HOLY CROSS DAY

Sunday, September 14, 2025

Saints Matthew and Mark, Barrington, R. I.

John 12:31-36a

The celebration of Holy Cross Day on September 14th dates back to the fourth century. In the year 312, the Emperor Constantine was about to do battle with his rival, Maxentius, at the Milvian Bridge, just outside Rome. Constantine was familiar with the Christian faith, but he was not yet a Christian himself. On the eve of the battle, however, he saw a vision in the sky: a cross, and under it the words, “In this sign, conquer.” 

 

Immediately, Constantine replaced the pagan symbols on the standards of his armies with crosses. The next day, he decisively defeated his rival and became the unchallenged ruler of the Roman Empire. In gratitude for his victory, he ended the persecution of Christians and converted to Christianity himself, although he delayed being baptized until he was on his deathbed.

 

Constantine became curious about what had become of the actual cross on which Jesus had been crucified. In the year 325, he sent his mother, Helena, to the Holy Land to try to find the true cross. Helena was 80 years old and a devout Christian. When she arrived in Jerusalem and began making inquiries, some of the local Christians pointed out the traditional location of Golgotha. At that spot now stood a temple of Venus, erected by the Emperor Hadrian in the second century. 

 

Helena had the temple demolished and undertook excavations at the site. The excavators discovered a rocky outcropping with a nearby burial chamber, matching exactly what one would expect if searching for Golgotha and the Holy Sepulcher. And, at the bottom of a nearby cistern, they found three wooden crosses.

 

The problem was that no one could tell which of the three crosses was the one on which the Lord had suffered and died. At this point, Macarius, the Bishop of Jerusalem, proposed a solution. A dying woman was brought on a stretcher, and each of the three crosses was lowered and touched to her body. When the third cross miraculously healed her, the onlookers knew that they had identified the True Cross. Helena had part of this cross enclosed in a silver reliquary and left it in Jerusalem. Construction of the great Church of the Holy Sepulcher began at the site.

 

Nine years later, on September 13, 335, Bishop Macarius dedicated the newly completed church. The next day, September 14th, he brought the relic of the True Cross outside and lifted it for all to see and venerate. This action became known as the “Exaltation of the Holy Cross” from the Latin verb exaltio, meaning to lift up. 

 

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher still stands in Jerusalem, although it’s been destroyed and rebuilt several times since the fourth century. I visited it three years ago, in 2022. Within its walls, you can still see the rock of Golgotha, or Calvary, where Jesus was crucified, and a short distance away, under the great central dome, the burial chamber from which he rose from the dead.

 

However, the relic of the True Cross is no longer there. It was captured by the Persians in 614 and recovered by the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius in 629. Finally, the Muslim forces of Sultan Saladin captured it from the Latin Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Battle of Hattin in the year 1187. No one knows what happened to it after that.

 

However, from the beginning, fragments of the True Cross had been taken to Rome and Constantinople, broken up into smaller fragments, and distributed all over Europe. In the sixteenth century, the Swiss Reformer John Calvin jibed that if you added up all the known fragments and splinters of the True Cross in Christendom, you’d have enough wood to build a ship. But he was wrong about that. A scientific study undertaken in the nineteenth century calculated the cubic volume of all the properly documented and certified relics of the true Cross. It concluded that they amounted to only about two-thirds of the likely cubic volume of the original cross itself. 

 

We have no way of knowing whether the cross that Helena discovered in 326 was the actual cross on which Jesus was crucified. But we can be reasonably sure that the various relics that we can see and venerate today in multiple cathedrals, shrines, and churches around the world do come from the cross that Helena found at Jerusalem in the fourth century. The Church’s procedures for investigating, authenticating, and documenting such relics are rigorous.

 

And even if we don’t know whether the cross that Helena unearthed in 326 was the actual cross on which Jesus died, it could have been—and that “could have been” speaks volumes about the nature of our faith. The Christian Gospel is based not on abstract philosophy or timeless myth, but on God’s dealings with real flesh-and-blood people who lived and died at identifiable times and places in history. Jesus of Nazareth suffered and died on a real cross made of real wood on a hill outside Jerusalem sometime around the year 30 to 33 AD. Whether the relics we possess today are authentic or not, the cross remains a historical reality, not an abstract symbol.

 

Today, we celebrate the paradox that by suffering and dying upon the cross, our Lord effectively transformed an instrument of torture, shame, and death into a sign of healing, life, and glory. In a sense, Holy Cross Day offers us another perspective on Good Friday. During Holy Week, we tend to experience the crucifixion as a moment of defeat and darkness that we somehow have to get past to arrive at the Resurrection glory of Easter.

 

But Holy Cross Day reminds us that the cross is also a sign of victory. In today’s Gospel, Jesus says: “Now is the judgment of this world, now the ruler of this world will be driven out; and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” Although to all outward appearances, Jesus is about to be judged and cast out, nonetheless, he identifies his approaching death as the judgment that casts out the devil and the cosmic forces of evil. And when he speaks of being “lifted up,” he depicts the cross almost as the throne on which he shall be exalted as king over all nations.

 

Before the conversion of Constantine, the Romans found it utterly perverse that we Christians should take as our central symbol an instrument of shameful death reserved for the worst sorts of criminals, traitors, and brigands. They had yet to understand that Christ had transformed the cross into a sign of victory and triumph.

 

Whenever we see a cross, we do well to reflect for a moment on what it signifies: not just a piece of jewelry on a neck chain, not just an architectural ornament on a building, but the deepest symbol of our faith and hope. We gaze upon the cross in awe and give praise and thanks to the Lord who died to give us eternal life.