In my Christology class, a few years ago, my Jesuit professor made an interesting remark about men and women who wear a cross necklace. He said that wearing a cross necklace in the early day of Christianity is like wearing a necklace of an electric chair in the 21stcentury. Crucifixion was, indeed, a method of capital punishment in which the victim is tied or nailed to a large wooden beam and left to hang until he died. So the cross is an ugly symbol of capital punishment like an electric chair, a method of execution originating in the United States, in which the condemned person is strapped to a specially built wooden chair and electrocuted until he dies. Christianity has successfully transformed the ugly cross into the main religious symbol that represents the victory of Christ over sin and death.
Today is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. In the second reading, we hear Paul’s poetic story of Christ. Scholarship of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century focused primarily on this poetic story. The first part of the poetry is the Act of Humiliation, which offers the story of Christ’ incarnation (emptied himself) and death (humbled himself becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross). The activity of self-emptying and self-humbling are indeed the manifestation of the self-revelation of God. But they also signify that the Logos is emptying himself to be a suffering creature like us. Through his incarnation, Christ wants to remind us that we cannot escape the suffering from this world because we are suffering creatures also. Paul interprets Christ’s death not only as an act of love, but also as an act of voluntary obedience, in which he sets an example for us to be voluntarily obedient in the midst of our suffering. If we are really a suffering creature, then one might ask when I will receive the glory of Christ’s resurrection. The Second Act of Paul’s poem is the Act of Exaltation, in which God rewards the servants for fulfilling his mission in dying. So if we as believers exercise our obedience as a suffering creature, God will also rewards us for being obedient to Him.
If you have time to re-read Paul’s poetic story of Christ, perhaps you can reflect on whether you want to be the living exegesis of the poem. In other words, do you want to be more Christ-like in the ways you obey and listen to the Father?