A reading from the holy gospel according to Saint John. Jesus said to Nicodemus, remember he was a member of the Sanhedrin, no one has gone up to heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the son of man who is in heaven. Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the son of man be lifted up, that all who believed in him 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, the good news of the lord. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. One of the characteristic emphasis in the sixteenth century, the century in the Western world of the Protestant Reformation, Luther's Wingling, Melonthong, Calvin, and company, was to take Christ off the cross and to present the cross without Jesus Christ on it. Now there's lots to be said for that.
I suppose the most significant justification for that view, which the Protestants had in mind, was that we should think of ourselves on the cross of Jesus Christ, putting ourselves there. And that's not a bad idea, of course. Now that having been said, I think we should hastily add that the only meaning that instrumentality of execution common in Roman days for the most base kind of criminal, It has meaning not because it's an instrumentality of execution on a cross, but because of Jesus Christ, the son of God. Now notice I say Jesus Christ, the son of God. If he only was another Socrates, who cares?
He'd be just a figure and we'll we will enshrine him or do anything that you do for a man like Socrates, who had his champions and who had his detractors. So the meaning of the cross of Jesus Christ is not the wood of a cruel instrumentality of execution, but it's the reality of the event of Calvary. The the fact that in the course of human history, the son of God, truly the son of Mary, died on the cross for us for us. Now it's all very well to look at the empty cross and say, that's where I am. What do you get out of that?
That hunk of wood that was the way thousands and thousands of people were executed in the days of Christ and before and after. Was a very common kind of mode of execution. Just a relatively few years before Christ, there had been an uprising in Israel. And you know what the Romans did, they squashed it. And so many of the revolutionaries, the anarchists, were crucified that they ran out of wood.
And this is a fact. I'm not drawing this is no myth or pious story or an impious story. This is a fact. We mustn't glamorize it. We're talking about the electric chair.
We're talking about the hangman's news. We're talking about the cell where you gas people to death, or any other mode of execution. That's what you're talking about. Now, as in my hard headed way, if it has meaning beyond the meaning a tool of capital punishment, it has meaning because of Jesus Christ. And that has meaning, not because he was the son of Mary, but because he was the son of God.
Plenty of thousands of human beings laid their lives down on crosses, thousands. Nobody knows how many. There was nothing special about it at all. If there's anything special about the cross of Christ, it's not the cross, but it's Christ, Jesus Christ. And that has meaning only if he's truly the son of God.
Let's face it. Either Jesus Christ is the son of God or he was a sham, and we ought to get rid of him. Because you can't compare him with Socrates. Socrates was a pretty good man. But if Jesus Christ wasn't the son of God, he was the greatest liar that ever walked the earth.
And think of the people who have been deceived down the centuries. You call that of being a good man? So if all you can say about Jesus Christ is that he was a good man, probably even a little better than Socrates, I say, let's go out and have a drink because you're wasting your time. He wasn't. That's the first point I want to make.
The cross has meaning because of him who died on it, the son of God and truly the son of Mary, Jesus Christ. And you can't tell me that down the centuries when men and women were called upon to carry their cross, when they look up and see an empty hunk of wood, what consolation or encouragement is that? But when they see on that cross the son of God who died for them, that should take them and lift them up immeasurably, inexpressibly, and it has. That's exactly what has happened. That is exactly what has happened.
Down the centuries, the untold number of Catholics, Christians who have looked at the cross and seen their savior on the cross have picked themselves up and followed Jesus Christ. They not only picked up their cross, but they followed Jesus Christ. That's the important thing. Plenty of people pick up crosses. There's nothing extraordinary about that.
The world is full of martyrs and good people in the natural sense of the word. Every culture has them. Every century has them. Every day has them. We all know them.
So the tremendous, the inexpressible difference between a hunk of wood that was used as a mode of execution and the cross of Jesus Christ that we worship, because we worship not a cross but Christ the Son of God. Who happened to have that kind of a death. It was the cultural way of executing a so called criminal like Jesus Christ. That's all. The second point is this.
I don't know whether you've been following Brideshead Revisited. Well, I'm doing it for the second time. I marvel and I just simply am astonished at some of the things you hear there. Now the last episode was about Julia. I don't know what you can't go all into this thing.
But Julia, in order to contract it well, to get married if she wanted to be married, was married outside the church. And she's dropped her religion entirely. And now she's contemplating a second marriage. And she says some astounding things. She's kind of hysterical.
But one of the things Julia says is how strange and mysterious it is, mysterious it is, that holiness comes from the cross. And so it has been because Jesus Christ died on the cross, the holiest of holies. So let us this is the truth that we must bring home to ourselves, That the mystery of suffering as we call it, the mystery of pain, the mystery of tragedy, the mystery, and there's no other word for it, for innocent suffering. If any of you read Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, you will recall how he one of the great things he emphasizes in there isn't the great crimes of human beings to one another as adults, but the crimes of human beings as adults to innocent children. How millions and millions of children down the ages, absolutely innocent, have suffered.
What in the world is the answer to that? Only answer I know is the answer of the cross. And the cross has meaning for me and I hope for you, because not of the wood of a cruel instrument of execution, but because the son of God died on that for me. The name of the father, and of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.