Sermon: THE HOLY CROSS

Why the Chapel of the Holy Cross?  The dedication is very ancient.  In 335 the Emperor Constantine dedicated a basilica on the site of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.  Here, his mother St Helena was said to have uncovered the cross of Christ.  Relics of the true cross were sent all over Christendom.  Among those that arrived on these shores was one brought by Queen Margaret of Scotland whose feast we celebrated yesterday.  It became known as her Black Rood, and it was honoured here as one of this Cathedral’s most precious relics.  You can see it depicted on the Margaret altar frontal in the Nine Altars. 

This chapel, almost a crypt, is a humble, low-down place, and this suggested the association of death and resurrection.  In this cave-like interior you feel you could prepare a body for burial, say your farewells, keep vigil as you wait for the dawn of resurrection.  Good Friday and Holy Saturday belong to places like this with their half-light, half in the earth and half out of it, half open and half hidden.  These thresholds can be crossing points between the old and the new, between this world and the next.  In the concentrated space of a crypt, things look different.  And that is the point.  

But the holy cross is not just the symbol of our mortality.  It is the eternal sign of the divine victim who suffered and died for our redemption.  Because of it, life and salvation have opened up to us again; we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.  ‘The tree of defeat became the tree of victory.’  That has always been the heart of my own faith since I sang the top line of Bach’s St John Passion at school and I began to see how at Golgotha, love has emptied itself for all of us.  ‘God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ’ says St Paul in words taken up by Isaac Watts in the hymn that we shall sing. 

Thanks to a most generous benefactor and the skill of colleagues who have worked so hard on this project, a long-held vision has become a reality.  I had cherished the thought of creating an oratory or chapel here to foster growth in the spiritual journey.  I hoped it would have a very pure Cistercian feel to it, white and simple, with a clean, clear light like a glass of spring water, and furnishings that evoked Shaker woodwork whose unadorned beauty lies in their fitness for the task.  Colin Wilbourn’s altar, lectern and seating avoid the obviousness of tidy symmetry.  They are crafted with a native naturalness that is a little oblique, slightly off-centre.  You will see the cross imprinted in them echoing the translucent cross at the east end.  It can remind us that the cross is still work in progress in us for as long as the Master Carpenter wields his tools in the workshop of our lives, to remake rough-hewn, de-centered, asymmetrical people like us into God’s own image and likeness.

So here is a still, prayerful place to add to the already rich spiritual resources of the Cathedral.  For the holy cross is God’s gift of peace and healing and reconciliation where our lives are put together again and burdens roll away.  It tells us that ‘God so loved the world’, words we shall surely go on pondering for all eternity.   My prayer is that this little chapel may speak of this love that is ‘so amazing, so divine’. That is the purpose for which we dedicate it to the Holy Cross of our good Lord Jesus Christ today.   

At the dedication of the Deanery Undercroft Chapel, 17 November 2010