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Andrea di Bartolo (1360-1428) - The Resurrection. Walters Art Museum, Wikimedia Commons
Sermon Holy Cross Day 2025
The Cross is known universally as the Christian symbol. It appears publically on churches throughout the world (although ours is awaiting replacement). Many Christians wear a small cross, or have one in their home. We make the sign of the cross on ourselves in our prayers.
The Cross also appears on the flags of a number of nations and institutions that have a Christian heritage. We saw the Flag of St George and the Union Flag quite a lot yesterday. There was the usual exuberant celebration of the Last Night of the Proms, where clearly everyone is welcome under these waving banners. Rather more troublingly, we also saw flags, and indeed crosses, carried through our streets in an anti-immigration protest in an attempt to claim Christianity as some kind of cultural identity badge, with apparently no understanding of Christian teaching. The Church is one over all the earth, and Christian identity can never be conflated with any particular race or nation.
What we now call the Flag of St George, a red cross on a white background, appeared in the Middle Ages, long after the historical Saint George, when it began to be used as a flag by a number of countries, of which England was a relatively late arrival. At around the same time, it appeared in art in depictions of the Resurrection, as a banner held aloft by the risen Christ.
This gives us a clue to its symbolic meaning. The red cross, the colour of blood, symbolises the passion of Christ, his death, and the white stands for the new life of his resurrection. So, carried by the risen Christ, it is a symbol of the Paschal Mystery, the victory of the Cross through his death and resurrection.
This is the heart of the Christian faith, summarised in Philippians this morning. Christ has emptied himself to share our humanity, even to death, and therefore has been raised to the glory of God. It was necessary that the Messiah should suffer and so enter into his glory. Because God in Christ has shared our death, death has been defeated, and the resurrection revealed. Humanity, united with Christ, is raised with him.
The pattern of dying and rising is the shape of the Christian faith, and is imprinted on us by our baptism, in which indeed we are marked with the sign of the Cross. We died and were buried with Christ in the waters of the font, so that we might be raised with him to eternal life.
The grace we received in the font at our baptism is renewed in our life from day to day. Yet we cannot avoid the Cross, we are marked with it. There is no resurrection without death. Repentance, the conversion of life to which we are called, is a continual dying to self that we might live to God. The sufferings and sorrows of life are not avoided or cancelled out by the resurrection, but are transformed, the light of the resurrection shines through the Cross.
The Cross is both the sign of reconciliation, and the mark of its cost. Reconciliation between humanity and God, first of all, and therefore also the reconciliation of all divided humanity. Colossians says “through Christ God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross”. Ephesians says, “He is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us”.
How the cross saves and reconciles us is a mystery, which is not a puzzle to be solved but rather a truth whose meaning can never be exhausted. In the Cross, we see the infinite love and mercy of God, who alone can save us, meeting the depths of human sin and division and need and the disaster of death, and overcoming them.
And this is for everyone. Colossians says, it is the reconciliation of all things. The Gospel says it is the lifting up of the Son of Man, so that “everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life”. The Cross reconciles us with God and with one another, creating one new humanity in which there are no boundaries of race, nation or culture.
We should not therefore be ashamed of the Cross. What if some people misuse it as a symbol of culture wars or toxic nationalism? Christians know better, and it is our symbol. Here we have no abiding city, but we seek the City that is to come, as Hebrews says. Whatever flag may fly over us in our exile here on earth, the Church unites, in one, people of every race, nation and culture. And we look to the Cross as the banner of another country, in which we have our true citizenship, the City of God in which all peoples will be gathered into one new humanity in Christ.
The Cross is the sign of Christ, the sign of salvation. It is God’s hope breaking through into human tragedy. It is death defeated and the resurrection revealed. It is the sign of reconciliation that overcomes all barriers of race and nation and culture. The Cross proclaims to all people, as Ephesians says: “You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and… members of the household of God.”
As Christians, we will best honour the sign of the Cross by living according to what it means. In lives of sacrificial self-giving love. In reconciling, because we have been reconciled. In welcoming, because we have been welcomed. In forgiving, because we have been forgiven. In faith that the worst this world can do can never equal God’s power to bring new life and hope. By always being ready to point to that hope amid the dreadful wreckage of human sin and death. It is through lives marked by the Sign of the Cross that we will best lift high the Cross, and the love of Christ proclaim, in a world that stands so much in need of that love.
