On September 14, much of the Christian Church celebrated the Feast of the Holy Cross. In the Eastern Church, where much of my early liturgical formation took place, it is one of the great feasts of the year. The Cross is carried solemnly into the midst of the church, lifted high before the people, surrounded with flowers, hymns are sung, and the faithful come forward to venerate it. In Western Christianity, the feast has taken somewhat different forms, but the central image remains the same: the Cross is lifted up.
I have no desire to abandon this feast or the tradition that has handed it down to us. But fidelity to tradition cannot mean pretending that traditions exist outside history. Words acquire associations. Symbols are used and misused. Prayers are heard differently after centuries of experience than they were when first written. To receive a tradition faithfully is therefore to know something of what has happened to it along the way: how it has been interpreted, how it has changed, how it has sometimes been used to bless things contrary to the Gospel, and what its language and symbols might communicate to our neighbors today.
Tradition, at its best, is not the preservation of something beneath glass. It is a living inheritance entrusted to us. We receive it from those who came before, examine it in the light of the Gospel, repent where repentance is necessary, and hand it on again. The question before us is not whether we should abandon the Feast of the Holy Cross, but whether we can enter more deeply into its mystery by asking what, exactly, we are exalting when we exalt the Cross.
The Cross We Inherited
Before it became a Christian symbol, the cross belonged to empire. Rome did not crucify people simply to kill them. Crucifixion was public. It was humiliating. It was deliberately brutal. The condemned person was displayed before the community as a warning. The cross communicated the power of the state and the consequences of challenging the order it maintained.
Empire, the state, killed Jesus.
And the cross was one of the instruments through which empire demonstrated its power to subjugate. Christianity makes an astonishing claim about what happened next. Jesus transformed the meaning of the symbol. The instrument intended to communicate fear became a symbol of hope. The instrument of humiliation became a proclamation of human dignity. The instrument of bondage became a symbol of freedom. The instrument of violence became, ultimately, a revelation of love.
Rome raised crosses to demonstrate what power could do to a human being. Christians began raising the Cross because Jesus showed what love could do. But history did not stop there.
As Christianity moved from the margins of the Roman world toward its centers of political power, the Cross moved with it. The feast we celebrate on September 14 developed around the dedication of Constantine’s great church complex in Jerusalem and the public elevation and veneration of the Cross. Traditions surrounding Helena and the discovery of the True Cross became attached to it. Later, the recovery of the Cross by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius following war with the Persian Empire became part of the feast’s historical memory.
The Cross of the condemned man increasingly became associated with emperors, armies, victory, and empire.
There is a terrible irony here. The Roman Empire had used the cross as a symbol of domination. Jesus transformed it into a sign of self-giving love. And when Christians acquired political power, we sometimes began transforming it back into a symbol of domination.
There is another part of this history Christians must confront honestly. Some of the later legends surrounding the finding of the Cross developed an explicitly anti-Jewish dimension. In the Judas Kyriakos tradition, Jewish leaders supposedly possessed secret knowledge about the location of the Cross and concealed it from Helena. Judas is coerced into revealing its location and subsequently converts to Christianity. Such stories contributed to a much larger Christian imagination in which Jews became opponents of Christian truth and Christian triumph became evidence of their error.
Whatever historical distance separates us from those legends, their legacy matters. Our Jewish neighbors have experienced the Cross not only as the symbol Christians understand as redemption but sometimes as a symbol carried by people who persecuted them. Faithfulness requires us to remember both histories.
The Cross We Pray
Our liturgies preserve some of these tensions. The traditional Byzantine troparion for the feast asks God to save God’s people, bless God’s inheritance, grant victory over adversaries, and preserve the community by the power of the Cross. Historically, this prayer became closely associated with Christian empire and military victory.
The version we use at St. Nina of Georgia Orthodox Catholic Church makes a small but significant change:
“Lord, save Your people and bless Your inheritance, granting faithful people to prevail over adversities, and protecting Your world by Your Cross.”
Not adversaries. Adversities. That change matters because it changes whom—or what—we believe must be overcome.
The Roman Catholic collect prays that Christ “should undergo the Cross to save the human race.” The Episcopal collect for September 14 begins: “Almighty God, whose Son our Savior Jesus Christ was lifted high upon the cross that he might draw the whole world unto himself…”
I have prayed words like these for years. But increasingly I find myself asking what we mean when we pray them. What does it mean to “save the human race”? What does it mean for Christ to “draw the whole world unto himself”?
For much of Christian history, Christians have too easily answered those questions in terms of ourselves. The world will be Christian. Other people will become like us. Christianity will triumph. Christian civilization will expand. And when those theological assumptions become joined to political power, the distance between evangelism and domination can become dangerously small.
But perhaps we have been listening to the words “draw the whole world” without paying sufficient attention to the place from which Christ is doing the drawing. He is on the Cross. There is no army beneath him. There is no throne behind him. There is no law compelling anyone to believe. There is no sword in his hand. His arms are simply open.
Perhaps “drawing the whole world” is less about converting the whole world than it is about loving the whole world. Perhaps the universality proclaimed by the Cross is not the universality of Christian domination but the universality of divine love. There is no person beyond that love. There is no nation beyond that love. There is no race or religion beyond that love. There is no stranger, immigrant, enemy, doubter, believer, Jew, Muslim, Christian, atheist, or anyone else whom Christians are permitted to declare disposable.
And perhaps “world” should mean even more than humanity. The God revealed in Christ loves creation itself: earth and sea, creature and forest, things seen and unseen. The Cross does not give Christians possession of the world. It calls us to love and care for the world God loves.
