The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (2025)
Shortly after he arrived at a compound for patients of Hansen’s Disease (a leper colony) in India, Doctor Paul Brand, a specialist in hands and tendons, quietly slipped into a community meeting, sitting on a mat behind the group in the compound courtyard. As he settled, he was aware the many smells washing over him: cooking spices and medical ointments, but also disease and decay.[1]
As a hand specialist, his eyes were naturally drawn to the patients’ hands, most of which had missing or deformed fingers that were turned in—hands that were often called “lepers’ claws.” Some of the patients were sitting on their hands or trying to keep them hidden.
When the patients realized Doctor Brand was there, they asked him to speak. So, moving to the center of the group, he began by saying, “I am a hand surgeon. So, when I meet people, I can’t help but look at their hands. [Palm readers claim] that they can look at your future by looking at your hands. I can tell your past. For instance, I can tell what your trade has been by the position of the callouses and the condition of the nails. I can tell a lot about your character. I love hands.”
His talk then took a slight turn: “How I would love to have had the chance to meet Christ,” he said, “and look at his hands. But knowing what he was like, I can almost picture them, feel them.”
He talked about the hands of Christ, beginning with infancy when his hands were small and helpless, the tender hands of a baby. Then came the hands of the boy Jesus, holding a stylus as he learned to write his letters. Then the hands of Christ the carpenter—rough, gnarled, with broken fingernails and bruises from working with a saw and a hammer.
But there were also the hands of Chris the Healer. Compassion and sensitivity radiated from them and when he touched people, they could feel the Divine Spirit coming through.
“Then,” Doctor Brand continued, “there were the crucified hands. It hurts me to think of a nail being driven through the center of the hand, because I know what goes on there…the tendons and nerves and muscles… The thought of those healing hands being crippled reminds me what Christ was prepared to endure. In that act,” Doctor Brand said, “he identified himself with all of the deformed and crippled human beings in the world. Not only was he able to endure poverty with the poor, weariness with the tired, but—clawed hands with the crippled.”
The people were blown away by this idea: Jesus—a cripple, with claw-hands like theirs?
“And then there were his resurrected hands,” Doctor Brand concluded. “One of the things that I find most astounding is that, though we think of the future life as something perfected, when Christ appeared to his disciples he said, “Come, look at my hands”… He carried the marks of suffering so he could continue to understand the needs of the suffering. He wanted to be forever one with us.”
As he finished, Doctor Brand looked around and saw the patients’ hands now lifted palm to palm in the Indian gesture of respect, Namaste. The hands were the same stumps, the same missing fingers and crooked claws. But the people weren’t hiding them anymore. They were held high, close to their faces, in respect for Brand, but also with a new pride and dignity…
“The Glorification of the Cross” by Adam Elsheimer
We know the story of the Passion and death of Jesus so well that we can sometimes take the details we find in the Gospels for granted. The same holds true for the symbol of the Cross. And it’s easy to be focused on what’s happening right now in our lives—our family commitments, job concerns and financial worries, the fatigue that we feel when we think about the violence, fear, and terror that dominate the news—that we lose sight of how God is present and at work in our lives and in our world, even in the dark places where death and destruction seem to be winning out.
This Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross reminds us that, in Jesus, God joined us in our very human experiences of joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, hope and fear, love and loss. And on that Cross, hanging between heaven and earth—with the nails having transformed his healing hands into crippled claws—Jesus poured out all that he was, offering everything back to the Father.
This was Jesus’ mission. Jesus came so that we could be lifted up to God. This is why it was so important for Doctor Brand to go beyond the marred and mangled hands of the Crucified Christ to remind those suffering women and men of how God used the Cross—a —as the way to show us true glory: a divine gift of life and grace that has the power to conquer death and transform the darkness of grief, decay, destruction, and death into heaven’s light.
Will human suffering continue? Yes.
Will there still be devastating earthquakes and droughts? Yes.
Yes, there will be more wars and famines. Children and the innocent will continue to suffer.
No, we have not found a way to end torture, executions, and human trafficking.
Only God knows how many people in the world live in fear.
But this feast reminds us that God has hidden the seed of divine life in our experiences of suffering, and this is the reason for our hope. We know that there is more to life and we are being invited to watch and wait, trusting that the barren wood of the tree of the Cross will bear the fruit of light and life—for us and for salvation of the whole world.
[1] This story is adapted from The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey (Zondervan, 2002).
O God, who willed that your Only Begotten Son
should undergo the Cross to save the human race,
grant, we pray,
that we, who have known his mystery on earth,
may merit the grace of his redemption in heaven.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever. Amen.
-Collect for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Homily prepared for Three Holy Women and Ss. Peter and Paul Parishes in Milwaukee, WI
