Watch the Homily
Listen to the Homily
The conversation reflects on the significance of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, emphasizing the transformation of the cross from a symbol of death to one of hope and healing. It discusses the Israelites’ journey from slavery to the Promised Land, their complaints about manna, and the lesson of choosing life over sin. The cross is highlighted as a means of convicting and healing, symbolizing God’s love and sacrifice for eternal life. The message calls for repentance, belief, and following Christ to experience transformation and bring victory to the world.
Read the Homily
Father Randy: I don’t know about you, but the past week has been kind of tough with all the just violence, the division that’s been on, you know, display in our country and in the world. But I’ve been able to find a good amount of consolation just in the timing of it all. Because today we celebrate the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. This feast commemorates the day that the true cross was first recovered and publicly displayed back in the early 300s.
Father Randy: And today it invites us to consider how the mystery of the cross, how it is transformed from a symbol of shame, of execution, to what it is now. A sign of healing, of hope. Hope that God can take the worst that we can give, the worst that we can do, and make it new. The cross is a perpetual reminder that God so loved the world that he gave his only son.
Father Randy: so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life it’s John 3 16. it’s the favored quote of Christian sports fans all over the world it’s also the simplest and the shortest proclamation of the gospel that you can find that verse is the center of today’s gospel because it sums up the importance of the crucifix its role as a reminder for us
Father Randy: But if we really want to understand it and understand why the cross, you know, why couldn’t God have chosen some other way? Why did he use the cross? We have to go back to the first reading from Numbers that Jesus references in that lesser known passage of John, John 3.15. So in the first reading, the ancient Israelites, they’re traveling from Egypt to the promised land.
Father Randy: And along the way, they begin to complain. They decide that it would have been better to go on being slaves in Egypt than to endure the journey through the desert. Why specifically are they upset? Well, apparently they don’t think the food is very good. Now, a quick reminder, the food that they’re eating is manna. It’s this mysterious bread-like substance that God is sending down each morning for them to eat, sustaining them on the journey. But apparently, God miraculously supplying them food, you know, isn’t good enough.
Father Randy: They’re blinded to the wonder of what God is doing for them because it’s become ordinary. And now all they can think about is their old life apart from God in Egypt, the few good parts of life they had there. I mean, it’s crazy to think, but for the Israelites, the apparently well-spiced and seasoned food of Egypt, they’re constantly talking about, you know, the cumin and the garlic and the leeks and all this stuff.
Father Randy: That’s somehow enough to make up for the memory of the various terrible things that happened there. You know, years of slavery, the systematic murder of every male child. It doesn’t make sense to go back. And yet that’s what they do. You know, you may be tempted to think like maybe if God had just sent down, you know, some garlic powder and cumin with the manna, they’d be fine. That’s not the way it goes. People sometimes do, you know, kind of those illogical things. We do the same. That’s the nature of sin.
Father Randy: It promises us something good. And then it only provides some immediate but fleeting satisfaction. And then it leaves us emptier than we were before. But of course, with enough time, with enough dryness, we can start to long for it. For just that simple momentary pleasure, the comfort that it provides to us, even though we know it kills us. And then we’re like St. Paul. You know, I don’t do the thing I want, but I do the thing I don’t want. When we turn to sin,
Father Randy: That’s when we turn away from God. We turn away from God who’s a source of life. And so when we make that choice, it’s natural that we begin to experience the opposite of life. It’s death. This is what we see happen to the Israelites in a very literal way. They decided that it’d be better to be slaves again in Egypt than to follow the God who set them free. They’re literally turning from the source of life to a place of death, back to the people who wanted to kill them.
Father Randy: That is a choice that has grave consequences, grave spiritual consequences. And God allows them to experience physically the consequences of that choice. That’s death. Just as interiorly they have turned toward death, they now experience it outwardly through the serpents. In the serpents, God shows them what they have done, the choice that they have made, that they have already died in their hearts by turning back to Egypt. But God…
Father Randy: God does not leave them trapped in that state. That is the great message of this reading, that it’s not just one and done for the people, that he offers them a way to be healed. So he has Moses construct a bronze serpent, and he puts it on a pole in the center of the camp so that anyone who has been, they can look at it, and they can receive healing from God. And now the very thing that is causing them death, serpent, is now being used to bring life to them. When they look up at that image,
Father Randy: they are forced to confront the reality of what they chose. And then by acknowledging before God what they have done, by looking at it and asking for healing, they’re healed. Now, normally for us, when we sin, we don’t physically experience the consequences of that choice. I haven’t seen a whole lot of serpents running around Jackson looking for sinners to bite. But what we do experience is those interior consequences. On the inside, we taste death.
Father Randy: We taste that isolation, the shame, confusion, fear, abandonment, hopelessness, broken relationships, you name it. I suspect that we all know all too well what that interior death feels like, what it does to us. And that really brings us to the pinnacle question. If that’s the state that we’re in, lost in these things, how can we be healed? Where can we find life? The answer to that is the cross.
Father Randy: Jesus says in John 3, 15, Just as Moses lifted up a serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. Just as the Israelites were healed by looking at the very thing that brought them death and repenting of the choice they made, so we are healed by Jesus on the cross. Because it is in Jesus on the cross that we see our sins, that we see the consequences of them.
Father Randy: In our crucified Lord, in his wounds, in the shame that he endured, we see physically expressed what sin does, what it does to us. But of course, that’s not all that Jesus does. He doesn’t just show us, you know, how badly we screwed up. He doesn’t just show us, you know, what we’re experiencing on the inside. He forgives our sins. He takes them away. John 3, 16, For God so loved the world that he gave his only son,
Father Randy: so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but have eternal life. God loves us so much that he takes on our sins and our sufferings on the cross so that we would have eternal life with him. The cross is exalted today because through it we have been saved, and by it we know who God is, that God is love, and that he loves to the extent of sacrificing his own life for us.
Father Randy: So like the serpent in the desert, the cross both convicts and it heals. It convicts us of our sins. It convicts us of the reality of God’s love for us. And then it invites us to receive healing. The healing that we in the world so desperately need. That healing can only begin when we’re willing to listen to the scriptures as it says here, to believe, to follow him, letting him save us from all the ways that we choose death. Looking up at the cross,
Father Randy: Seeing the reality of our sins, the cost of selfishness, of rejecting life, be moved to repentance and sorrow. Going to confession so we can receive forgiveness and the grace to make the journey through the desert. Loving as he loved us. So when we look at our lives, and we look at the world, and we see the effects of sin, especially right now, violence and division, the only answer that is going to be able to sustain us is found in the cross.
Father Randy: Because it is on the cross that we see how God can use even the darkest moment, the crucifixion of his own son, to bring life. How he transforms the cross from a symbol of death to one of victory. And if he can do that with the cross, then he can do the same with me. And he can do the same with us in our world. If we’re willing to choose life in him, it is then that he transforms us. Through us, he transformed the world.
Father Randy: But we need to ask him, Lord, where do you need to win victory? Where am I living in death? Where does the cross need to be? Where do I need to be convicted? First us. And then when we believe, when we follow him, we can go out and we proclaim him. And we will see the victory that he has come to bring.