Acta Apostolicae Sedis - Commentarium Officiale370

following in the great Apostle's footsteps, to strengthen you in your Christian

faith and to preach the Gospel that offers life and hope to the world.

The focus of our celebration today is the Cross of Christ. Many might be

tempted to ask why we Christians celebrate an instrument of torture, a sign

of suffering, defeat and failure. It is true that the Cross expresses all these

things. And yet, because of him who was lifted up on the Cross for our

salvation, it also represents the definitive triumph of God's love over all

the evil in the world.

There is an ancient tradition that the wood of the Cross was taken from a

tree planted by Adam's son Seth over the place where Adam was buried. On

that very spot, known as Golgotha, the place of the skull, Seth planted a seed

from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree in the midst of the

Garden of Eden. Through God's providence, the work of the Evil One would

be undone by turning his own weapons against him.

Beguiled by the serpent, Adam had foresaken his filial trust in God

and sinned by biting into the fruit of the one tree in the garden that was

forbidden to him. In consequence of that sin, suffering and death came into

the world. The tragic effects of sin, suffering and death were all too evident in

the history of Adam's descendants. We see this in our first reading today,

with its echoes of the Fall and its prefiguring of Christ's redemption.

As a punishment for their sin, the people of Israel, languishing in

the desert, were bitten by serpents and could only be saved from death by

looking upon the emblem that Moses raised up, foreshadowing the Cross that

would put an end to sin and death once and for all. We see clearly that man

cannot save himself from the consequences of his sin. He cannot save himself

from death. Only God can release him from his moral and physical enslave-

ment. And because he loved the world so much, he sent his only-begotten

Son, not to condemn the world - as justice seemed to demand - but so that

through him the world might be saved. God's only-begotten Son had to be

lifted up just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so that all who

looked upon him with faith might have life.

The wood of the Cross became the vehicle for our redemption, just as the

tree from which it was fashioned had occasioned the Fall of our first parents.

Suffering and death, which had been a consequence of sin, were to become the

very means by which sin was vanquished. The innocent Lamb was slain on the

altar of the Cross, and yet from the immolation of the victim new life burst

forth: the power of evil was destroyed by the power of self-sacrificing love.