Sermon preached on Holy Cross Day – 14th September 2025 based on Philippians 2:6-11, John 3:13-17

May I speak and may you hear through the Grace of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen

This morning, I want to start with a series of question for you to think about. What if Jesus had never come 2000 years ago, and instead was born just before the beginning of the twenty first century, around 1992 say?  What would his birth, life and ministry have looked like in the present day, but more importantly, how would it end, in order to produce the same results of millions of people coming to believe in him and in God as part of a worldwide religion?

Would he have been shot with an assassin’s bullet? Both the good and the bad have died in this way. Would he have been caught up in some major disaster, helping others and dying? With all of the social media available today, would his death have been filmed and the world clicked more than a million times on the video, with sad, caring emojis, whilst the responses became full of condolences, tasteless humour and vitriolic comments?

The problem is – and it’s not one that I want to try and reconcile at the moment – is that being legally condemned and sentenced to death is no longer an option in our justice systems.

Which is why I believe that Jesus died at the perfect time and in the perfect way.

Whatever we might think of the Jewish or Roman systems of justice, the fact that it offered crucifixion as the ultimate punishment, has enabled us to use it as means to truly see the extent of God’s love for the world and us as individuals. Which is why today the church celebrates Holy Cross Day in its calendar of liturgical feast days for remembering and honouring saints and on this occasion holy objects.

From as early as the seventh century, the church celebrated this feast day to acknowledge a particular event. This was a discovery on the 14^{th of} September around 326AD, by Helena, the mother of the Roman emperor Constantine, of what many believed to the empty tomb and true cross of Christ during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

She had ordered a pagan temple to be destroyed, which revealed, buried underneath, three crosses, which were assumed to be the crosses of Jesus and the two thieves. A painting by Agnolo Gaddi completed in 1380 in the choir of the Franciscan Basilica of the Holy Cross in Florence (see image above) depicts Helena making this discovery.

A first glance the painting presents six crosses, which makes it look a little like a builder’s yard in which Helena is trying to decide which cross is the real one. However, closer inspection reveals that the artist has joined two parts of the story together into one image, and on the left-hand side, in order to determine which one is that of Christ, Helena has a dying woman in a bed brought to the site, who was completely healed at the touch of the third cross. The right-hand side appears to be the cross being erected on the site of the church of the Holy Sepulchre that Emperor Constantine had built at a later date.

The story was also recorded by Jacobus de Voraigne in his book, The Golden Legend, which became an immensely popular and influential source of Christian lore during the Middle Ages, providing a convenient educational resource for clergy and laity alike, presented in an accessible, narrative style. It was one of the most widely read books of its time, second only to the Bible, and significantly influenced medieval art, poetry, and stained-glass windows, allowing ordinary, everyday people the chance to visualise the stories, many of which they were unable to read for themselves.

Helena’s ‘True Cross’ was subsequently brought back to Europe as a prize of the early church, and as news of it began to spread, countless pieces and splinters began showing up all over the continent.  The great majority, however, were forgeries (many made from wood that does not even exist in the Holy Land); and while Helena’s cross probably did come from Jerusalem, and while it almost certainly was a real cross in the sense that it was used for executions, there would have been hundreds, if not thousands of such crosses in Judea, to which we should add the likelihood that recycling, decomposition and the conversion to firewood after too many uses, makes its authenticity questionable.

Based on this, it is highly unlikely that the actual physical cross on which Jesus died would have been discovered. The fact is we don’t really need it to be so, because rather that seeing the cross as an object of worship in itself, it is better to recognise it as a symbol of Jesus’ sacrifice and salvation. It reminds us to boast in nothing, ‘except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ’.

We may regularly make the sign of the cross and many choose to bow to the cross in our liturgy, not as an idol to be prayed to, but a potent visual symbol that embodies the depth of God’s love and the height of Christ’s glory at the perfect time and in the perfect way.

The cross is both scandal and glory, weakness and power, shame and victory. When we look at the cross, we see the deepest mystery of our faith: the Son of God humbling himself to the lowest place in order to raise us up to life. The cross is not an accident of history, but the perfect plan of God’s redeeming love.

Paul tells us whilst Jesus had equality with God he does not cling to this glory. Instead, He empties himself, taking the form of a servant, entering our humanity, and embracing the frailty of flesh, which means he goes lower still, through obedience to God and to death, through the most shameful, agonizing death the world could imagine: the cross; …which was the lowest place imaginable. It was not only brutal but humiliating, reserved for criminals, designed to shame as well as kill. This shows us how far God was willing to go for our salvation. It strips away any illusion that we can earn God’s love.

As Jesus explains to Nicodemus, the Son of Man must be lifted up, which refers both to the cross and to his glory and exaltation. ‘For God so loved the world’ and the cross is the measure of that love. The cross is not about wrath unleashed but love poured out.

And we know that the story does not end in humiliation. The cross is not just a place of suffering. It is the turning point of history. It is the moment when the King is revealed at the perfect time and in the perfect way —not in worldly power, but in sacrificial love. His throne is a cross. His crown is of thorns, and he reigns forever.

The cross is our landmark, our anchor, our hope.

At the cross we see the depth of God’s love—so deep that He gave his only Son for us.

At the cross we see the height of Christ’s glory—so high that every knee will bow before him.

So let us look to the cross—not as spectators, but as believers.  We must allow it to shape how we live. We are called to humility, to self-giving love, to obedience to God’s will. The cross calls us to trust—not in our own strength, but in the love of God revealed in Jesus.

To take up our cross is to walk the path of humility, to put others before ourselves, to live in sacrificial love. The world may see that as weakness. But at the foot of the cross, we know it is the way of Christ, the way of true life, in fact the perfect life, to be lived at the perfect time and in the perfect way. Amen.