Sermon by the Revd Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff for the Veneration of the Holy Cross, September 13, 2026

In the name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Amen.

On this feast of the Holy Cross, the Church calls us to behold not simply an instrument of Roman punishment, but the great sign of Christ's victory, the place where shame becomes glory, death becomes life, and the apparent defeat of the Son becomes the judgment of the world.

In short, the great mystery of the incarnation, and of course, the profundity of the cross, the sacrifice of Christ, and our salvation all meet here.

The feast is traditionally associated with the discovery of the relics of the cross by St.

Helena, an English woman who was the mother of Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.

So the story goes, she travelled to Jerusalem in search of the holy places connected with the life and passion of Christ, and according, as it is delicately put, to ancient church tradition, the cross was then found near Calvary, at a place that had long been obscured beneath a pagan building.

The circumstances in their exact detail belong, as I say, to the devotional memory of the church, one might say, but the feast is central, and the claim is not antiquarian.

The cross, which the world had meant for degradation, was revealed, after all, as the throne, essentially, of the crucified king.

The wood of death becomes the tree of life.

That is why the church does not celebrate the cross because suffering is, for example, good in itself, or because cruelty can be sanctified.

We celebrate it because Christ entered into suffering, injustice, shame, and death, all the features of the world and our lives as human beings, and has made them the place of his redemptive self-giving.

The cross is not an ornament added to Christianity after the fact, it is the form which divine love took within the world of salvational transformation.

As we turn to Philippians and John, the two lessons that we have heard, taken together, as we indeed have just heard them, they constitute a remarkable remarkable, concise yet powerful Christological unity.

They present the sun self-emptying as the decisive point at which the cosmos itself stood judged, the prince of this world was cast out, and the light draws to himself those who will walk in him.

The second chapter of St.

Paul's Epistle to the Philippians is both the theological and ethical center of the entire epistle.

It joins together a summons to unity in the church, and one of the New Testament's most consequential portrayals of Christ.

Paul is writing to a congregation living in a Roman colony.

The Philippi, Christians there, face pressures from the outside and evidently strains from within their community, rivalry, ambition, status consciousness, and the temptation to seek one's own advancement over the good of the community.

Therefore, when Paul tells them to do nothing through strife or vainglory, he's not simply urging them to be agreeable, nor is he giving a generic lesson in modest manners, as one might say.

He's grounding rather a distinctive communal polity, an entire way of life, in the narrative of Christ's self-giving and vindication.

That in a way is important, but in another way the least of what he's telling us.

The apostle sets before the church not a detached abstraction, though, and that is an important aspect, but as he puts it, a mind.

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.

Now then follows, in verses 6 to 11, what scholars frequently call the Carmen Christi, the Christ Hymn, which many have thought to be a pre-Paulite liturgical composition, perhaps adapted by St.

Paul.

But whatever the ins and outs, this hymn is central to his theological project.

He does not introduce it as a speculative account of the relation of the Son to the Father, important though that account is, he introduces it as the ground and pattern also of the congregation's shared life.

The church is to learn its common mind from the mind of Christ.

The text traces a descent, that is, also a disclosure.

Christ Jesus, being in the form of God, does not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, seized, or exploited.

Instead, he made himself of no reputation, taking the form of a servant, being found in human likeness.

He humbles himself and becomes obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

And then there comes a great reversal.

Wherefore, God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus is Lord in the glory of God, God the Father.

There's an immense theological sequence here.

The one who is in the form of God takes the form of a servant, the one who possesses equality with God, participates in the divine, that is, chooses not self-assertion, but obedience, self-emptying.

The one who enters the utmost depth of humiliation, is, however, also exalted thereby as universal Lord.

And the cross is the hinge of all this.

Greek scholars of the passage rightly give particular attention to one word among each of those.

Morphe for.

Christ is said to be in the morphe, a form of God.

He then takes the morphe of a servant.

The parallel is not accidental.

It tells us something about the reality of the one who descends, and the reality of what he assumes.

Sir John Chrysostom, preaching against the Christological confusions of his own age, insists that the parallel must be understood ontologically, that is to say, as a statement about what is real, not merely what appears upon the surface.

The form of a servant, he says, means man by nature.

Therefore, the form of God means God by nature.

Thus the servanthood is true servanthood, the humanity is true humanity, and the Godhead is true Godhead.

Now that is a lot to ponder and pull together.

