A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Jesus said to Nicodemus, no one has gone up to heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the son of man. Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the son of man be lifted up that all who believe may have eternal life in him. Yes. God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him may not die but may have eternal life.
God did not send the son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through his son. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Jesus Christ is lord, and he reigns from the cross. There it is.
This, the first reading we had this morning, you know, about that snake in the desert and then how Moses made a bronze snake, and then all who looked upon it were saved. That is the of course, is the symbolism of the cross, and that's why that reading was picked. The idea that when we look up at the cross, we're going to be saved. Well, why not look at a guillotine, at a gallows, at some kind of a syringe that you can shoot some stuff into a person's veins and kill them? Why not take any instrument of execution and lift it on high and say that God reigns from it?
Well, we might just we might very well do it. It just happens by a strange coincidence that in our Lord's day, the most despicable mode of execution was crucifixion. It wasn't even a decent way of dying. It was a most indecent way of dying. And you see, we have to get this perspective.
And you see, the cross, it was a hunk of wood of some kind. We're not even sure of the shape of the thing. But it was some kind of a of a of a cruel way of tying somebody up there, and generally death came by starvation and thirst. It was a horrible death. You didn't die suddenly.
It was not a sudden death. People could be stay on the cross for for days. So there wasn't anything glamorous about the cross in our lord's day, believe me. Anything that it wasn't nearly as glamorous as today we have when we had have an execution, you know. We surround it with all kinds of care and attention and consideration.
It was just the opposite with a person who is going to be executed on the cross. It was despicable. It was a disgrace. It was the last final thrust of society to show their absolute disgust with the person being executed. Now that's the reality.
And that's the reality of pain and suffering and all the other tragedies that come into life. There's nothing glamorous about it in itself, in itself. You don't have to be a Freudian to realize that some people handle pain in various ways. They inflict it on others and seem to get enjoyment out of it, but believe it or not, some people seem to get a certain amount of enjoyment out of inflicting it on ourselves. Take the little kid who runs and backs its head against the wall.
I haven't seen many walls hurt by it, but the little kid can hurt its head. What's he doing that for? Is he out of his mind? You see, what we have to get to at grips with, there is nothing glamorous about pain and suffering. If you can avoid it, avoid it.
Who wants it? And notice that opening prayer that we said here, it's called a mystery. Just keep that in mind. The fact of pain, and that's just one form of evil in this world, the fact of evil in this world is a mystery, and we're not going to solve it. But one thing that Jesus Christ did do, he saved us from it.
He gave us an answer to it, and the answer is looking looking at the cross. Now what do you see there? What do you mean when you speak of the holy cross? There's nothing holy about a hunk of wood. There wasn't anything holy about a man being executed.
Remember, just a few years before Christ was born, the Romans came in and and crucified so many Jews that there there were very few trees left. There were people still living in Jesus' time who knew that. Keep that in the back of your head when you think of the how fearful the Jews were of having anarchy and what the Romans would do to them because some of them remembered what had happened when hundreds upon hundreds and hundreds were crucified till the wood went out ran out. So if there's anything holy about the cross, where is the holiness? It's not in the suffering.
It certainly isn't in the executioner's chair, whether it be the be the guillotine or the swordsman or or the axe of the the headsman or the or a cross, whatever it was. There's nothing holy about any of that stuff. They're the they are the dregs of society. We don't even we'd like to eliminate it. Think of the arguments today against capital punishment.
Many of those, I don't agree with them, but plenty of them have a lot of merit. Every argument has some merit, you know. So when we talk about the holy cross, what are we talking about? We are talking about Jesus Christ savior. We can't understand the mystery of evil, of suffering, of pain, of tragedy, of crisis.
We can understand it. But what Christ came to tell us was that the noose, that the gun at my temple is not the answer. The cross of Jesus Christ is the answer. Now what do we mean by that? There's nothing automatic.
This is not a great mystery, this part of it. What is holy about the cross is Jesus Christ, our savior, lord. And it's very interesting when I say that the lord reigns from the cross because there is no time in our lives when god becomes so prominent and possibly, possibly, because that's my choice, possibly may reign. There's no time in my life when that is more true than when I'm at the bottom of the barrel with pain, with suffering, with tragedy, when I can't see any light at the end of the tunnel. Then when I can say, Jesus, you have the answer.
You have given meaning to this, what's happening to me. I don't understand it, but you have given meaning to it. It is not senseless. It is not absurd. It is not the end of the world.
It is none of those things. I look at the brazen serpent and I'm saved. Not because of a hunk of metal. It's because the action of god was transmitted to the people in some way through it, through their act of faith. They had to do it.
They had to do the looking. You see, all that Judah saw was himself, despair, suicide. All that Peter saw was Jesus Christ and became head of the church. And so here's the point. When we talk about the holy cross, it's Jesus Christ reigning from the cross, and the cross is certainly, rightly the symbolism of pain, of evil, of suffering, of all the burdens of life that all of us, to some extent, have to carry.
The severity of that burden varies from almost from day to day, but it's in but in many ways, it's inescapable. You see, it's not a choice that we have of whether we're going to be afflicted by the the whips and scorns of outrageous fortune. That's not the choice. The choice is, do we look at the cross of Jesus Christ? Do we look at suffering?
Christ didn't enjoy the cross. Remember, he said, my god, my god, why have you abandoned me? Think of that. Christ felt abandoned on the cross, and he's god. You talk about a mystery.
Who can who can put that into words? My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Jesus said that, and he begged to be freed from it, begged to be freed from it, but he wasn't. Because in the end, he said, not my will, but thine be done. The name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit.
Amen.