A Walk Through Holy Sepulcher

Sermon for Holy Cross Day, transferred
Philippians 2:5-11; John 12:31-36a
Sept. 15, 2024

Today we’re celebrating Holy Cross Day, transferred from yesterday.  Now, why would we celebrate the cross?  Of all the things to raise up about the Christian faith, the Church sets aside a day to honor the instrument of Jesus’ death?  That seems odd, to say the least. To look for an answer, I want to take you somewhere I visited on my pilgrimage to the Holy Land last year, a place that’s all about the mystery of the cross – the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. 

A strange truth you learn in the Holy Land is that many of the things you came to see are covered up by churches, and this one is maybe the best example of that unhappy truth.  The Church of the Holy Sepulcher covers the traditional sites of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial.  The church was dedicated on Sept. 14 in the year 335, which is why Sept. 14 is Holy Cross Day.  The Roman Emperor Constantine had converted to Christianity and, with the faith now legal, the bishop of Jerusalem excavated the site thought to be Calvary.  In 326, the effort revealed three crosses and a cave close by; and Constantine’s mother, Helena, went to Jerusalem to supervise construction of a church over the site.  The original building was a basilica (a rectangular space, like where our pews are) next to the rock where the crucifixion was said to have happened.  And at one end of that space was a rotunda around the tomb.  The cross-section view tries to make sense of how the building encloses these sites.

Over the centuries, the building witnessed the rise and fall of empires and Church authorities, and the repeated changing of the guard left its mark on the building and its administration.  The building itself was added onto several times.  And control of all those spaces came to rest with no less than six different Christian authorities simultaneously: the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Syriac, and Coptic churches.  Conflict among those bodies has played out even in physical violence over the centuries, leaving Jesus shaking his head in dismay.  The present “status quo” agreement dates from 1757, and the truce is still so uneasy that, literally, the movement of a ladder over the outside door would be enough to bring the six different authorities back at each other’s throats.

The church’s geography mirrors both the crazy authority structure and the range of holy things to venerate there.  Making your way through the church is like exploring somewhere in a dream, with disconnected realities cobbled together into a structure you couldn’t imagine in real life.  But there are three primary spaces of veneration.  There’s the Rock of Calvary, on which the three crosses are thought to have stood.  There’s the Stone of Anointing, where Jesus’ body is said to have been prepared for burial.  And there’s the tomb itself, a cave whose hillside has been deconstructed and enclosed by a building within the building, called the Edicule.

When I visited, our group had 90 minutes at Holy Sepulcher.  The guide told us to choose which holy site mattered most to us because we’d be spending most of those 90 minutes waiting to glimpse the thing we’d chosen.  I chose the Rock of Calvary, the site of the crucifixion, where pilgrims can get down on their knees and put their hands about nine inches down into a hole in the rock said to have held Jesus’ cross.

Now, it’s tempting to say we “stood in line” to visit the rock.  But there was no line.  Instead, there was a mass of humanity making its way, like a school of fish with no sense of personal space.  We moved very slowly up steps, and into an antechamber, and toward the chapel on the rock, with an altar over the hole where the cross stood.  People from many nations pushed and shoved each other toward the site of the world’s salvation.  Maybe they understood the holiness of the site, but they’d forgotten the Golden Rule along the way.  This seems like the least appropriate place on the planet to push ahead of someone else.

Finally, each pilgrim gets a moment at the foot of the cross.  You drop to your knees, which seems completely appropriate, and you get a few seconds to stick your hand down the nine-inch hole and touch the bottom. Now, a thousand of your closest friends have done the same thing that day, and millions more over the last 17 centuries; so, what you touch bears the residue of that – dirt and God knows what else from all those hands that came before you.  But, you know, after I touched the bottom of the hole in that rock, I crossed myself, as if it were a holy-water font.  It just seemed right to trace the shape of the cross on my body and remember, in that outward-and-visible way, the shape of Jesus’ suffering and death on that rock.

