THE feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, observed on September 14, represents in a concentrated form the heart of the Christian faith.
Since earliest times, Christ's innocent death on the cross has embodied dramatically the triumph of divine weakness and wisdom and goodness over human power and calculation and evil.
The celebration highlights the 'raising up', or 'exaltation', of Jesus on the cross for humanity's salvation, foreshadowed by the 'raising up' of the bronze serpent in the desert in earlier times by Moses (Numbers 21:4-9), and explicitly emphasised in the Gospel of John (3:14).
Yet for Jesus to be compared to a serpent is puzzling. For serpents are usually associated with notions of venom and treachery, as in the case of the proverbial 'snake in the grass', rather than with goodness and salvation.
Admittedly, in including such a comparison in his Gospel, John has in mind the story just alluded to, of how Moses raised the bronze serpent to offer healing to his followers in the desert.
But still it does appear slightly odd, at first sight at least, to find Christ being compared to a serpent or a snake. What are we to make of this?
The first thing that might be said is that the serpent is never in fact described in the Bible as a uniformly evil or negative or even dangerous figure.
Indeed, Jesus himself advised his own followers to be certainly as innocent as doves, but also as cunning as serpents.
And long before that, the Book of Genesis describes the serpent, who was to go on to tempt our first parents into breaching God's instructions, as "more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord had made" (Genesis 3:1).
In accepting in his Gospel Jesus' identification with the serpent, John is surely dropping a fairly broad hint that God's subtlety and cunning and wisdom and healing power are finally stronger than, and can outwit, any amount of evil and opposition to his goodness that human beings are capable of mustering.
Maybe there's even a faint, distant echo of this in the symbol of the serpent as a source of healing frequently to be found over pharmacies.
The feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is a vivid reminder of the means by which heaven was put within our reach: by the death of God's only son on the cross
But be that as it may, there's no doubt that the reversal of intentions seen in the crucifixion of Jesus is profoundly characteristic of the Christian view of reality.
Jesus' foes and opponents thought they were getting rid of him by killing him. That was their express intention.
But God used those very means deployed by Jesus' enemies in order to triumph over them and over their evil, by showing in the resurrection that his weakness and truth were ultimately more powerful and more enduring than the power and brutality of his enemies.
It is said that when a tyrant dies, his reigning power dies with him. When a martyr dies, his reign is just beginning (Kierkegaard).
In the same way, Jesus' triumph on the cross marked the end of his adversaries' power over him, and the irreversible beginning of God's reign of salvation.
It is important, though, not to lose sight of the price paid for humanity's redemption, a price that would adequately reflect and that had to reflect the harm done by human sin, to echo St Anselm.
This price, Christian faith teaches, was so high that only God could pay it.
But it is equally important to bear in mind why the crucifixion was the means God adopted to secure our salvation.
The theme of the serpent cannot but call to mind the fall of our first parents, when they fell for the serpent's attractive, even seductive, suggestion, and reached out to grasp at equality with God, the glittering prize the serpent dangled before them.
We know that the prize turned to dust, but the promise and hope of 'being like God', or of sharing in God's own life, was not taken away from humanity or lost for ever. It was only given to us in a different way, in God's own way.
It's surely not by accident that, in the Letter to the Philippians, Paul speaks of Jesus as "not clinging to his equality with God, but emptying himself... even accepting death on a cross" (2:6-8).
By reversing, in other words, the tragic error of our first parents, by not clinging to, or grasping at, equality with God, as our first parents had done, Jesus reversed the consequences of human sin and opened for us the possibility of heaven, that is to say, of ultimately attaining the goal our first parents had longed for and reached out for but had fallen short of.
Jesus did this by following the path of self-emptying or self-forgetfulness, of service and endurance or suffering, rather than the path of self-assertion and self-promotion and self-aggrandisement.
The feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is thus above all a vivid reminder of the means by which heaven was put within our reach: by the death of God's only son on the cross.
Martin Henry, former lecturer in theology at St Patrick's College, Maynooth, is a priest of the diocese of Down and Connor.
