The Marvelous History of the Holy Cross

A JOURNAL OF ORTHODOX FAITH AND CULTURE ROAD TO EMMAUS Help support Road to Emmaus Journal. The Road to Emmaus staff hopes that you find our journal inspiring and useful. While we offer our past articles on-line free of charge, we would warmly appreciate your help in covering the costs of producing this non-profit journal, so that we may continue to bring you quality articles on Orthodox Christianity, past and present, around the world. Thank you for your support. Please consider a donation to Road to Emmaus by visiting the Donate page on our website. THE MARVELOUS HISTORY OF THE HOLY CROSS Kings removing their diadems take up the cross, the symbol of their Saviour’s death; on the purple, the cross; in their prayers, the cross, on their armour, the cross; on the holy table, the cross; throughout the uni- verse, the cross. The cross shines brighter than the sun. St. John Chrysostom Near midnight a lone rider, the last in a relay of imperial messengers from the borders of Asia Minor, pauses exhausted at the military gate in the Theodosian walls. Waved on by the guard, he gallops the last mile through the Arcadian forum, past the Church of the Resurrection and the Miliareum Aureum. At the Great Palace he’s already been seen and announced. He dismounts at a run – a royal chamberlain hurries him up the marble stairs, down frescoed and curtained halls to a great double door that opens at their approach. A burning brazier lights the center of the royal chamber and Emperor Heraclius advances from the shadows, his hand outstretched. The breathless messenger prostrates to the floor, “Your Imperial Highness, Jerusalem has fallen to the Persians. The pop- ulation is massacred, the Holy Sepulchre burnt to the ground, and the Patriarch and the Holy Cross carried away into captivity….” Moments later the church bells of Constantinople summon the city to mourning. The year is 614 and Shahr-Baraz, the brilliant and ruthless Persian general, has just carried off the holiest relic in Christendom... he Cross is the one symbol that has been accepted at all times, in all Tplaces, through Orthodoxy, heresy, and distortion by every people who have called themselves Christian. To the Orthodox, however, it is more than a symbol: for two thousand years the Church has held fast to its belief in the 39 Road to Emmaus Vol. III, No. 1 (#8) healing and saving power of Christ that moves through the Holy Wood and all its representations. According to early tradition, after the Lord was crucified, the Jews hid His Cross and those of the two thieves in an old cistern near Golgotha, filling it with stones and earth to prevent the Christians from recovering it for veneration. Like the Christians in their catacombs, it lay hidden for nearly three hundred years until Christianity was legalized by Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century. The cross was a sign of shame and torture to the Greeks and Romans, and in early centuries Romans taunted Christians as “cross-worshippers,” add- ing ironically, “they worship that which they deserve.” Both the sarcasm of the pagans and the intermittent danger of persecution kept Christians from openly displaying the cross and they resorted to using other – sometimes elaborate – cross-like symbols on their public sepulchres. In the catacombs of St. Callistus in Rome, for example, an anchor with a lamb kneeling underneath symbolizes the crucifixion, and a ship, the ark of salvation, dis- plays a trident-cross as a mast. Nevertheless, the love for the cross flourished in the secret home lives of Christians. By the second century, Tertullian (156-222) was writing, “We Christians wear out our foreheads with the sign of the cross.” These “dev- otees of the cross,” he went on to note, “make the sign of the cross before every undertaking.” Although the cross was used privately and liturgically from the beginning, two major events resurrected it in public liturgical life and monumental art: the apparition of the cross in the sky to Constantine, and the finding of the Holy Wood in Jerusalem. In 312, on the eve of a battle against his brother-in-law, Maxentius, Constantine encamped with his army before the walls of Rome, where he had a vision of a fiery cross superimposed against the sun and the Saviour Himself commanding him to bear into battle banners depicting the Holy Cross, with the words, “By this sign thou shalt conquer.” The next morning Maxentius’ troops met Constantine’s near the Malvern Bridge and were defeated. Constantine became the sole emperor and within the year pro- claimed Christianity a lawful religion, bringing