First reading: Num. 21:4b–9

With their patience worn out by the journey, the people complained against God and Moses, “Why have you brought us up from Egypt to die in this desert, where there is no food or water? We are disgusted with this wretched food!”

In punishment the LORD sent among the people saraph serpents, which bit the people so that many of them died. Then the people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned in complaining against the LORD and you. Pray the LORD to take the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people, and the LORD said to Moses, “Make a saraph and mount it on a pole, and if any who have been bitten look at it, they will live.” Moses accordingly made a bronze serpent and mounted it on a pole, and whenever anyone who had been bitten by a serpent looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.

Second reading: Phil. 2:6–11

Brothers and sisters: Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Gospel: Jn. 3:13–17

Jesus said to Nicodemus: “No one has gone up to heaven except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

In other words

by Fr. Raul G. Caga, SVD (Sacred Heart Parish Shrine, Kamuning, Quezon City)

There’s no better time for the exaltation of the cross than during the Easter Triduum. However, a separate feast arose as early as in the fourth century when the original cross on which Jesus was crucified was excavated in 326 AD by a team led by St. Helena, the mother of the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine. Thus, the feast memorialized the first installation of the remnants of the true cross of Jesus in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher at Mount Calvary on September 14, 335 AD. After three centuries, though, the Persians invaded Jerusalem and plundered it of all valuables, including the relic of the Holy Cross. In 630 AD, Heraclius II defeated the Persians, recaptured the casket containing the holy relic, and reinstalled it in the rebuilt Church, but only to be destroyed again by the Muslims in 1009. Finally, in 1149, the Crusaders rebuilt it as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

This historical account shows how the symbol of the cross has become the universal image of Christian belief. Far from its original symbol of shame and punishment for criminals during the reign of the Roman empire, the cross is now a Christian symbol of God’s sacrificial love and redeeming mercy in Jesus. God chose the cross to be the instrument of salvation for all. As St. John writes in today’s Gospel, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”

The feast of the exaltation of the cross should, therefore, remind us that the way of the cross is the way of life. St. Paul speaks of this in the Second Reading where God, in his Son Jesus, emptied himself and abandoned as it were his Godhead and became one like us. The story of the cross began, in fact, not on the day of crucifixion but on the day of his incarnation, stripping himself of everything about Godhead and assuming our lowly and broken nature.

Hence, to exalt the cross is to embrace its hard and inconvenient truth—that it is only in dying that we gain eternal life. To exalt the cross is to exalt the way of sacrifice, forgiveness, solidarity, dialogue, self-donation, and love.