Drapers, Daubers, Defacers: Holy Cross, England 2025
The Very Revd Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury
Sunday 14 September 2025, 13th Sunday after Trinity, Holy Cross Day
Philippians 2: 6–11
John 3: 13–17
‘…The common people are without definite religious beliefs, and have been so for centuries. The Anglican Church never had a real hold on them, it was simply a preserve of the landed gentry, and the Nonconformist sects only influenced minorities’.
George Orwell, 1941. But what would he make of the religious fervour has lately gripped the English? For many of our fellow-citizens have in recent weeks sallied forth to proclaim the faith by draping its truest symbol from bridges, daubing it on walls, and painting it on mini-roundabouts. In triumph, they exalt the instrument upon which our Lord died, and in reverence they honour his faithful martyr Saint George. Thousands went on pilgrimage in London yesterday, displaying their banners, wearing them around their necks – in, perhaps, a fervent vigil for today’s feast? The liturgical calendar has street protest chic; Holy Cross Day has made a stunning comeback.
Well – no.
I doubt it will ever have occurred to the flag-drapers, wall-daubers and roundabout-defacers that Saint George never set foot in England. Legend has it that he died in the Palestinian village of Lydda – a village which was taken by Israeli forces in the ‘nakba’ of 1948. Were George alive today he would be living in a camp in Lebanon or the West Bank. I doubt it will ever have occurred to them that, so far as his patronage of England is concerned, George is an immigrant, brought to these shores by warriors returning from European campaigns in the Middle Ages. Almost certainly on…small boats. And I certainly doubt it will have occurred to them that had it not been for an event which took place on this day one thousand, six hundred and ninety years ago then they would probably be draping, daubing, and debasing our urban furniture not with a cross but with a fish – which would be so much more difficult to spray-paint.
The fish was the original Christian symbol. But until the cheesy bumper stickers of the 70s it lost its place in the icon rankings, and it lost its place because of Holy Cross Day. Holy Cross Day is not principally a celebration of the crucifixion of Christ and his resurrection, a reheat of Passiontide. It is a celebration of the consecration of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Date: 14 September. Year: 335.
We’ve spent seven weeks poring over the text of the Nicene Creed, the work of the epochal Council called by the Emperor Constantine one thousand seven hundred years ago. But, as they say, behind every great man there is an infinitely greater woman. And in Constantine’s case it was his Mum – the Empress Helena. No sooner was the ink dry on her son’s new-fangled Creed than Helena embarked on a pilgrimage to Palestine. The Nicene fathers had wrangled over the meaning of the events described in Scripture: Helena set out to see the places where those events had taken place – the places where Jesus had walked and taught and died and risen. When she came to Jerusalem Helena found the place that tradition held to be the site of Christ’s death and burial. And there, we are told, she uncovered the cross upon which he had died – the True Cross. Constantine ordered the construction of a church on the spot, and the celebration of the Holy Cross on that date took root and has continued.
Even from this distance I can see your eyebrows rising. A far-fetched legend about a far-off discovery of a far-out relic? Clearly the man needs a holiday. But bear with me – this matters. Contemporary archaeology has confirmed that in the first century of the Common Era the area in which the Holy Sepulchre stands had been quarried for stone – all the useful building material had been taken away – and the area had subsequently been used for a garden or gardens. The Church is built over a limestone spur which survived the quarry, its stone too soft for use in construction. Perhaps its jutting peak provided the perfect site for shameful, visible, public executions. And around it spread gardens, just as St John says: ‘…there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden was a new tomb…’.
So Helena may have been onto something: it is entirely plausible that her son’s new Church was built on the site where the events that are the core of our faith unfolded. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. But for Helena’s generation, three hundred years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, it was important to walk the path he had walked; to tread the rock of Golgotha; and to touch the wood of the cross. The universal significance of those events may have been acknowledged in the clauses of the new Creed. But they had a particular origin. God ‘emptied himself, taking the form of a slave’. A slave. And Helena had (they believed) uncovered that origin. We may be sceptical about the historical validity of holy places and holy things. But if we cling to the universal at the expense of the particular then we have abandoned the historic faith of the Church.
Here’s the thing – I am not convinced that there are any collective nouns or general descriptors in God’s vocabulary. I am not convinced that God sees an armoury of aardvarks, a choir of angels, or a shrewdness of apes. I am not convinced that God sees ‘refugees’ – or that God sees ‘immigrants’. And I must accept that God sees what I, in my distress and disquiet, cannot see: God sees more than drapers, daubers, and defacers; more than the mass of 100,000 who marched in London yesterday. God sees Daoud and Binyamin and Edith and Tracey and Roger and Sue and Caroline and Hamish and Mahmoud. God sees the women and men he has made, and each of them is wonderful to him; they are his beloved creation.
It’s not just that the flags and graffiti display an ignorance of the cross-currents of history. It’s not just that they bear no relation to the deep webs of faith. It’s not even that they turn an icon of love into an icon of fear. It’s that they seek to carve up the world, stake it out, and badge it with the Holy Cross. But the world they carve up and the world they stake out is not the world God has loved into being and in which all have a place: God, whose only Son suffered and died on a limestone spur outside the wall of a city in the ancient Middle East. God, who sees the particular before he sees the universal; God, for whom the particular serves the universal.
Salisbury’s Canon Historian, Tom Holland, picks up where George Orwell left off, and writes ‘To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions’. But the actions of the drapers, the daubers and the defacers (my view, not God’s) test that assessment to breaking point. The cross is not for the world’s condemnation. It is not for any part of the world’s condemnation. It is not for even one person’s condemnation. It’s for the world’s salvation, through the one who suffered, and died, and rose again.