Tradition
credits Constantine's mother Saint Helena with the discovery of the buried
cross of Jesus during the second quarter of the 4th century in Jerusalem.
Immediately this relic became the object of tender devotion and lavish ritual.
The pilgrim nun Egeria has left us a vivid account of the ritual for exposition
and the procession to venerate the cross on Good Friday in Jerusalem. The true
cross became a nexus of holiness, sacred presence and healing. Egeria even
writes of one overzealous devotee caught biting off a chunk of the cross during
the Good Friday Liturgy.
The Fathers of the Church loved to find in every reference to wood or tree, staff, rod or ark in the Hebrew Scriptures a type of the cross of Christ. Cyril of Jerusalem declares, "Life ever comes from wood!" Paulinus of Nola chants to the cross, "You have become for us a ladder for us to mount to heaven." And in an anonymous Easter homily inspired by Hippolytus, the tree of the cross reverses the destruction wrought by the tree of Eden: “For me this tree is a plant of eternal health. I feed on it; by its roots I am rooted; by its branches I spread myself; I rejoice in its dew; the rustling of its leaves invigorates me...I freely enjoy its fruits which were destined for me from the beginning. It is my food when I am hungry, a fountain for me when I am thirsty; it is my clothing because its leaves are the spirit of life.” Pascha IV
The poetic intuition of the Fathers found beautiful expression in the splendid processional hymns of Venantius Fortunatus. The Pange Lingua written to celebrate the reception of relics of the true cross by Queen Radengunde at Poitiers in 569 addresses the cross directly:
The Fathers of the Church loved to find in every reference to wood or tree, staff, rod or ark in the Hebrew Scriptures a type of the cross of Christ. Cyril of Jerusalem declares, "Life ever comes from wood!" Paulinus of Nola chants to the cross, "You have become for us a ladder for us to mount to heaven." And in an anonymous Easter homily inspired by Hippolytus, the tree of the cross reverses the destruction wrought by the tree of Eden: “For me this tree is a plant of eternal health. I feed on it; by its roots I am rooted; by its branches I spread myself; I rejoice in its dew; the rustling of its leaves invigorates me...I freely enjoy its fruits which were destined for me from the beginning. It is my food when I am hungry, a fountain for me when I am thirsty; it is my clothing because its leaves are the spirit of life.” Pascha IV
The poetic intuition of the Fathers found beautiful expression in the splendid processional hymns of Venantius Fortunatus. The Pange Lingua written to celebrate the reception of relics of the true cross by Queen Radengunde at Poitiers in 569 addresses the cross directly:
Faithful
cross, O Tree all beauteous
Tree all
peerless and divine!
Not a grove on
earth can show us
Such a leaf
and flower as thine.
The lovely Vexilla Regis hails
the cross as a triumphant emblem of victory:
The royal
banners forward go,
The cross
shines forth in mystic glow,
Where he as
man who gave us breath,
Now bows
beneath the yoke of death.
On this Feast
of the Triumph of the Cross, we rejoice for the cross is the place where Jesus
gave himself completely to us, there he shed his precious blood to free us from the
inevitably of unending death.
