Published: September 14, 2026
Today the Church celebrates the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, a feast that asks us to do something countercultural: to look directly at an instrument of execution and call it glorious. The Gospel for this feast comes from John's account of Jesus speaking with Nicodemus, a Pharisee who came to him under cover of night, unsure how to reconcile what he was seeing with what he had always believed. In that quiet, searching conversation, Jesus offers one of the most compact and profound statements of the entire Christian faith, tying together the mystery of his identity, the meaning of his death, and the depth of God's love for the world.
Jesus begins by pointing back to a strange episode from the Old Testament, one that forms the first reading for today's Mass. The Israelites, wandering in the desert and complaining bitterly against God and Moses, were afflicted by venomous serpents. When the people repented, God did not simply remove the serpents. Instead, he instructed Moses to mount a bronze serpent on a pole, so that anyone who looked upon it would live. It is a strange remedy, healing that comes not by avoiding the source of suffering but by gazing directly at its image, lifted up before the whole camp. Jesus takes this ancient story and reveals it as a foreshadowing of himself. Just as the serpent was lifted up in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. The cross, in other words, is not a footnote to the story of salvation. It is the very shape that salvation takes.
This is worth sitting with, because it runs against every instinct we have about strength and victory. We tend to imagine that God's power would look like triumph in the obvious sense: an army arriving to rescue the oppressed, a king ascending a throne, a display of force that ends every possibility of doubt. Instead, the Gospel tells us that the decisive revelation of God's power and love came in the form of a condemned man on a cross, arms outstretched, life poured out. The exaltation of the cross is not despite its humiliation but somehow through it. What looked like the ultimate defeat became, in God's hands, the ultimate act of love. This is a pattern the Church invites us to trust even when our own lives do not look like victory. Suffering, weakness, and even public shame are not necessarily signs that God has abandoned the story. They can be, mysteriously, the very place where his glory is most fully revealed.
The heart of the passage, though, is not really about pain. It is about motive. Jesus does not say that God sent his Son to prove a point, or to satisfy an abstract requirement, or to make a display of power. He says, plainly, that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. Every step that follows in the story of the cross flows from this single sentence. The desert healing, the lifting up, the outstretched arms: all of it is explained by love, and love alone. This matters because it is easy, especially for those who have grown up around religious language, to hear the story of the cross as primarily a story about justice, punishment, or debt. Those categories are not absent from Christian theology, but John does not lead with them here. He leads with love, and he insists that the purpose of the Son's coming was never condemnation. Jesus says so explicitly: God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. If we walk away from this Gospel with anything, it should be this: the cross was never meant to make us afraid of God. It was meant to reveal how far God was willing to go to save us.
There is something deeply practical in this for anyone trying to live a Christian life today. Most of us carry around some quiet fear that our failures, our sins, or our suffering disqualify us from God's attention, or worse, invite his judgment. The Exaltation of the Holy Cross stands as a direct answer to that fear. The cross is lifted up precisely for people who feel bitten by the serpents of their own choices, wandering and complaining in their own deserts, unsure whether healing is even possible for them. The Israelites were not told to fix themselves before they could be healed. They were told to look. That same invitation extends to us. Faith, in this Gospel, is less about achieving moral perfection and more about the willingness to turn our gaze toward the cross and trust that what we see there is love, not condemnation.
This feast also asks something of how we treat the crosses we encounter in our own lives and in the lives of others. If the cross truly is the place where God's love is most visible, then the sufferings we carry, and the sufferings we witness in the people around us, are not simply obstacles to be endured until real life resumes. They can become places of encounter with God, points where grace enters precisely because something has been broken open. This does not mean we should seek out suffering or romanticize pain. It means we can bring our hardest moments to prayer without shame, trusting that the same God who did not turn away from the cross will not turn away from us in our own difficulties.
Practically, this Gospel invites a simple daily practice: when we feel the weight of guilt, anxiety, or hardship, we can imitate the Israelites in the desert and simply look. Looking at a crucifix, pausing before it rather than past it, is itself a quiet act of faith. It is an acknowledgment that healing does not come from pretending our wounds do not exist, but from trusting the God who was willing to be wounded for us. On this feast, the Church does not ask us to admire the cross from a safe distance. She asks us to exalt it, to lift it high in our hearts as the truest sign we have of how deeply, and how personally, we are loved.