Over recent years the Church’s focus of attention in the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross has shifted away from the finding of a particular relic and has settled rather more on the concrete reality of the cross in the life of a believer right now. The simple fact is that burdens, problems, sometimes even outright hardship, are a reality for everyone.

Those two words, “cross” and “believer” really point the way beneath the surface of experience. In the life of a believer, nothing means simply what it feels like. Everything means what Christ says it means. Perhaps that is also the first thing to be said about hardship in the life of a believer. In the light of faith, it is not simply a burden. It is, in fact, a cross. There is a world of difference between simply enduring, simply bearing up under hardship, and actively carrying a cross. The cross is a uniquely, mysteriously, Christian burden. It is hardship with a point. Suffering that leads somewhere means something.

Christ began to carry his cross the moment he decided that the value of his mission, the goodness of what he was sent to do, far outweighed any consideration of whether or not that mission made him popular, acceptable and powerful, or made him an outcast, a figure to be scorned, ridiculed, and finally killed. For Christ, that was the heart of what the Cross meant. Fidelity. Simply never to give up, never to sway from the course known to be the will of the Father, no matter what anyone else did or said, no matter how it may have felt at the moment.

In the life of Christ, the cross was the focal point of his total, unconditional acceptance of the human condition. He could have avoided that easily enough. There are hundreds of ways to hide from the woundedness of the human condition and always have been.

Acceptance of the human condition, in all its woundedness, is part of what carrying the cross means.

In the life of Christ, the cross was the focal point of forgiveness as well. It was in that final, fullest possible acceptance of the woundedness of human beings, even of his executioners, that Christ on the cross brought to his people the divinely creative power of the Father’s own forgiveness, the Father’s own promise that that woundedness just doesn’t matter.

Those who approach the burdens, the hardships in their lives, with faithfulness, with acceptance, and with forgiveness literally re-create that burden. They make of it a cross. They drain that burden of its danger, its ability to destroy them. For a believer, for those who take up a cross, the worst that any burden can ever be is heavy.