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Pacific Spirit: Christians inspired by meaning of the cross

Pilgrims have sought ‘True Cross’ for centuries
John Gram
John Gram, pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church, says Christians are challenged to take up their crosses: “What that means is that we will live out our discipleship as perpetual eccentrics.” Photo Dan Toulgoet

Good Friday is the pivotal day that commemorates the crucifixion of Jesus, which represents the cleansing of sins from believing Christians across all time. This Sunday represents a parallel, of sorts, to Good Friday, and is a time when Christians in Vancouver and worldwide reflect on the meaning of the cross.

Sunday is the Feast of the Holy Cross, or simply Holy Cross Day, among many other names given to the commemoration by denominations around the globe. It is when churches celebrate the meaning and symbolism of the cross itself.

John Gram, pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church at Laurier and Granville, says that Christians, depending on their denomination, are marked with the sign of the cross at baptism as a reminder that “Jesus has called us to take up our cross and follow him.”

“What that means is that we will live out our discipleship as perpetual eccentrics, always out of step with a world whose values have been turned on their head by the cross of Christ,” Gram told me in an email conversation.

“The cross is a sign of the power of God to redeem life out of death,” he says. “The cross of Jesus measured the extent of his obedience: Jesus remained obedient to the will of God even as it led to his death. This is the paradox at the heart of the ‘theology of the cross,’ that the strange, powerful love of God is hidden deep in the wood of the cross. To all the world, the cross seemed to have accomplished suffering and death, but because Jesus was raised from the dead, that same cross is now a life-giving sign of redemption.”

To all the world, the cross seems a symbol of the central event in Christian life, the crucifixion and subsequent resurrection. But post-biblical narratives suggest it remains a tangible artifact too — perhaps the most significant piece of wood on earth. In the fourth century, the elderly mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, Helena (later St. Helena of Constantinople), travelled to the Holy Land and is said to have discovered the “True Cross.” It is said, in fact, that she found three crosses, presumably those of Jesus and the two thieves alongside whom he was crucified.

A miracle told Helena which of the crosses was the one upon which Jesus was martyred and that cross was to become perhaps the greatest relic of the Christian world. While the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was constructed at the site where the crosses were discovered — and where Jesus is said to have been crucified, buried on Good Friday and resurrected on Easter Sunday — large parts of the cross itself are said to have been taken by Helena back to Europe, where many churches claim to harbour fragments.

And in case anyone thought it was only our generations that cannot be trusted to treat museum pieces respectfully, a nun’s report from the 380s tells of the extraordinary security surrounding the reliquary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, instituted after a pilgrim, leaning in to kiss the cross, took a bite out of it instead.

Peter Nation, a recently retired school teacher who headed the religion department at his North Shore Catholic high school, visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre earlier this year. This

Sunday’s mass will be enriched for him as a result of coming into proximity with the cross and the various other relics and holy sites he encountered.

The Feast of the Holy Cross is celebrated in the church in the form of what’s called a solemnity, Nation says, which is the biggest kind of celebration, along with other special days like particular saints’ feast days. Rightly so, he says, given the centrality of the crucifix.

“When you really think about it, it means everything to a Christian,” he says. “I will be making sure, as a practising Catholic, that when I go to Mass on Sunday and during the rest of the day — it’s a day of worship all day — I’ll be thinking about what it meant. The times that I’m a jerk, the times that I’m nasty, the times that I’m selfish, the times that I’m intentionally stupid, I have the possibility of being forgiven. I can be forgiven, if I ask for it, for the eternal consequences of being an idiot fairly frequently.”

With so many stories, some of them conflicting, about relics and their provenance, how can one be sure, after thousands of years, that the presumed site of the crucifixion is indeed where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands, or that the wood in the reliquary is actually from Jesus’s cross, or that so many of the other holy sites are what they are said to be?

“If these guys aren’t all nuts, hallucinating, then the fact that this degree of faith has continued for 2,000 years means that it is built on something real and actual,” Nation says, before adding: “I don’t think any Christian’s faith depends on whether Helen really found the cross, but it certainly is interesting historical background.”

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