CELEBRATE SUNDAY
WITH ST. MARY'S
EXALTATION OF THE CROSS
Venerate the vessels of our salvation.
EXALTATION OF THE CROSS
God desires for us to know Him, love Him, and serve Him. But as human beings, we are physical creatures who communicate with the faculties given to us by our Creator. We speak to one another and listen to one another through our senses, and because of this, God began to speak to us through those same physical senses as soon as He began His relationship with us. This ultimately culminated in the Incarnation of our Lord, Jesus Christ, but even Jesus used the things of this world to make his presence known, to speak to us, and to eventually offer us salvation. On this Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, we remember those vessels of salvation used by God; though they were not divine in themselves, they were used by our Lord so that we can come to best understand Him.
READ THIS SUNDAY'S MESSAGE
In this Sunday’s first reading, the Israelites have grown frustrated with the difficulty of life in the desert. They complain that there is no food, until they admit they are disgusted with the “wretched food”–the Manna from Heaven. As a result, they were punished with bites from venomous snakes. When the people repent, God does not take the serpents away, but rather shows that looking at the snake formed by Moses will heal them. Later on, a jar of Manna was taken and stored in what would become the Ark of the Covenant, along with the tablets of the Law and Aaron’s staff. The Ark was God’s dwelling place on earth and was treated with absolute reverence, so much so that if one was to merely touch it, he would instantly die. But even the Israelites understood that the Ark was not God; it was rather an exalted vessel which He used to make His presence known to His people. Christ also chose vessels to communicate: instead of emerging victorious in battle against the Romans, he embraced the weapon with which he was put to death, thus making it worthy of veneration and symbolic of our faith. Now, every Christian denomination in the world utilizes the image of the cross in some way. Still, we understand that the symbol of our faith is not the God that we worship, but rather the method by which God communicates to us.
Upon a tree, we chose to abandon God. But on another tree, we were offered salvation. The serpent introduced death to us, but this symbol of death became a chance for us to inherit new life just as it was offered to the Israelites. We introduced suffering into the world, yet God deemed it acceptable that He would become one like us in all things but sin so that we might be delivered up from our fallen state. But his humanity was not symbolic; God’s entire divinity was found in the human person of Jesus Christ, and still he chose to become human through the physical world, through a vessel. As the Venerable Fulton Sheen says, “He who is God created the mother to make Him a man.” Through a woman, we fell to the serpent. But through another woman, we overcame the snare of the serpent by the work of her son. Mary was a human being. Yet like the Ark of the Covenant, she held the bread of life within her. She held the fullness of the Law and the High Priest within her womb. She was the dwelling place of God on earth. And along with the wood of the true cross, she became one of these sacred vessels that God chose to offer salvation through–a mere human being who is capable of becoming a vehicle for deliverance, just as we are now when we receive the body of Christ. By becoming the vessels of salvation, God exalts these humble things and they become worthy of veneration. Mary identified herself as such when she exclaimed: “he has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree.” Today, we celebrate the exaltation of lowly things. We remind ourselves that the symbol of our faith is not one of typical royal victory, but one of brutal death. Yet this vessel of death is exalted and becomes the vessel of salvation. God works miracles through the humblest of means. He did so with the Ark, with his own mother Mary, and especially with the wood of the cross. And on that wood hung the salvation of the world.
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