The Exaltation of the Holy Cross – Readings

(Note:When this feast is celebrated on a weekday, there is a choice of readings before the Gospel. If the feast falls on a Sunday, both readings are read.)

Commentary on Numbers 21:4-9; Philippians 2:6-11; John 3:13-17

The Gospel reading is from John. He compares Jesus’ being lifted up on the Cross to the incident in the Book of Numbers (one of today’s Readings), where a plague of serpents is sent against the Israelites because of their constant complaining against God. When they beg Moses for help, God tells him to put an image of a serpent on a pole. All those who look at the bronze serpent would be healed.

In a much more radical way, Jesus is also lifted up so:

…that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

And this life comes because Jesus’ giving of his life on the Cross is a sign of his Father’s love for each and every one of us. For, as Jesus will tell his disciples at the Last Supper:

No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. (John 15:13)

And in today’s reading he also says:

Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him.

The word “Exaltation” in the name of today’s feast means a ‘lifting up’, and in the Gospel of John, Jesus says that he, being “lifted up” will draw all peoples to himself. This ‘lifting up’ refers not only to Jesus’ being physically raised on the Cross. In John’s presentation of the Paschal Mystery, Jesus dies on the Cross, passes to new life (Resurrection), returns to the Father (Ascension), and breathes forth the Spirit (Pentecost). Jesus is totally ‘exalted’ on the Cross.

The Second Reading is from the Letter of Paul to the Philippians and contains the famous kenosis hymn about Jesus. Kenosis means an ‘emptying’. Jesus was the Incarnate Son of God and shared the divinity with his Father and the Spirit on an equal level. Yet, in order to bring us salvation and life without end, Jesus:

…emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.

He did this in service to us. He adopted our human condition totally and he even went lower than this by submitting to one of the most terrible forms of death, death by crucifixion. And all of this was to help us understand the extent of his Father’s love for each one of us.

Because of this self-giving and self-emptying:

Therefore God exalted him even more highly
and gave him the name
that is above every other name,
so that at the name given to Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

Hence, the Cross is a much esteemed symbol for Christians everywhere and a way by which they express their faith. We place a cross in our churches and homes, in the classrooms of our schools and in other Christian institutions. Many wear a cross as part of their dress.

We remember Jesus’ words to his followers:

…whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. (Matt 10:38-39)

As we often sing after the Consecration during the Eucharist:

Dying, you destroyed our death; rising you restored our life.

Read more

Tuesday of Week 5 of Lent – First Reading

Commentary on Numbers 21:4-9

Today, we see the Israelites on their long journey through the desert to the Promised Land. They are quite near their final goal. In their way stood the territory of Edom. In spite of requests to pass through without causing any trouble, they are turned down.

Moses, however, was determined not to engage Edom in battle, and the people became impatient with him and also with God for the direction in which they were being taken. They were full of confidence, having just won a victory over Arad, a territory lying between the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean. They forgot that their victory over Arad had been granted by the Lord in response to a solemn pledge to put a curse on the towns they attacked. But now they have forgotten what they had done with God’s help and were ready to rebel again.

As they make their way to the Sea of Suph, that is, towards the Gulf of Aqaba (at the southern tip of modern Israel) and skirt around Edom, they begin grumbling against God and Moses. They are finding life hard and wish they had never left the slavery of Egypt, which now seems better than what they are presently going through.

The focus of their complaints today is especially against the manna, the food that God provided them six days a week:

Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest “this miserable food”.

Their impatience leads them to blaspheme against Yahweh, to reject Moses and despise the “bread from heaven” (the manna). This was more serious than it might appear. By rejecting the food God was sending to them in abundance, they were rejecting God himself.

Their complaining about the tastelessness of the food represents a kind of tastelessness of their own, their ingratitude to God who fed them in the desert and prevented them from dying of hunger. Like the Israelites, thanksgiving to God for his blessings to us is often one of the prayers we make least often.

It is then that God sends a plague of poisonous serpents which kill many people. In Hebrew, they are called “poisonous [fiery] serpents” (saraph), from the burning effect of their poisonous bite (the word seraphim comes from the same root).

The people see this as a punishment from God for their grumbling:

We have sinned by speaking against the Lord…

They beg Moses to intercede with God on their behalf. God tells Moses to mount a bronze serpent on a pole, and says that anyone who is bitten and looks at it will live. And so it happened.

The significance of this reading is clearly in its being a foreshadowing of Christ on the cross. Later on Jesus will say:

And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. (John 3:14-15)

The serpent only healed people of the bite of a snake. Later, we are told in the Second Book of Kings that Hezekiah destroyed the bronze serpent which Moses had made because it had become an object of idolatry.

The life that Jesus gives from the cross is of a totally different kind. And that is what we prepare to celebrate as we come to the end of the Lenten season.

Read more