Feast day: September 14
The Exaltation of the Holy Cross
A feast of the Cross itself — the instrument of death turned into the tree of life — recalling the finding of the True Cross in Jerusalem and its recovery from Persia.
The feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, kept on September 14, glories in the Cross of Christ — the instrument of the most shameful of deaths transformed into the throne of the world's salvation and the tree of life. It is a feast not of mourning, as on Good Friday, but of triumph, lifting the Cross high as the sign of victory.
Its origins lie in Jerusalem. By tradition St. Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, discovered the True Cross during her pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the early fourth century, and the great basilica of the Holy Sepulchre was built and dedicated over the sites of Christ's death and Resurrection. The annual commemoration of that dedication, and of the Cross found there, grew into the feast.
It gained a second great memory three centuries later. The relic of the Cross had been carried off as plunder by the Persians, and when the Emperor Heraclius defeated them and recovered it, he bore it back in triumph to Jerusalem in 629. The story tells that he could not lift the Cross while robed in his imperial splendor, and could carry it only after he laid aside his crown and purple — a parable of the humility the Cross demands.
The feast teaches the central paradox of the faith: that life comes through death, and glory through humiliation. As the ancient liturgy sings, 'We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world' — and the Church holds up before the nations the wood on which, it believes, the world was saved.
What was the cruelest of Roman executions the Church now lifts up in triumph: the Cross, by which, Christians believe, the world was saved.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/04529a.htm
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