Cross of Christ, Tree of Life: Homily for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

My dear brothers and sisters in Our Lord Jesus Christ; the reading from the book of Numbers, about the placing of the serpent on the cross never made any sense to me for the longest time. We cannot possibly be saying that Our Lord was like the serpent? Why would the people of Israel look upon the serpent in the same way that they looked, and still look, upon Our Lord on the Cross?

To resolve this conundrum St. Gregory of Nazianzus came to the rescue and explains:

That brazen serpent was hung up as a remedy for the biting serpents, not as a type of him that suffered for us but as a contrast. It saved those that looked upon it, not because they believed it to live but because it was killed, and killed with it were the powers that were subject to it, being destroyed as it deserved.

To repeat the point, the serpent is not representative of Our Lord, but a contrast. It was sin, and the sinful body of man, that was pinned to the Cross. The Son of Man survived the Cross becoming for us the cause of our redemption.

Think of the words of the angels on the Sunday of the Resurrection to Mary Magdalene:

 He is not here; he has risen, just as he said (Mt 28: 6).

Indeed, He is no longer on the Cross, for through His Passion, Our Lord nailed sin to the cross, and released us from the ancient curse, so that, as on Easter, we can say:

My soul like a bird, has escaped from the snare of the hunter (Ps. 124:7).

In other words, through His sorrowful Passion, Our Lord demonstrated that the Cross is the tool through which we too can purge our sinful bodies. The Cross is exalted today, on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, because it is the remedy for the children of those who suffered the bitterness of being expelled from the garden.

And yet, despite recognizing this fact in principle, too often our behaviour is like those of our spiritual ancestors, the sinful people of Israel, who in their relationship to God

flattered him with their mouths
and lied to him with their tongues,
Though their hearts were not steadfast toward him,
nor were they faithful to his covenant.

Too often, the Cross is not exalted, it is most certainly not the raison d’etre of our lives, but simply an ornament, a decoration.

I will offer you a couple of examples. There have been times when priests are told: “Father, please make sure that the Mass is over by x time, because xxxx have to go to work.”

Behold, brothers and sisters, the exaltation not of the Cross, but of time, and work!

Now the Mass is not long because the priest offers long homilies. It gets lengthened because one takes time with the prayers, so that they are enunciated properly, and make sense to those who may hear them. They are slow, above all, because many of the prayers of the Mass are directed toward God. Could my conversation, could our conversation, with God be rushed?

There is also a complaint that the Mass is lengthened when we use the first Eucharistic canon, which, as you will see today, contains the names of a number of saints. “What does he take the long prayer,” we grumble when we hear this particular Eucharistic prayer. The counter-question that could be posed would be, why are we in such a rush to get the Mass over and done with? Is the Mass such a chore that we want it to be done in as short a time as possible? When we come to Mass, do we realise that we are here to exalt the Master of the Cross? If so, should we not crave to spend as much time with Him as possible?

Moreover, it would be worthwhile remembering that many of the names of the saints in the Eucharistic canon are those who like Our Lord embraced their cross and shed their blood, not just for Our Lord, but for us. It behooves us, therefore, to be faithful to, and cherish their memory!

Indeed, too often, the Mass has become the place where it is not the Master of the Cross that is exalted, but the community, or worse the priest! The community exalts itself by preferring forms of worship that affirm itself – we prefer happy-clappy songs that make us feel good, that raise our spirits, rather than help us contemplate the state of our relationship with Our Lord. Too often, we make the Mass about the rhetorical capacities of the priest, rather than his faithfulness to the rubrics. Too often more time is spent on a well-delivered homily, so that the rest of the Mass, and particularly the canon, the Eucharistic prayer, is rushed through. Too often, we spend more time in thanking the members of the community who have helped in the organization of the Mass, rather than in the Mass itself.

The feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross offers us an opportunity to pause, and to ask ourselves, who, or what, is it that I am exalting in my life? Is it Our Lord, the author of life, who made the Cross the Tree of Life? Or is it the wiles of the serpent who continues to slither among us and drag us bodily into the pits of hell?

Adoramus te, Christe, et benedicimus tibi,

quia per sanctam crucem tuam redemisti mundum

We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you,

because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world!

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the parish church of Our Lady of the Immacualate Conception, Pangim on 14 September 2026.)

