Homily: Crossing Bridges

Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 24 / Sunday - Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross

Readings: Numbers 21.4b-9 / Responsorial Psalm:  78 (R/v 7b) / Philippians 2.6-11 / John 3.13-17

Crossing bridges. Crossing bridges is what my friend Joshua does when he visits a city. In San Francisco, he walked across the Golden Gate Bridge. In Sydney, he walked across the Sydney Harbor Bridge. As a Singaporean, he likes walking across the Helix Bridge now and again to look at the city's skyline afresh. 

Crossing bridges helps him to appreciate the city from different perspectives. More importantly, this is how he bridges the space that separates a city into two. Sometimes, it is a river that divides. Other times, it is a bay. However, a city is divided what matters most to him is being about to cross over, to bridge the space and to experience what the other side has to offer.

I’d like to propose that bridging—this action of overcoming division—can help us better appreciate what we are celebrating in today’s Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. 

Today we are being invited to remember, to celebrate and to believe in the truth of God’s greatest work: the defeat of death and the opening of heaven’s doors as God's saving love that assures us of our eternal life. What we should be delighting in is the Cross as the glory of God’s saving love for us. 

This is how our reading from John’s gospel expresses this truth: God so loved the world that he gave Jesus, his only Son, so that all might be saved. And as Paul reminds us in our second reading, Jesus saved by humbling himself, like a slave, to become obedient even to death on a cross. This is why we can proclaim “By your holy Cross, Jesus, you have redeemed the world” when we pray the Stations of the Cross in Lent and on Good Friday. Yes, it is by Jesus’ Cross that you and I are saved to be with God eternally. 

But you and I do not just know this love of God as a religious truth or a historical event. We know it as the lived experience we have of God’s saving love in our everydayness. We recognize it whenever we are forgiven for our mistakes. We feel it whenever someone shows us mercy and lifts us up. And we live it whenever the second chances we are blessed with allow us to live life more fully and more happily. Yes, God’s love continues to save us daily. This is the same kind of love that saved on the Cross—God’s love that saves without reservation against anyone’s sinfulness; God’s love that is always confident of the goodness each one is for salvation. 

I’d like to suggest that we are able to experience this love of God in our lives because God has bridged heaven and earth through, in and with Jesus’ Cross. And the grace of this divine bridging has dramatically altered how humankind lives, not only for a future hoped for but even now. All of us are already living as God’s redeemed people, raised up with Jesus through the Cross to exaltation, that is, into the joyfulness of being one with God. 

As people of faith, this divine bridging provides us certain hope: God’s sure and saving presence has not only entered into our lives but through Jesus God has indeed come to be with us to the end of time. Yes, God is never going to leave us alone. 

Our gospel reading provides us an important clue to understand how the Cross can proclaim the goodness of God’s bridging in and for our lives. We find this clue in Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus; it is the vocabulary of spatial dimensions of how God and humankind interact in Jesus. 

Jesus speaks of “up” and “down”: of how humankind can go up to heaven only because Jesus has come down to earth so that all who believe in him will be lifted into eternal life. “Up” and “down” are words that capture the contradictions in Christian life and faith. We can substitute this pair of words with other pairs like “right” and “wrong”, “faith-filled” and “doubtful”, “kindness” and “selfishness”, “free for God” and “enslaved to sin”. All of them describe in one way or another the struggles we have in living the Christian life well.

Today, we are reminded that the space of contradictions between these opposites, between up and down, heaven and earth, divinity and humanity, the hope of salvation and the despair of sinfulness in our lives is closed by Jesus’ obedience, self-emptying, and fidelity to God’s love that saves. The Cross of Jesus overcomes these contradictions, bridges this space and raises us into the delightful union with God. This is how God saves through the Cross.

Meditating on the mystery of the Cross should draw us more fully into God’s saving and life-giving embrace both now and always. But this delight, this exaltation of the Cross in and for our lives, cannot be simply for us to just see and know, to just receive and experience. God hardly means for us treasure this joy only for our self-gratification, our self-possession, our self-righteousness. 

Rather, the exaltation we find when meditating on the Cross should be the treasure trove of a joy that challenges us to action. This joy, I believe, asks you and me to commit ourselves to authentic action for God: we should not only want to also bridge the divide as God did but to do this more freely and more intentionally. Only then can our efforts to bridge our distance from God be more sincere and more wholehearted. Then, as we bridge the space between God and us, between life and death, between being saved or perishing, we can begin to appreciate the depth of our belief in God. How much do we really believe?

I'd like to suggest that we will not find our answers in a theological treatise or a dogma or a catechism teaching, and yes, not even in this homily by this priest. Instead, each of us will discover the depth of our belief in that simpler, humbler, more human act of faith we always do, now and again: when we make the sign of the cross. The words "up" and "down" in this morning’s gospel point to heaven and earth, which we tend to think of as places. But the mystery of the Cross that we celebrate today challenges us to move us beyond the notion of place to relationship, choice, belief, and salvation.

For isn’t each moment that we sign ourselves in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit about entering into relationship with God? Aren't these moments of signing the Cross also choosing again and again to confess to ourselves and to the world that we are Christian? Isn't each moment that we sign ourselves also a proclamation of    the truth we believe in--that in the Cross God saves us because God loves us? And don't we remember with hope as we sign ourselves in the name of the Father and the of the Son and of the Holy Spirit that God destines us for salvation, for the delight of communing with us, no matter how much we struggle with sin?  

Perhaps, we know the depth of our belief best when we experience that very palpable shift in our consciousness each time that we sign ourselves: we find ourselves crossing over into the divine, of bridging the human world with its many distractions and entering more fully into God’s presence, no matter for how long or short this might be? 

If your answer to each of these questions is “yes,” then shall we not take the way of the Cross? This same way that God has crossed into our time and bridged into our space so as to save and lift us up into the fullness of God’s life and love.  

Perhaps, if we can be as determined as Joshua is in crossing the bridges and overcoming the divide in each city he visits, you and I might discover that when we do the same for God, we can begin to really savour what more God has to offer us on the other side, not just eternally but here and now joyfully. All we need to do it is to make that choice for God and to cross over our spiritual bridge to God today. 

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore

photo: from Corbis (Internet)