Exaltation of the Holy Cross 2024

Published: September 14, 2024

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor preached the following homily during the Installation to Candidacy of Permanent Diaconate Mass at St. John Catholic Center in Little Rock on Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024.

Bishop Taylor

Have you ever wondered why the symbol for the medical profession is two intertwined poisonous snakes? It is called the caduceus or the shield of Aesculapius, the pagan Greco-Roman god of healing and it has its origin in the fact that most medicines are poisons taken in a dosage sufficient to kill the disease without also killing the patient.

In the Bible we see the snake in a similar light, especially as this applies to the health of our soul. By means of the snake in the Garden of Eden, the souls of Adam and Eve were poisoned, sin entered the world and these original and all subsequent sins continue to poison the human spirit to this very day.

But now in Jesus, the new Adam, we have a powerful antidote to save us from the power of the bite of sin. This antidote was prefigured already in our first reading where God cures physical snakebite by ordering Moses to make a bronze snake so that all who looked at it would be cured — I say prefigures because the true antidote for the poison of Adam’s sin wasn’t obtained until Good Friday when Jesus himself — not just some bronze image — was, as today’s Gospel says, raised up meaning “on the pole of cross”.

All who looked on the bronze snake lifted high by Moses were given a temporary reprieve from physical death by having seen it with the physical eyes of their head. But now all who look with eyes of faith on Jesus lifted high on the cross, who put their trust in him, will be given a permanent reprieve from eternal death.

But notice: the cure of our souls required not only good medicine, but also the very death of the doctor. To rid us of the poison, he had — so to speak — to suck the poison out of us, just like you suck the poison out of a snakebite victim, taking it into himself.

And now bearing this poison in his own body instead of in ours, he saw to it that it was nailed to that cross with him, inside him, so that its destructive power might die when he died, thus making his sacrificial death the medicine, the remedy by which we were healed — the triumph of the cross — our participation in Jesus’ victory over the power of sin and death which we celebrate today.