Brothers and sisters,
Today we stand beneath the mystery of the Cross, gazing upon the very sign that the world once mocked as defeat, but which God has exalted as victory. In John’s Gospel we hear these words: “The Son of Man must be lifted up, so that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.”
The Cross is not merely an instrument of execution; it is the throne from which Christ reigns. To us monks of Our Lady of Silence, who day after day return to the quiet rhythms of the liturgy, the Cross is our school. It is the book in which we read the depth of divine love, the plough that breaks open our stony hearts, the ladder by which heaven bends down to earth.
We hear that the Son of Man was “lifted up.” He was raised on the wood of shame, yet in that lifting he draws all things to himself. For us, that lifting means more than history: it means that in every trial, in every small humiliation, in every surrender of our own will, the Lord is raising us too — not for condemnation, but for eternal life.
The mystery of the Cross does not belong only to monks. It belongs to all God’s people. And here in Mountheaton, it belongs too to our beloved Cistercian College, joined to the Abbey as a living branch to the vine. Many of our young people walk daily beneath the shadow of the Cross which crowns our chapel. For them, as for us, the Cross is not a decoration but a summons. It is a reminder that true wisdom is not found in self-assertion but in self-giving; not in grasping at life, but in laying it down.
We monks look across to the College and we pray: may the Cross be their compass. May it steady them when the world tempts them with lesser loves. May it shape their friendships, their studies, their vision for life. And we hope too that they will glimpse in our own lives, however frail, something of that same surrender to the mystery of Christ lifted up.
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux once preached that the Cross is the “supreme school of love” — it teaches us not only who God is, but who we are called to become. In the silence of the cloister, and in the noise of the classroom, that lesson remains the same: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.
Let us then exalt the Cross, not in triumphalism but in gratitude. Let us carry it in our hearts and on our shoulders, knowing that it is light because it is carried with Christ. Let us proclaim to the College students, to all who come to our Abbey, and to one another in community, that love is stronger than death, and mercy deeper than every wound.
For the Cross stands not as an end, but as the radiant beginning of eternal life.
Amen.