After my five seconds of holiness, I followed the other pilgrims down the stairs and back to the church’s entryway.  With the 15 minutes left, I walked past the Stone of Anointing, made my way to the rotunda housing the Edicule, and walked around that odd little building within a building containing Jesus’ burial cave.  I couldn’t get very close because of the crowds waiting for their pilgrim moment, but at least I got a few pictures, along with everyone else. 

What I didn’t realize is that even the Edicule is controlled by different religious authorities with different rules about respecting its holiness.  Although you can take pictures of the Edicule’s entrance and its sides, the back of the tomb is overseen by the Coptic Church; and their cleric standing guard at that chapel gets testy and yells at you if you take a picture there.  I didn’t mean to be disrespectful, but at least a got the shot.

Why am I telling you all this?  Because, as a pilgrim in this holy space, where God Incarnate used an instrument of bloody death to give us eternal life, I found it challenging to know exactly what I was venerating.  The cross, yes.  But in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, it’s easy to get lost, literally and figuratively.  You can get distracted by the ancient icons and mosaics, the incense and the hanging lamps.  You can get distracted by questions of historical authenticity:  Is this really where the cross stood and where Jesus was buried, or did that happen at the competing Protestant site down the street?  You can get distracted by the people, the mass of humanity jockeying for position to honor the One who emptied himself of position.  Especially after the Coptic cleric yelled at me, I left wondering what I was supposed take away from all this.

Much later, it occurred to me that maybe the most meaningful icon for veneration in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was that annoying mass of humanity trying to crowd ahead of each other to reach the foot of the cross.  In this space especially, you can’t miss the holy irony.  God, in Christ, was willing to challenge the authorities, and be betrayed, and be arrested, and be beaten, and be nailed to a cross, and die a death reserved for slaves, thieves, and revolutionaries.  God, in Christ, was willing to do all that in order to beat Satan at his own game, using sinful death to vanquish sin and death.  And God, in Christ, was willing to do all this in order to show us the most unbelievable thing of all – that you and I are worth it.  Yes, we fail all the time.  Yes, we hurt the people we love the most.  Yes, we allow strangers to suffer as we look the other way.  Yes, even in the holy of holies, we push and shove to get ahead of someone else.  And, yes, God says, “See how much I love you anyway?  You’re made in my image and likeness,” God says.  “You bear the same creative spark that brought the universe to life,” God says.  “You are made by Love for love,” God says – the love that emptied itself, and humbled itself, and died on a cross so you could live forever.  “You are worth it,” God says.

So, what do we do with that as we walk out of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and walk out of church here this morning?  What happens this afternoon, or Monday, as we head back into our lives?  In our Gospel reading today, Jesus tells us the point of his sacrifice.  Lifted up on a cross, “I will draw all people to myself,” he says (John 12:32).  So, look to the one who was exalted … in powerlessness.  Look to the one who reigns as Lord of all … because he gave himself for all.  As we proclaim every Good Friday when the instrument of torturous death comes into the room among us, “Behold the wood of the cross, whereon was hung the world’s salvation.…  O come, let us adore him.”

But – don’t stop there.  Adoration is right and good, in a place like Holy Sepulcher and in our daily prayers.  But just as the cross is processed into the church every Sunday, leading us to the altar for worship, so it’s processed out again, leading us back into day-to-day life.  That’s where the cross truly lives – not in a church but in the world.  So, what do we do with that?  St. Paul tells us:  “Let the same mind be in you as was in Christ Jesus,” he writes (Philippians 2:5).  Or, as it says at the end of our order of service each week, as we’re dismissed back out into the world, “Our worship is over.  Now our service begins.” 

Sharing the mind of Christ doesn’t mean being holy wimps.  It doesn’t mean we should beat ourselves up for our failings or let others beat us down with worldly power.  For here are the two deep truths I think Jesus is asking us to hold side by side as we share the mind of Christ:  First, you are worth dying for.  And second, Jesus is worth living for.  As he said to the crowds, as they jockeyed for position in their own day, the point isn’t whether Jesus ticks the boxes and looks like the savior the world would expect.  The point is how you live if the same mind is in you that was in Christ Jesus.  “Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you,” Jesus says.  “If you walk in the darkness, you don’t know where you’re going.  While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light” (John 12:35-36) – beloved children who walk the way of the cross.