make us new creations.
‘Here is a Christian’
Throughout our lives, we use that sign of the cross to begin every prayer, mark every blessing, punctuate our daily devotions.
It recurs again and again. We see the cross everywhere: on necklaces and bracelets, rosaries and rings, cemeteries and steeples. It’s in our churches and our homes; it’s hanging over doorways and erected over graves, and it declares to anyone who sees it, “Here is a Christian.”
Yes, whether we understand it or not, we are people of the cross. And so this Sunday, we take time to acknowledge it, revere it, celebrate it, and for a good reason. We Christians don’t see the cross as a tool for an execution, but the instrument for our salvation.
The Gospel for this Sunday underscores why the cross matters. Someone has described this section from John as “the Gospel in a nutshell,” because it so simply and profoundly captures the substance of our faith in just one sentence: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”
Proclaiming the cross
And it happened because of the cross. The cross wasn’t the end, but the means to an end. No wonder we see it everywhere.
Yes. We are people of the cross.
This weekend, we take time to thank God for that, reflect on that and acclaim it to the world. We are who we are, and what we are, in no small measure because of those pieces of wood.
A familiar prayer sums it all up: “We adore you O Christ, and we praise you, because by your Holy Cross you have redeemed the world.”
