Sermon for the Sunday before the Elevation of the Holy Cross

John 3:13–17

Today the Lord speaks to Nicodemus in the dark. Tomorrow we lift up the Cross in the middle of the church. Today we are told what the Cross means. Tomorrow we see it.

“As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.”

Israel was in the desert. Serpents came among them and their bite brought death. God told Moses to set a serpent of bronze on a pole. Anyone who had been bitten looked at it and lived.

So it is with Christ. He took our nature. He did not take our sin. He was lifted up in the form of a condemned man, and he was innocent.

In Greek, “lifted up” is the same word as tomorrow’s feast. The Elevation. Saint John chooses it on purpose. It means the Cross and it means glory, and for him the two are one. The Cross is the throne.

Tomorrow is not a day of mourning. Tomorrow we keep the finding of the Cross by Saint Helena, and the day it was raised high in front of the people so that all of them could see it and bow before it. That is what the feast is. The Cross is lifted up and the people venerate it.

And we do not call it an instrument of execution. We call it the life-giving Cross. The wood was made holy by the death of our God upon it. What men made for killing, God has made into a fountain of life.

Why? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son.” The Cross is not a price squeezed out of God. It is a gift, and love gave it. He did not send his Son to condemn the world but to save it.

Tomorrow we sing this. The Kontakion of the feast calls him the One who was lifted up on the Cross of his own will. It is the same word he speaks to Nicodemus today. And those three words carry the whole feast. Of his own will. Nobody took his life from him. He laid it down.

Now watch what happens to Nicodemus. He appears three times in this Gospel, and each time there is more light.

The first time is today. He comes at night with his questions.

The second time, his fellow rulers are moving against the Lord, and Nicodemus asks whether the law condemns a man without giving him a hearing. It is a small thing to say. They mock him for it and ask if he is a Galilean too. He does not press it. That is half light.

The third time is tomorrow. Tomorrow’s Gospel stops at the death of the Lord. A few verses later Nicodemus comes back. He comes in daylight, in front of everyone. He brings myrrh and aloes, a hundred pounds of it, and with Joseph he takes the body down and lays it in the tomb.

The man who came with his questions at night now holds the body of the Lord in the open. He had been told that the Son of Man must be lifted up. He is the one who lifts him down. Neither the night conversation nor the argument in the council made him brave. The Cross did.

So tomorrow we come. The priest lifts the Cross and sets it in the middle of the church, and we bow to the ground before it.

And we fast. A great feast and a strict fast on the same day. That is not a contradiction. We fast because the wood we come forward to kiss cost the blood of God.

And so we are all called to look. Look at him on the Cross and marvel. This is our Lord. He gave his own life so that we might gain eternal life in paradise. Amen.