Today we celebrate the Lord’s Day, the day we worship and adore God. You can miss Mass any day of the week, and it won’t be considered a sin. But if you miss Mass on Sunday, you fall into mortal sin. Why?
I’ll give you an example: Father’s Day arrived, and your children didn’t call you to say hello, didn’t invite you to dinner, didn’t give you a gift, absolutely nothing your children did that day for you as a father. How would you feel? What would you think as a father? Most likely, you don’t care much for your children.
The same goes for Sunday: it’s God’s day, for God, to worship Him and recognize Him as God. And if you don’t come to Mass on Sunday, you’re acting the same way your children do. To you, God is of little importance. Well, besides Sunday being the Lord’s Day, we also celebrate this very special date, THE EXALTATION OF THE HOLY CROSS. It is our parish feast day, the first time we celebrate our parish as a parish community.
Now, what does it mean to celebrate the cross? To celebrate because our Lord Jesus died on the cross? No, obviously not. We celebrate the cross because through the cross, Jesus Christ gave us salvation. As today’s Gospel says: God gave his only Son to death on the cross, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life, because God does not condemn the world, but wants the world to be saved through Christ Jesus. Our sins are so many and so serious that only through such a cruel death can we understand the love of a man for all of us. I’ll give an example to be clearer: you love your children, or your mother, or your wife so much that you allow yourself to be killed for them, you give your life for them. But only for them; But he wouldn’t give his life for his neighbor, or his boss, or his gardener. His love is for his own, for his family. God’s love is for all, not just a few; Jesus Christ died for all humanity. That is an immense love. When one believes in that love, one understands the meaning of the cross. The cross is salvation, it is life, it is triumph. Christ conquered sin on the cross; He conquered death, because if you believe in Him, when you die you will be with God. A death as horrific as Christ’s on the cross cannot be viewed with indifference; one cannot be insensitive.
That is why the cross is exalted today; it is raised because we now understand that there must be great love in a man to allow himself to be crucified for each one of us, being so unfaithful, foolish, disobedient, arrogant, impure, lazy, lying, etc.
We thank God on this day because, through faith in Christ, we have a Church that teaches us to understand the meaning of the cross.
We all carry our own crosses. And they weigh us down and we suffer. But Jesus, who is a man of sorrows and suffering, goes with us, helping us carry them.
May God bless this parish of the Holy Cross, and each one of us. Amen.
