The Universal Exaltation of the Life-Creating Cross

Happy Feast Day! Today is the Feast of the Universal Exaltation of the Life-Giving Cross (one of the Twelve Great Feasts of the Orthodox Church). Below is the Epistle reading for this Feast and, followng that, an exerpt of a paper I wrote. (I apologize for the footnotes not posting. I don't know how to fix this problem.)

Corinthians 1:18-24 (Epistle)
18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
19 For it is written:
20 Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?
21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.
22 For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom;
23 but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness,
24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

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The Universal Exaltation of the Life-Creating Cross (September 14)
The placement of this feast in the church calendar# has been a cause of no small amount of discussion. Why in early September? Wouldn’t it make more sense for this feast to occur closer to Pascha, when the Church celebrates the destruction of death? The best answer I have read comes from the pen of a monk of St. Tikhon’s monastery…“Truly, the Nativity of the Theotokos was seen as the beginning of our salvation, and the Cross is seen as the culmination of our salvation.”# Therefore, the two feasts are placed close to each other.
We find the origin of this feast sometime after A.D. 335 but before A.D. 347#. The historical accidents of the Feast, as reflected in the Icon are the raising of the Cross before a crowd of people by the Bishop of Jerusalem. It is thought that the Cross was presented to the people at the time of the dedication of the Basilica of the Resurrection, which temple is represented in the background Icon#.
But the date, location, and occasion of the elevation of the Cross are not the point of the Feast or the Icon of the Feast. The elevation of the Cross is a universal phenomenon. The Church in all places and at all times looks to the Cross as “the weapon of peace”# which grants victory over the adversary. This universality is seen in an interesting version of this Icon that is in the nave of Holy Trinity Cathedral in San Francisco. At first glance it looks like any copy of the Icon of the Exaltation of the Cross. But upon closer inspection we see that the bishop lifting the Life Creating Cross is not the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Instead, he is the Patriarch of Moscow. And the crowd of people before whom he is raising the Cross is not the population of Jerusalem. It is the sacred throng of the Holy Martyrs of the communist persecution; St. Benjamin, the Royal Martyrs, St. Elizabeth, and tens of thousands of other bishops, children, priests, nuns, monks, lay men and women, all are looking to the Cross exalted by the Patriarch. And each of them is holding a small cross in his right hand. They saw the Cross that was lifted up before them and they embraced it. They exalted it not just at a Feast once a year, but in their hearts. They followed Jesus to Calvary and they received the “invincible trophy#”.