Take Your Cross to Jesus

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Today, the Church celebrates Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. We always lift up the Cross. We honour it. We put it in the centre of our churches and make the Sign of the Cross over ourselves every day. But the cross was actually an instrument of torture and shame. And yet Christians have looked at the Cross for centuries and called it holy. This feast goes back to the early Church in Jerusalem, when the Cross of Christ was solemnly lifted up for the faithful to venerate. But here is the important thing: we do not exalt suffering. We exalt the love that suffering could not defeat.

That helps us understand the story in the Book of Numbers. The Israelites are bitten by poisonous serpents, and God tells Moses to make a bronze serpent and raise it on a pole. Whoever looks at it lives. Think about that for a moment. God does not tell them to look away from the thing that wounded them. He tells them to look directly at it. And in the Gospel, Jesus takes that image and applies it to Himself: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” In other words, God does something extraordinary: He takes the place of pain and turns it into the place of healing.

And maybe that is what we sometimes misunderstand about Christianity. We often pray, “God, take this cross away. Fix this situation. Remove this pain.” And sometimes He does. But sometimes He does something deeper. Sometimes God does not remove the wound; He enters it. The Cross tells us that there is no place in our lives so painful, shameful, disappointing or broken that Jesus is unwilling to enter it. Betrayal? He knows it. Loneliness? He knows it. Rejection? He knows it. Grief? He knows it. Even the feeling of being abandoned by God? Jesus carried that too. The Cross does not give us an easy explanation for suffering. It gives us something better: a God who refuses to leave us alone in it.

And here is the thought that challenges me: we usually want resurrection without crucifixion. We want God to transform our lives, but we do not want Him touching the places that hurt. We hide our wounds, our failures, our regrets, sometimes even from God. But perhaps Jesus is saying today, “Look at Me. And then let Me look at the part of your life you keep looking away from.” Because the wound we surrender to Christ can become the very place where grace enters. The Cross was supposed to be the proof that Jesus had failed. Instead, God turned it into the sign of His victory. So perhaps the question is not simply, “How do I get rid of my cross?” Maybe the deeper question is: “Jesus, what could You do with this cross if I actually gave it to You?”

Prayer: Lord Jesus, Give me the courage to look at the places in my life I would rather avoid. Enter my wounds, my failures and my fears, and transform them by Your love. When I cannot understand my cross, help me to trust the One who carried His for me. May Your Cross become my hope, my strength and my way to life. Amen.

– Homily by Rev Fr Patrick Agbeko