But the same logic governs our own Anglican confession in the articles of religion, the 39 articles.

They declare that the Son, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took man's nature in the womb of the Blessed Virgin of the S.

Thus two whole and perfect natures, that is to say, the Godhead and the manhood, were joined together in one person, never to be divided.

This is no dry metaphysical refinement.

It actually protects the whole gospel itself.

For if Christ were not truly God, then his victory over sin and death would not be the victory of God Himself.

If he were not truly human, then he would not have entered our condition or healed it from within.

But the eternal Son has taken our nature without ceasing to be what he is as divine.

And therein lies the great mystery.

And this is what theologians mean when they speak of kenosis, self-emptying.

It is not the subtraction of deity, it is not the loss of divine nature, it is rather the addition of our poverty as mortal humans, the assumption of the humble condition of creaturliness made from dust and subject to suffering and death that is taken on.

Hence the meaning and fullness of that phrase, he made himself of no reputation, by taking the servant's form, not by abandoning the Father's glory.

But the emptying, then, is not metaphysical loss, it's a redemptive descent.

Christ enters our nature in order that our nature may be healed, restored, and brought into communion with God.

So when we turn to the gospel, St.

John places us in the same decisive hour as St.

Paul, but from another angle.

After the voice from heaven, Jesus says, Now is the judgment of this world.

Now shall the prince of this world be cast out, and I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.

And the evangelist immediately clarifies the phrase.

By saying this he says, signifying what death he should die.

The lifting up is the crucifixion.

Yet it is also, whilst in human terms, earthly terms, the ultimate ignominy, it is also exaltation.

It is a public execution, a disgrace.

Yet it is also the manifestation of divine joy.

Here the Johannine lifting up and the Philippian exaltation come together.

Philippians names the inner form of Christ's lifting up, obedience unto death, even the death of the cross.

John identifies its public and cosmic effect, judgment upon the world, and expulsion of its worldly prince.

The instrument of that casting out is Christ's lifting up.

In the crucified one, the old ruler loses his claim.

The apparent triumph of violence thus becomes, in the end, its defeat.

The cross is wide enough for the world, as we might say.

Yet Christ's command remains urgent to each and every one of us.

Believe in the light.

And the crowd then makes an important objection.

If the Messiah abides forever, how can the Son of Man be lifted up?

How can the eternal Christ die?

They have heard eternity, but refused humiliation.

They want the Messiah's glory without the Messiah's cross.

The Lord does not respond with a merely diagrammatic, as it were, theological explanation.

Interestingly, he gives an imperative, a command.

Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you.

While ye have the light, believe in the light, that ye may be the children of light.

The final word of today's gospel is therefore not simply metaphysical, but moral and spiritual.

It is thus, in a sense, a warning.

Christ says that the light is with them only a little while, and then he departs and hides himself, as it were, from those who have seen him and hated him.

Light refused to become darkness that does not know where it goes.

The vocation of Christian learning is itself a walking, of course, in given light, a perspective upon which we do well to dwell also.

For the scholar, the preacher, the student, and every Christian believer must be aware of two temptations.

The first is that of the grasping, treating the knowledge of God as a possession, seeking mastery in some fashion, intellectual as it were, over God, rather than becoming a servant of the word and submitting to it, thus an act of pride.

The second is, of course, delay, professing that Christ abides forever while postponing the costly obedience, that command which he gave us, remember, that his lordship requires, as though eternity made the cross optional in some fashion when it comes to the way we live out our lives here and now.

Against both temptation, the hymn in the Philippians text and the gospel, speak with one voice.

Have this mind, walk while ye have the light, believe in the light, that ye may be children of the light.

But doctrine and discipleship are not two things.

The tender love of God is the cause, the incarnation and the cross are the form, patience and resurrection are the fruit.

So then the cross stands before us as the great theological and ontological hinge of the incarnation, and as the pattern by which the church itself should be formed in many different ways and layers.

And we must recognize that the theology of the cross depends upon what the church confesses concerning the person who dies upon it.

The theology of the cross therefore rests upon the doctrine of the incarnation.

And in the modern period, one illuminating attempt I commend to undertake this work of understanding philosophically was that of Thomas V.

Morris in his book The Logic of God Incarnate.

His central concern is a familiar one that goes back to the crowd in today's gospel.

How can the one person Jesus Christ be both fully divine and fully human?

How can the one who is omniscient, omnipotent, eternal, uncreating, also be limited in human knowledge, subject to worldly weakness, vulnerable to temptation, and obedient unto death?