the long years of Roman persecution to a close. The second event was of even greater importance. From the time of Jerusalem’s destruction by the Romans in ad 70, the phys- ical history of the Hebrew people had been wiped from the earth. Solomon’s 40 THE MARVELOUS HISTORY OF THE HOLY CROSS temple had been leveled by Hadrian’s troops and the Roman town of Aelia Capitolina erected over the ruins of Jerusalem. Over Christian Golgotha stood a temple dedicated to Venus. With the accession of her son as sole emperor, the seventy-eight-year-old Empress Helen departed for Palestine to rededicate the holy places to Christ. When she arrived in the Holy Land in 326, Bishop Macarius had already begun razing the temple of Venus, but the Christians did not know where to begin searching for the Cross and the Cave of the Resurrection under the immense pile of earth, stone and rubble covering the site. After Bishop Macarius led a supplicatory prayer service on the hill, the laborers began to smell a fragrant odor coming from under the earth. In this way the Lord’s Tomb was found. The Cross of Christ, along with those of the two thieves, was found with the help of a Jew named Judas who knew the ancient tradition concerning its location in the rock cistern. According to Church tradition, Judas was subsequently baptized with the name Cyriacus and became Patriarch of Jerusalem, suffering a martyr’s death in 363 under Julian the Apostate. He is commemorated on October 28. Following the directions of Judas, three crosses were found to the east of the Cave of the Holy Sepulchre, along with some of the inscriptions and nails. The inscriptions [titles], however, had come apart from the crosses, and it was unknown which cross was the Lord’s. Bishop Macarius stopped a passing funeral procession and ordered that the three crosses be touched, one after another, to the corpse. As the Lord’s Cross was laid on him, the dead man resurrected. One tradition recounts that the empress was the first to prostrate herself before the Holy Cross and kiss it. The eager crowd pushed forward, and amid shouts of “Lord, have mercy,” Bishop Macarius raised the Cross on high. That day, September 14, 326, was the first “Exaltation of the Cross of the Lord,” and until now the feast is faithfully kept as one of the Twelve Great Feasts of the Orthodox Church.1 That the Cross was recognized as authentic from the beginning is indis- putable. Although the finding of the Cross is strangely left unmentioned by Eusebius, the early church historian, it is spoken of openly by Cyril, Patriarch of Jerusalem, who was a contemporary of Eusebius and lived in Jerusalem within a few years of its finding. In his catechetical lectures of 348 1 From Lives of the Saints (The Great Synaxarion) (in Greek). 41 Road to Emmaus Vol. III, No. 1 (#8) St. Cyril says, “…He was truly crucified for our sins. For if thou wouldest deny it, the place refutes thee visibly, this blessed Golgotha, in which we are now assembled for the sake of Him who was here crucified, and the whole world has since been filled with pieces of the wood of the Cross.”2 Egeria, a fourth-century Spanish nun who authored one of the earliest surviving pilgrimage accounts of Christian holy places, describes in detail the Good Friday service of 380, and the veneration of the Holy Cross: And when they arrive before the Cross the daylight is already growing bright. There the passage from the Gospel is read where the Lord is brought before Pilate, with everything that is written concerning that which Pilate spake to the Lord or to the Jews, the whole is read… Then a chair is placed for the bishop in Golgotha behind the Cross, which is now standing. The bishop duly takes his seat in the chair, and a table covered with a linen cloth is placed before him: the deacons stand round the table, and a silver-gilt casket is brought in which is the holy wood of the Cross. The casket is opened and (the wood) is taken out, and both the wood of the Cross, and the title are placed upon the table. Now, when it has been put upon the table, the bishop, as he sits, holds the extremities of the sacred wood firm- ly in his hands, while the deacons who stand around guard it. It is guarded thus because the custom is that the people, both faithful and catechumens, come one by one and, bowing down at the table, kiss the sacred wood and pass through. And because, I know not when, some one is said to have bitten off and stolen a portion of the sacred wood, it is thus guarded by the deacons who stand around, lest any one approaching should venture to do so again.

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