Recently I watched two television programmes about capital punishment. You may have seen them. The first was Pierrepoint, a film about Albert Pierrepoint who was one of the official executioners from 1932 - 1956. Pierrepoint became amour, if that is the right word, due to his hanging of Nazi war criminals and also because he hanged Ruth Ellis, the last woman so executed in the UK in July 1955.

The other was a programme based on the last man hanged in Crumlin Road prison. He was Robert McGladdery hanged for murder of 20^th December 1961. What was different about this hanging was that capital punishment had been abolished in the rest of the UK but not in Northern Ireland. The hangman in this case was Harry Allen, reputed to wear a bow tie for the occasion.

Capital punishment is a grisly business and yet we seem to be fascinated by the subject.

One of the more gruesome of London’s many tourist attractions is the London Dungeon. This world famous museum is crammed with instruments of torture. Here you will find every conceivable device used over the centuries to inflict pain, humiliation and death on victims both guilty and innocent of any crime: a vivid illustration of what the poet Robert Burns referred to as ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. Or to be politically correct if less poetic, peoples inhumanity to people.

We may shudder at this fascination with the gruesome and the violent. And yet we are here today to ‘celebrate’ one of the most vicious forms of torture, one of the most dreadful means of execution, ever known. The cross. And we call it holy.

Why? Jesus reminds us why, in one of the most treasured verses from Christian Scripture, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life’.(John 3:16) - a verse more widely memorised perhaps than any other. It is comforting, familiar, much loved, yet when we consider what lies behind that simple word ‘gave’, we must indeed shudder.

There is huge pain here. Pain for God. God the Father grieving sorely as his beloved Son made the ultimate sacrifice, and God in Jesus hanging there on the cross himself, enduring the pain: physical, emotional, spiritual. And why did it happen? Jesus explains the reasons when we read in the gospel according to John, ‘No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life’.

Here we have Jesus referring Nicodemus to the story of the people of Israel wandering in the wilderness and when they began to moan about the lack of food (Numbers 21: 4-9). No matter that God’s intervention had freed them from slavery in Egypt; they were still slaves to sin, questioning God’s wisdom. They spoke not only against Moses but against God. When poisonous snakes appeared in the wilderness, biting and killing many of the people, the enormity of their sin struck them and they turned to Moses, begging him to pray to the Lord on their behalf.

Despite their sin and their grumbling, God provided a remedy for their immediate affliction, a remedy that looked just like the cause - a figure of a serpent lifted high for them to look at, and be healed.

Jesus draws a parallel. For people had continued to sin and to grumble against God ever since that time. Sinful fallen humanity had drifted away from the holy one who loved them so much: the gap between them seemed unbreachable. A God who loved us less might have given up on us altogether. Instead, God provided another remedy. Lifted up on the cross, Jesus would look like any other sinful human being, naked, humiliated and in pain. In human likeness, in human form, he humbled himself, and as a human absorbed our sins - yet destroyed them, for he was still God, our loving and self giving God.

Son of Man, Son of God. Representative human yet divine. Not just a cure, as in the wilderness, saving people’s lives…. But promising eternal life: that the world might be saved through him, brought back into the loving relationship with a Holy God for which we were created.

That is why we can call the cross ’holy’ or as the familiar hymn puts it: wondrous. WE sing that we survey the wondrous cross. We look at it as the people in the wilderness looked on the bronze serpent to be healed. Look at the cross. There is huge pain there - but there is also huge love.

So today is the feast day of the Holy Cross. In the Western Church it is called, in latin, ‘Exaltatio Sanctae Crucis; literally meaning, ‘Raising aloft the Holy Cross’. In the Anglican communion the feast is simply called Holy Cross Day, a name also used by the Lutheran Church.

The feast commemorates the finding of the true cross in 325AD by St Helena, the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, during a pilgrimage she made to Jerusalem. The site had been desecrated over the years so Helena had it restored and by order of Helena and Constantine a church was built on the site, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Church was dedicated nine years later, with a portion of the true cross placed inside.

In 614, that portion of the cross was carried away by the invading Persians and remained missing until it was recaptured by the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius in 628AD. The portion of the cross was retuned the following year after having been taken to Constantinople by Heraclius.

Constantine, undisputed Emperor from 324 to 337, was the first Christian Emperor and it was he who stopped and reversed the persecutions of Diocletian.

At the battle of the Milvian Bridge, against the forces of Maxentius, in 312, Constantine dreamt of an emblem and a voice saying, ‘In hoc signo vinces’ (IN this sign you shall conquer) He ordered his soldiers to put the emblem on their shields. The emblem was the ‘Labarum’ known to us a the CHI_RHO - the first two letters of the word Christ.

The Cross became the universal symbol of Christianity, replacing the fish that had identified the earliest Christians

We are now so accustomed to the cross as a symbol of our faith that it may come as a shock to think of it in the same terms as an executioner’s axe, a guillotine, a lethal injection, hangman‘s noose. Or worse, since those methods were (or are) relatively swift, Pierrepoint hanged a man in 7.5 seconds. The lingering death of the cross was prolonged torture.

If we wear a cross, we may suddenly feel uncomfortable having the representation of an instrument of torture around our neck or pinned to the lapel of our jacket. Such discomfort is surely no bad thing, as, like making the sign of the cross, it makes us think. After all we received the sign of the cross after baptism so may it be a daily reminder of what God did for us, the extent of God’s love and forgiveness and may we consider how to respond to such love.