Forgiveness from the Heart: Homily for the Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

We contemplate forgiveness this Sunday. Despite being one of the words most bandied about by Catholics, forgiveness is something that is particularly difficult to understand, because even though we wish to forgive, what do we do with the hurt that we feel when we are wronged, and the anger that boils up in our hearts when we think of that wrong?

To understand forgiveness, it is best to understand the basic formula of Catholicism: place God above all things. We cannot, we simply cannot, understand, and set right, our relationship with our brother, if we do not first understand, and set right things with, with God. Address God, first and all things will then flow aright.

In the case of forgiveness, we need to first understand that God forgave us first and it is this forgiveness that we imitate in our attempts to forgive our brothers. The great St. John Chrysostum teaches us:

He created us from nothing; he made the whole visible world for us, the heaven, the sea, the earth, animals, plants and seeds. I must be brief because of the infinite number of his works. Into us alone of all that are on earth he breathed a living soul. He planted a garden for us. He gave us a helpmate and set us over all the brute species, and he crowned us with glory and honor.

And yet, after all of this, after the Creator of all things allowed us the privilege to walk with him in the garden of paradise, what did man do? He disobeyed God and ruptured the relationship between God and man.

My dear brothers and sisters, from our own lives we all know that when trust is broken, it is very difficult to restore it. Look at those who live unchristian lives, a betrayal is very often the reason for them to swear a lifelong enmity. They look to destroy that person in any, and every, way they can. In such a context, if God had been like us, our punishment ought to have been the punishment intended for the servant in the Gospel:

a debtor was brought before him who owed him a huge amount. 
Since he had no way of paying it back,
his master ordered him to be sold,
along with his wife, his children, and all his property,
in payment of the debt.

We are in the debt of anyone who does good to us, and woe to us if we bite the hand that has fed us. And it was the hand of God that our first parents struck in their original sin!

And yet, Chrysostom points out:

when humanity turned out ungrateful toward its benefactor, he thought us worthy of an even greater gift—forgiveness.

Commenting on the Gospel today, St. Augustine points out that Our Lord’s reference to seventy times is not without significance, for in his gospel St. Luke enumerates seventy-seven generations between Our Lord, and Adam, our first father and the originator of sin. It was this original sin that Our Lord came to redeem us from, and thus, when He redeemed this sin, he redeemed seventy-seven generations!

It is to this perfection, then, that Our Lord Our Lord exhorts us:

Be perfect, … as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Mt. 5: 48)

He is asking us to be like Him, imitate Him. And this is precisely the point of the parable we read about in the Gospel today. The king who forgives the debt is a reference to God who forgives us our sins. Chrysostom once again points out that we should observe how generous God is; the servant asked only for an extension of time, but the king gave him more than he asked for, remission and forgiveness of the entire debt.

But none of this helps us to understand how we should forgive. Perhaps I can offer an example from my own life. I have been grievously wounded by a couple of people. When I think about it, my heart boils over with anger. I contemplate words I will say, to cut them down, or simply to defend, or protect, myself. Forgive them I want to, but my heart cannot fathom how to do so!

And then, the other day, at confession, the words of the confessor, “pray for them” trickled into my heart. While kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament I realized that whenever the angry thoughts related to these men come into my heart, I must stop immediately and pray, both for them, and myself. The words I use, and often recommend to penitents who come to me, are the second half of the Hail Mary:

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

Pray for us sinners,

Now, and at the hour of our death,

Amen. 

And it does not have to be this prayer. Think of the words of Our Lord, when He was pinned in agony to the Cross:

      “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Lk 23:24)

For in truth, we do not know what we are doing when we hurt and wound someone through sin. We are casting our own mortal soul in danger of eternal fire if we do not repent.

The point of these prayers, is to plough our heart, repeating them over and over, so that eventually, whenever the anger bubbles up, it will automatically become a prompt to pray for that person, and ourselves. At that time, we will be able to say, I have forgiven him from my heart. 

May Our Lord grant us the grace to forgive our brother from our heart.

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

Pray for us sinners,

Now, and at the hour of our death,

Amen.  

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the parish church of Our Lady of the Rosary, Caranzalem.)

(Image reference: Our Lady of Sorrows, A. Lusson & L. Lefèvre, 1874 (?), Church of St. Laurent, Parish.)