When the Cross Becomes a Weapon
These are not merely questions about ancient empires and medieval legends. They matter urgently in our own time.
We are witnessing the rise of what is commonly called “Christian nationalism.” I put Christian in quotation marks deliberately. I find it increasingly difficult to reconcile nationalism’s need to establish boundaries between those who properly belong and those who do not with the Gospel’s call to follow the crucified Christ. But that larger argument must wait for another day.
For our purposes here, history should at least make Christians cautious whenever the Cross becomes closely associated with political power. Nationalism inevitably requires an “us.” This is our nation. Our culture. Our inheritance. Our way of life. And sooner or later, someone must become “them.”
The Cross has been here before. It has been carried before armies. It has been placed upon imperial standards. It has been invoked against Jews, Muslims, heretics, Indigenous peoples, and political enemies. Again and again, Christians have faced the temptation to turn the Cross from the place where God reveals self-giving love into a banner proclaiming our own righteousness and power.
That is why the history of September 14 matters now. The danger is not simply that someone might misunderstand an ancient hymn or an old collect. The danger is that Christians ourselves might misunderstand the Cross. Christ does not give us the Cross as a weapon with which to conquer our enemies. Christ gives us the Cross and says, “Follow me.” The distinction could hardly be greater.
The Cross is not something Christians carry against someone else. It is something we take up ourselves.
What, Then, Do We Exalt?
We can retain the ancient language of triumph, but only if we are very careful about what kind of victory we proclaim. The victory of the Cross is not Christian victory over Jews or Muslims, over secular society or another nation. It is not the victory of our political party, our culture, our church, or even our particular understanding of Christianity. The victory of the Cross is love over hatred, mercy over vengeance, freedom over domination, human dignity over degradation, reconciliation over estrangement, hope over despair, and ultimately life over death.
This changes how we understand the adversary as well. The adversary is not the person standing across from us. The adversaries are those powers within us and among us that prevent us from seeing the image of God in the person standing across from us. Hatred, fear, prejudice, greed, violence, and the desire to dominate are worthy adversaries of the Cross precisely because they diminish both the humanity of our neighbor and our own capacity to love.
This is why the Feast of the Holy Cross may be more necessary now than ever. We do not need it because Christians need another symbol around which to rally, because Christianity needs to reclaim political power, or because the Cross proves that we are right and everyone else is wrong. We need this feast because we need to stand before the Cross again and allow it to remind us what the way of Jesus looks like. We need to look carefully at the one hanging there: a condemned man, a victim of state violence, a person the machinery of empire declared disposable. Christianity makes the extraordinary claim that God is revealed there. The Cross, therefore, cannot simply be another symbol of power; it reveals an entirely different understanding of power, one expressed through vulnerability, self-giving, and love.
This is what it means to exalt the Cross. We lift it high so that we can see it, but we must resist the temptation to climb upon it and make it a throne. We cannot turn it into a sword or use it to determine who belongs and who does not. We cannot use it to sanctify empire, nation, party, race, or ideology. We must allow it to remain what Jesus made it: a sign that hatred, violence, empire, and even death itself do not have the final word. The final word belongs to love.
Perhaps, then, I can still pray that Christ might “draw the whole world unto himself,” but I need to understand those words differently. I do not pray for a world in which everyone has been made Christian, for Christian supremacy, or for the triumph of my religion over someone else’s. I pray for a world drawn toward the love revealed upon the Cross: a love that refuses to regard another human being as disposable, that seeks freedom rather than domination, and that is capacious enough to embrace neighbor and stranger, friend and enemy, humanity and creation itself.
The world does not need Christians to conquer it for Christ; the world needs Christians willing to love it as Christ did. And that brings me back to the question with which I began. What are we exalting when we exalt the Cross? If our exaltation of the Cross requires the subordination of someone else, then what we are exalting may no longer be the Cross of Jesus Christ.
Sources and Further Reading
Loraine Schneider Enlow, “Another Judas and the Cross: Pseudo-Hebrew and the Politics of Conversion in the Judas Cyriacus Legend,” Harvard Theological Review 118, no. 4, 783–806. Published online January 19, 2026. Enlow examines the Judas Cyriacus legend and its presence in Christian liturgy, hagiography, iconography, and literature, including its influence upon Western Christian attitudes toward Jews for more than a millennium.
Stephan Borgehammar, “Heraclius Learns Humility: Two Early Latin Accounts Composed for the Celebration of Exaltatio Crucis,” Millennium: Jahrbuch zu Kultur und Geschichte des ersten Jahrtausends n. Chr. 6 (2009): 145–202. Borgehammar examines early traditions surrounding Heraclius’s restoration of the Cross and their relationship to the development and spread of the September 14 feast.
Orthodox Church in America, “Elevation of the Cross,” The Orthodox Faith, Volume II: Worship. The OCA’s historical discussion describes the Feast of the Cross within the Eastern Christian Empire and notes that its troparion functioned as something akin to a “national anthem” of the Byzantine and Russian Christian empires, originally petitioning God for military victory and preservation of the empire.
Orthodox Church in America, “The Universal Exaltation of the Precious and Life-Giving Cross — Troparion & Kontakion,” September 14. The contemporary English text preserves the traditional petition asking God to grant Orthodox Christians victory “over their adversaries” and to preserve God’s habitation through the Cross.
Vatican News, “Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross,” September 14. A concise account of the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 335, the tradition surrounding Helena and the Cross, and the later recovery of the Cross following its capture by the Persians.