It won't do simply to say it's a mystery.

If by that we mean that the Church's confession has no intelligible content, or may contain straightforward contradiction, even worse.

The mystery of the incarnation is not, as it were, some nonsense statement to speak about bluntly and blindly, and it certainly cannot contain a formal contradiction.

So Boris accordingly seeks to distinguish very helpfully, I would suggest, between person and nature, between the properties that belong to Christ according to his divinity and those that belong to him according to his humanity, and to show, therefore, whether the traditional faith can be seen at least as rationally coherent.

It is possible for the eternal son to possess the attributes of deity, he argues, while also genuinely possessing a human nature, including a human consciousness, human limitations, and a human history.

And Morris's argument addresses the alleged incoherence that doubters allege of Orthodox Christology, the relation of divine and human attributes in Christ, the reality of temptation, and the philosophical difficulties raised by the claim that one and the same person is God the Son and Jesus of Nazareth.

And Morris's most specific proposal is what has come to be called the two minds account.

In broad outline, and I can't go into it in detail here, of course, but he argues that the incarnate Son might be best understood as possessing both a divine range of consciousness and a genuinely human range of consciousness.

And such an account tries to explain how Christ may truly know all things in virtue of his divine nature, and yet grow in wisdom and ask questions, suffer, pray, obey, and undergo that real limitation of human life in virtue of his humanity.

Yet there is something salutary here, too.

For Morris effectively reminds us that the incarnation cannot be preserved merely by repeating the words fully God and fully man, or as it were, with a loudhailer trying simply to say them more loudly, without asking what those words demand of us.

The humanity of Christ must be real enough for hunger, tears, obedience, temptation, suffering, and death to be more then than appearances.

At the same time, Christ's divinity must be real enough that the one who suffers in the flesh is none other than the eternal Son of God.

For that is precisely the truth we have heard proclaimed all the way through today, in Philippians and in the Gospel.

And yet Morris's account also shows the limits of philosophical construction.

It's illuminating, but not as yet perhaps entirely successful, but it is a worth a project worth exploring.

The language of two minds may help us to identify one of the great pressures within Christology, how the divine son can truly live a human life without reducing his humanity to a disguise, but it can also leave us imagining two centers of consciousness, placed alongside one another, or a divine subject managing a human life as it were from above, which would all be errors.

The fathers, then, and the early church councils do give us a somewhat more austere and perhaps nonetheless more worshipful Brahman.

They simply confess that the one and same Son, perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood, is to be acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.

The distinction of the natures is not abolished by their union, neither are they divided into two sons or two Christs.

But the philosophical task remains necessary, I suggest, for we must not speak of Christ in ways that make his divinity unreal, his humanity unreal, or his person divided, nor indeed the reality of what he brought to us inaccessible to our minds.

Yet it remains true to say spiritually, that is one thing, it is one thing to construct a logically possible account of how the Son might be both divine and human.

It's another to stand before the crucified one and confess that the Lord of glory has truly entered death for us and for our salvation.

A cross is not a puzzle, some sort of set of questions for philosophical ingenuity.

It is the act in which the divine love disclosed in the incarnation what it truly was and took its climactic historical form.

The one who is in the form of God is the one who is obedient unto death.

The one who takes the form of a servant is the one whom God highly exalts.

The one who is lifted up on the cross is the one who draws all things to himself.

Therefore, our thinking about the incarnation must lead us not away from the cross, but more deeply into its meaning.

The cross is neither merely an ethical example, nor merely a divine spectacle.

It is the freely embraced obedience of the incarnate Son.

It is the human obedience of the one who truly is God.

It is the divine self-giving enacted in the human flesh, which the word has made his own.

The book of common prayer teaches us to pray this mystery before we presume to master it.

God, of thy tender love towards mankind, sent his son to take our flesh and suffer death upon the cross, so that we might follow the example of his patience, and also be made partakers of his resurrection.

The tender love of God is the cause.

The incarnation and cross are the form.

Patience and resurrection are the fruit.

So let us behold the cross, the wood once hidden, and in the church's memory, sought by Helena in Jerusalem, the wood upon which Christ was lifted up, the tree upon which the prince of this world was cast out, the sign under which the church learns not to grasp but to serve.

And let us walk while we have the light, believe in the light, and receive the mind that was in Christ Jesus, until every knee bows, every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Amen.