Vigils Reading – Thursday after Ash Wednesday

WE ADORE YOUR CROSS

By Aemiliana Löhr

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[Today] the veil is taken off the cross and tearful thanksgiving fills the

Church’s voice as she offers the cross to the people and calls out, “Look upon the

wood of the cross.”

The cross is set up now, no longer on Mount Calvary in front of the gates

of that Jerusalem, but on the altar of the New Jerusalem. No longer is there a

crush about it of blaspheming soldiers and Pharisees, but a reverent assembly of

God’s people which still, in this moment of greatest sadness, receives a delicate

anticipation of the joy of resurrection to come, a sort of consolation from the

cross. “We adore your cross, O Lord, and we praise and glorify your holy

resurrection; for behold, through the cross joy came into the whole world.”

This is a characteristic of the Church’s deepest attitude, not only in the

liturgy, but in her whole life as well. She goes with the incarnate Lord through

time, carrying the cross with him. Again and again she sees his blood poured out

by godless people, and the precious life of God’s anointed done to death; for in

her members the Lord himself dies. Good Friday goes on for her throughout the

world’s age, and thickest darkness is still before her. But she does not complain

or flinch; like Jesus, she makes no complaint. When death comes she dies with a

cry to God, certain of the witness she is giving and the life she is to receive.

[The Church’s] life is a life of carrying the cross, a continual dying. But her

voice is a joyful voice; her liturgy celebrates life. In reality she suffers death but

lives already in the resurrection. Her food is the food of immortality: the body of

the risen Christ. She cannot founder. Rather, …she stands alone in the decline of

this world, daily subject to death and [yet] daily awakened to life. She prays with

upraised hands for her murderers, and in the sign of the cross she calls for joy on

behalf of a tortured world. Indeed, in the posture of her prayer and the complete

oneness she has now with the Lord, she herself becomes the cross, and of her, it

will be said till the end of time and eternity, “Through the cross joy came into the

whole world.”