Christ’s Sacrificial Love
This Sunday we celebrate Holy Cross Day. The Feast of the Holy Cross is one of the nine “Feasts” we celebrate in the Church to honour Jesus Christ, our Saviour.
Crucifixion involved both public degradation and a lingering, agonising death by thirst and exhaustion. The death of Jesus by crucifixion created an additional obstacle to any Jewish follower, since Deuteronomy states, “Anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse” (Deuteronomy 21:23; cf. Galatians 3:13).
In the early fourth century, Constantine decided to erect a number of buildings to honour the principal places associated with Jesus. The Romans had destroyed Jerusalem in 135 CE, and later built a new city, Aelia Capitolina, on the site. The hill of Calvary had been buried under tonnes of fill.
The excavations in Jerusalem for the new basilica, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, were supervised by the empress Helena, Constantine’s mother. She discovered in the rubble a piece of wood that she identified as a relic of the true cross. The buildings were dedicated on 14 September 335, and the feast of the dedication was kept annually. The relic of the cross was housed in the basilica.
This Sunday is one to remember and reflect on the humiliating and agonising way Jesus died for us all; to appreciate the importance of the symbol and reality of Christ’s sacrificial love, the cross, in the daily life of every Christian.
God bless you
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From the Vicar
