14/09/2008 - Exaltation of the Cross
- Year A
Ist. Reading Num 21, 4-9 Psalm 77 2nd. Reading Fil 2,6-11 Gospel Gv
3,13-17
"With the Father and the Son he is glorified and adored". It is the Holy Spirit that receives adoration and glory when we adore the Father and the Son! The Holy Spirit is God together with the Father and with the Son, he cannot be separate from neither one: he acts with them and with them he receives our obbedience and our love. We adore the Father and adore Jesus. Today the word adore is used often in a wrong way to express a love towards a person or a hobby or a gratifying habit. We as christians, use it only to express a particular attitude of obbedience, love and veneration that are due only to God. All the Church adores the Holy Spirit and invokes him so that he comes to fill our hearts and move our minds towards goodness, mercy, temperance and sobreity, and make us listeners of the words of the Son of God and to do the Father's will that is shown to us through him. To adore God we dont use only words of praise and blessing, but also gestures like bowing of our heads and genuflections or prostrations. But we need to be careful that these expressions are accompanied by a new life, directed to the teachings of the Lord, eitherwise we are worst than pharisees whom Jesus use to reprove. We adore God "in spirit and truth": spirit is our breath, and truth is the manifestation and the revelation of the hidden God. To adore him "in spirit and truth" is equal as to live in a way of manifesting the love of God with the continuation of our breath, with all our being! When we adore the Father and the Son we do it thanks to the Holy Spirit who is in us, and hence receive the glory when we let him change us in love! We often pray: "Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit"! It is a prayer that doesnt only unite in our hearts the three divine Persons, but also make us aware that our thoughts and deeds are to reveal the faithful love of each and every divine Person and their trinitarian comunion!
Today we celebrate the Exaltation of the Holy Cross: we are reminded of the
Dedication of the Basilicas built by Constantine in Jerusalem on Calvary and
the Holy Sepulcre on September 13, 335 and the feast that was celebrated the
following day with the showing of the relic of the cross of Jesus. On this same
day, in the year 628, emperor Heraclitus overthrown the Persians, recovering
the same relics that these had taken away, by bringing them back to Jerusalem.
Today's liturgy make us pray:"God our Father,
in obedience to you your only Son accepted death on the Cross for the salvation
of mankind.
We acknowledge the mystery of the Cross on earth. May we receive the gift of
redemption in heaven.
We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with
you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever". This prayer has its
origin in biblical texts that are proposed to us today. The cross is called
"a tree", image of the tree in the garden where Adam was created,
the tree that Adam didnt respected. Of that tree, "of knowledge of good
and evil", Adam was not "to eat", because only God knows what
is good and what is evil for us. Eating of that tree meant disobbeying God,
holding oneself as more wise and more intelligent and good than God himself!
Another kind of tree is also the pole raised by Moses in the desert, a tree
from which the Israelites, biten by poisons snakes, received healing and salvation.
On this pole there was a brass snake, figure of Jesus the Christ, who was to
be on the tree of the cross in a way as to be liken to a "worm and not
man". "Whoever believes in him" says Jesus, will have "eternal
life": who looks at the cross sees the fulness of the love of the Father,
that love that wants to save the world.
Who looks at Jesus on the cross is questioned and challenge to give an answer.
<You accept to be loved, and that loving you cost so much? If you accept
this love, would you not imitate it? Even you to really love are called to die!
Do you believe that your life can be beautiful is satisfy your selfishness,
that life gives you joy if you do whatever you life? That which pleases you,
betrays you, and leaves an emptiness in your heart. Love as I love you!>
Look at Jesus on the cross, and the poison of the ancient serpent, the one who
seduced Adam and Eve and guided them to reject the Word of God, it wont hurt
you anymore. Look with love to the cross of Jesus, do not be ashamed ot it,
neither of the one you carry around your neck, nor of the one you keep at home,
or the one you see in hospital wards or at an angle of the road. Look with love
to the love of Jesus, and you are to find the strength to love even when to
love mean to begin to love. To climb the cross Jesus humbled himself to the
extreme. To look at the cross with love means to participate in the way God
sees the Son whom he wants to exhalt and give the most beautiful name which
is above every other name. The name of Jesus, says the apostle Paul, is worthy
to be adored by all being, men and angels: all bend their knee before his divinity.
Of him we say that he is "the Lord", the greek translation of the
hebrew name of God. On the cross he fulfilled the mission of living in the flesh
the fulness of the love of God. To look at the cross with love means therefore
to exhalt Jesus, confessing that he is God, and offer oneself to live also in
the flesh the love same love with humility and trust.