Lift Him Up
It’s fitting that we celebrate the ancient Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross at this point in our week-by-week journey through Scripture.
Since Pentecost, the Sunday readings have been preparing us to recognize Jesus as the promised Messiah of Israel. As we’ll see forcefully next Sunday, the mystery of the Messiah is the mystery of the Cross.
Today’s Epistle introduces this mystery with beauty and solemnity: The mystery of the Cross is the mystery of Jesus come down from heaven to help us in the depths of our weakness, of His obedience even unto “death on a cross” to raise us up with Him to new life, to the exalted heights of the divine.
This theme of divine descent and human ascent – of God coming down to lift us up – continues in today’s Gospel. The passage is taken from the middle of Jesus’ famous conversation in the night with Nicodemus. Jesus has already told him how believers will be “born from above” by water and the Spirit (see John 3:4-7).
Now He is going to explain to this “teacher of Israel” (see John 3:10) how that new life will be given to us by God. He does this by interpreting the Scriptures, by revealing what today’s Psalm calls “mysteries from of old” by showing him the full divine meaning of an event in Israel’s history (see also Matthew 13:35).
In interpreting the Scripture used as today’s First Reading, He reveals for us, too, the life-giving power of His death and Resurrection: As Moses lifted up the serpent-rod in the desert, He will be lifted up on the Cross. And as the Israelites were healed by looking upon the rod that Moses raised, we will gain eternal life by seeing our Lord on the Cross and believing that from this humiliation will come His exaltation, that He will be raised from the grave, “lifted up from earth,” and draw each one of us with Him (see John 8:28 and 12:32).
