Even to Death on a Cross

+ In the Name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.

We celebrate this morning the feast of the Holy Cross. As you can see in more detail in the missalettes, this feast commemorates the building of a Christian church over the site of Jesus’s crucifixion (and of his resurrection), in the holy city of Jerusalem. In thinking about this morning’s lesson, from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, I was conscious of the fact that several things I felt I should say were things that you may have heard me say before. But I finally decided that that repetition was inevitable, because the passage deals with such basic issues in Christianity. With the feast of the Holy Cross, as with the greater holidays like Christmas and Easter, preaching naturally refocuses on the central parts of the Christian faith: for nothing is more central to Christianity than the cross.

The lesson today is interesting just from a historical point of view, because in it St. Paul quotes from what must have been a Christian hymn—it’s not so obvious in English, but the experts agree that it is poetry in the original Greek. Paul is apparently writing this letter sometime about a dozen years after Jesus’s death, and if the hymn was already well known enough for Paul to quote it, it must be at least a few years earlier than Paul’s letter—so it gives us a very early picture of what Christians wanted to say about Jesus. And it turns out that what they wanted to say most was "Jesus Christ is Lord." In fact, the hymn which Paul quotes pictures all creation saying that: "every tongue," the hymn says, will "confess that ‘Jesus Christ is Lord,’ to the glory of God the Father."

For the author of the hymn, this declaration that "Jesus Christ is Lord" comes as the end of a two part process. When the first part of the process begins, we see Jesus as the equal of God. But then Jesus voluntarily empties himself, gives up his equality with God, and becomes a human being. This is a descent, a moving down from equality with God. It is a humble and obedient action for Jesus to take, and he follows it out to its logical conclusion, to the point of dying: nothing could be farther from God than to be a dead human being. Then, in the second part of the process, God raises Jesus—not only raises him from the dead, but lifts him back up to the equality he once enjoyed. And at the last stage of the process, as a final reward, God gives Jesus "the Name which is above all other names."

Now, for the author of the hymn, the Name which is above all other names is "Lord." This seems odd to us, because we think of "lord" as a title, rather than a name, and so, in fact, did St. Paul and the person who wrote the hymn. But Paul and the hymn-writer took over from Christianity’s Jewish heritage the idea that God has a personal name, represented by the four letters YHWH, and that that name is too holy ever to be pronounced. In fact, in Judaism, even the high priest only pronounced that four letter personal name of God once a year. So when ordinary Jewish people came to a place in scripture or in a prayer where God’s personal name occurred, they said the word for ‘lord’ instead—‘adonai’ in Hebrew, ‘kyrios’ in Greek. Thus when the hymn writer says, God has given Jesus the name ‘Lord,’ what he means is that God has confirmed Jesus’s equality with God by giving Jesus the four letter personal name of God as his own new name. This is what it means to say that "Jesus Christ is Lord"—that we can point to the man Jesus and properly address him with the sacred personal name of God.

Now, as I said, Saint Paul quotes this hymn as he writes to the Philippians about humility. But, the poetry experts say, Paul makes one addition to the hymn. The hymn writer had made a neat package about Jesus coming down to the point of death and then being raised up to universal glory. But Paul points out it wasn’t just any death: it was death on a cross. It was death on the Roman equivalent of the firing squad, the hangman’s noose, the gas chamber or the electric chair, death as disgraceful and painful as the Romans could imagine, death that could not be inflicted on Paul himself because he, unlike Jesus, was a Roman citizen.

So the real force of this lesson, then, read on this day, this day that celebrates the Empress Saint Helena discovering the Cross and her son Constantine building a magnificent church on the place of the crucifixion—the message is that this symbol we put on our buildings and our jewelry, that we mark on the brows of baptized babies and the crowns of kings, is not in itself either beautiful or glorious, but rather represents the pain and torture that God himself underwent for our salvation. It is only by his power that this symbol of shameful death becomes the sign of our hope for eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom be honor and glory, both now and forever. Amen.

--John Wm. Houghton