Holy Cross Day

A Sermon preached by the Precentor, Canon Anna Macham

Sunday 14 September 2025- 4:30pm

Isaiah 63: 1-16 and 1 Corinthians 1: 18-25

In his novel Helena, published in 1950, the celebrated author Evelyn Waugh, describes the quest of his heroine, the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, to find the relics of the cross on which Christ was crucified.

Not much is known about Helena as an historical figure.  According to the tradition of today’s feast day of the Holy Cross, she converted to Christianity as did her son, and – like many pilgrims of the time – set out on an expedition to find the true cross in Jerusalem, early in the fourth century.

In his novel, Waugh imaginatively depicts how his heroine comes to this new faith of Christianity late in life. Her subsequent journey to Jerusalem is depicted as coming out of her desire to find tangible evidence for this new religion’s claims, and to discover something she can see and touch so that she can know for herself, beyond doubt, that her new-found faith is real.

As an Empress, Helena has been caught up in the bitter, devious world of politics. Her son, the Emperor, confused and anxious at his own extraordinary success in subduing the Roman World, is getting more and more embroiled in the intrigues of political life, in espionage and assassinations, a world of plotting and ambition that captivates the powerful.  Yet in gradually identifying and piecing together what’s different about Christianity, Helena discovers that it isn’t, after all, locked up in debates about technical language or mystical speculation, but that it’s anchored in the prosaic facts of a man being born and crucified in a particular place, at a particular time, in history. Instead of words and elaborate gestures, Waugh writes, “What Helena wanted was something of quite another order. She wanted the True Cross” (p.183).  And so she sets out to find it.

For me, Helena’s story, so beautifully imagined by Waugh, illustrates something of the counter-cultural humility of the cross, and the fascination of its sheer physicality. In our New Testament reading today, we read that the cross of Christ is “foolishness” to the wise. In the eyes of the powerful, the cross looks like madness: a scandal to Jews and a Messiah who appears not to have triumphed but to have been defeated. This wasn’t some smart new philosophy or appeal to high culture, like many of the myriad other new religions competing for airspace at that time. The wisdom and power of God in the cross does not look like human wisdom or power. The wisdom and power of God comes in a person who empathises with the weak and the powerless by suffering and dying an agonising death on the rubbish-heap of the world.

The story of Helena and her search for the cross reveals the true God, a God who, in the death of Jesus, confronts the corruption of a world of posturing, power and prestige, overthrowing the subterfuge and violence of imperial power in order to set up his own kingdom, a kingdom in which the physically weak and foolish find themselves just as welcome as the strong and the wise.

According to the legend about Helena, that’s recounted in the novel, when the three crosses of Calvary were found on which Christ and the two robbers hung, Helena identified the cross of Christ by a miracle in which this cross, and not the others, heals a dying woman. And because of Christ’s cross, Helena is healed too. Walking into a crowd of people a few years earlier, Waugh depicts how she would have shrunk from them, standing on ceremony with “a posse of guards whacking and barging to clear a little cloister for her to move and breathe in”. But now, all this has changed.  “That was an echo from the old empty world,” Waugh writes, but “There was no hate in her now and nothing round her was quite profane”. While she doesn’t let her guards go completely, she now mitigates their roughness, “and always her heart was beyond them, over their big shoulders, in the crowd” (pp.118-19).

The cross changes us too. When we gaze upon it on Good Friday, when we touch the rough surface of its wood, its materiality holds a fascination for us, just as it did for Helena. Seeing and touching the cross reminds us of its low and profane nature, and this brings out a deep response in us.

For the cross is the place not just of degradation and suffering but also of our redemption, of our reconciliation. It’s the place of our atonement, the place of obedience where Jesus in humility was raised like the serpent in the wilderness and drew the whole world to himself.

“This is the wood of the cross on which was hung the saviour of the world” sings the priest entering the Quire on Good Friday, as the cross is carried and then stood us for all to see and venerate, and we respond “Come, let us worship”.

The reason we keep this feast today is that the cross is the most powerful, life-giving sign that we have, for all it is a scandal. This is why, following on from the tradition of Helena, we build our churches and cathedrals in the shape of the cross, why the cross is in our places of worship; this is why we wear it and make the sign of the cross when we worship, because we know that the cross is powerful. The cross is healing; it changes our lives. A source of comfort, it gives us strength to start afresh, and to be different people from how we were before, after all our mistakes and the images we hide behind. The cross takes the hate out of us; it makes us see all things, all people as holy, because if the cross, the place of shame, is holy, then there is nowhere that God’s love cannot go, nowhere it cannot reach. Above all, the cross shows God’s care for us, giving our lives meaning.

Waugh always described Helena as his best work, but since his death it has received little critical attention. It lacks the satire of his earlier, more famous books, but it rings true to our experience of the wood of the cross, our fascination with it and our quest to discover it again and let it change our lives. Helena’s quest testifies, in a very powerful way, to the deep truth that there is no resurrection without the cross, that there’s no life without death. The only way to seek resurrection is in the cross.

The wood of the cross tells the story of the way in which God has delivered us from death to life and continues to do so. The cross converts something that looks like defeat into something that is victory.