Exaltation of the Holy Cross

September 14 is not Good Friday observed again. Good Friday is the Passion, without the Gloria, without the Eucharist consecrated that day, with the Church standing at the Cross in sorrow and intercession. This feast is the exaltation: the Cross lifted up as the instrument of victory, the throne of the King, the sign by which the world is judged and saved. John’s Jesus says it before he dies: when I am lifted up I will draw all people to myself. The feast takes that sentence at its word.

The date is historical. In 335 the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built by Constantine over the places of the crucifixion and the tomb, was dedicated in Jerusalem. The dedication was kept on September 13 and 14, and with it the veneration of the wood of the Cross that Helena’s generation believed had been found there. Two centuries later the Persians took the relic. The emperor Heraclius recovered it in the campaign that ended in 628–630, and the restoration of the Cross to Jerusalem was joined to this same September date. Legend embroidered the return: Heraclius, gorgeously dressed, could not carry the Cross until he put on the poverty of Christ. The liturgy does not need the legend. It needs the fact the Church has kept: this is the day the Cross is lifted up, not only mourned.

The feast spread from Jerusalem to Rome and then to the whole Latin Church. It is a feast of the Lord, in red, with the Gloria. The color is the color of the Passion and of the martyrs, used here in triumph rather than in the bareness of Good Friday. If September 14 falls on a Sunday, the feast replaces the Sunday of Ordinary Time. It is not a holy day of obligation. The preface of the Holy Cross, or the preface of the victory of the Cross, says that the tree of man’s defeat became the tree of his redemption.

The readings make the theology unavoidable. Numbers 21: Moses lifts up the bronze serpent, and whoever looks at it lives. John 3: Jesus applies the image to himself. The Son of Man must be lifted up, so that everyone who believes may have eternal life. Philippians 2 is the other pole: he emptied himself, became obedient unto death, even death on a cross, and therefore God exalted him. Exaltation in the feast’s title is not applause for an object. It is the name of what the Father did with the Crucified.

The Gospel is John 3:13–17, the bronze serpent and the gift of the Son, or the Passion according to John when the rubrics of a particular year so provide. Parishes may expose a cross for veneration in a way that echoes Good Friday without repeating Good Friday’s liturgy. The day is still a feast, with Gloria and with the Eucharist. A common mistake is to make September 14 gloomy because the vestments are red. The Missal is celebrating a triumph.