From the heights of the cross

 In today's gospel, we find Jesus speaking in the night to Nicodemus. Nicodemus is actually a Pharisee, and Jesus chooses to speak to him by commenting on a passage of the Old Testament that would have been known to all Jews. It is a commentary that allows us to see how Jesus brings to fulfilment the foreshadowing of himself in the history of Israel. At one point during the Exodus, the Jews were being frequently bitten by a poisonous snake, and the remedy that God Himself gave to Moses was that he should make an image of the serpent from brass and hang it on the crotch of a tree. Subsequently, everyone who looked upon the serpent would be healed of the poison that had been injected into him.

                These parallels between the history of Israel and Jesus' life are the poetry of God in which happenstance and circumstance, at least to our eyes, are woven into the song of His love that calls us back to Him. Hearing our vocation is the beginning of our answer to the poetry of God’s saving invitation. We too have been attacked by a serpent and are suffering from the poison that this has left in our system. This is the poison of sin. It renders us ignorant, ill willed, weak, and self-indulgent. These are the blemishes in our nature which only the grace of God can heal. In fact, one of the distinctions that identifies the effects of God's grace in sinners is between gratia sanans - healing grace – and gratia elevans - grace that raises us up. God’s grace does both, curing our ills and bringing us to a place no purely human power could reach.

                In this gospel we are also given to understand why we too must be raised up. For if we are members of the mystical body of Christ, then we too must be raised up on the cross in order to share in the eternal life of the blessed Trinity. In the cross there is also a sign of the expansive love of God who wills to bring us into His very heart. Just as we stretch out our arms in order to embrace those we love, so God - who loves the world and sends His Son to save it - stretches out His arms in the crucifixion of that Son, casting the mighty from their thrones and raising up the lowly anawim, His servants.

                We face here one of the many paradoxes, one of the apparent contradictions, which are part of God's poetry also. As Saint Paul tells us, this cross, an instrument of torture, pain, and despair, is a scandal to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles. For the people of Israel, it represents the apparent abasement of the God Most High, and for everyone else, it represents yet another example of human stupidity. But the folly of God is greater than the wisdom of men, and the greatness of His folly would rescue us unworthy ones from a condemnation that we have only too often deserved. Thus, the great hymn Crux Fidelis captures this mad poetry of God's love on Good Friday:

Sweet the nails, and sweet the wood,

Laden with so sweet a load!

When we listen to the cross, we hear the call of His love to rise above the misery of our current condition. And from the heights of the cross – the exaltation of the Cross literally means ‘from the heights’ ex altis – we can see into the distant country of our eternal home.

But, only from its heights...