The Wrong Way Up: Hypsoo, the Cross, and the Idol That Cannot Save

There is a feast on the church calendar that I think is genuinely strange, and this past Monday was it. September 14. Holy Cross Day.

Sit with what that is for a second. Most days on the calendar belong to a person, an apostle or a martyr or a mother. A few belong to an event. This one belongs to an object, and the object is a piece of Roman execution equipment. The cross gets its own day, with its own appointed readings and its own collect, the way Peter and Paul do.

Try the same move with anything modern and listen to how it sounds. A feast of the electric chair. The Solemnity of the Firing Squad.

It should be repulsive. And for a long time it was.

Alexamenos worships his god

There is a piece of graffiti scratched into a wall on the Palatine Hill in Rome, from somewhere around the year 200. A figure hangs on a cross, and the figure has the head of a donkey. Off to the side a man stands with his hand raised toward it. Underneath, in scrawled Greek with the spelling wrong: Alexamenos worships his god.

Somebody drew that to make fun of a Christian who worked in the building.

Here is the part that gets me. That mocking cartoon is roughly two hundred years older than the earliest Christian artwork we have of the crucifixion. Two centuries in which the people who believed the cross saved the world would not draw it, and the people who thought it was ridiculous drew it immediately.

That is what the symbol was. A punchline about losing. And somewhere along the line it went from the worst thing you could put a man on to the thing people wear around their necks.

A feast most of us missed

Holy Cross Day landed on a Monday this year, which means most of us were not in a church for it. But it comes with its own appointed readings, and they are worth pulling out: Isaiah 45:21-25, Psalm 98, Philippians 2:5-11 and John 12:31-36a.

Here is the thread through them, and it will sound like a contradiction until it doesn't. Every one of these readings is about being lifted up. And every one of them means something close to the opposite of what we mean by it.

Lifted up, both ways at once

Start with John, because John hands us the word. Jesus says, "And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." Then the gospel writer does something he almost never does. He steps in and explains the line: "He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die."

So we are told, flatly, that being lifted up here means being nailed to a beam and raised off the ground.

John hears Jesus use it and knows both meanings are running. The lifting up is the execution and the enthronement in a single motion. There is no shameful part followed later by a glorious part. The cross is the promotion.

And notice what sits three verses earlier, at the top of the appointed reading, because it is the same idea from the other direction: "Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out." Cast out. Thrown down. One man goes up on a post and the powers of the world come down. That is the whole feast in one sentence.

It is also why the crowd in the next verse is baffled. They have heard the Messiah remains forever, so how can he say the Son of Man has to be lifted up? They hear both meanings in the word too. They just cannot get them into the same person.

The hymn shaped like a V

Philippians 2 is almost certainly older than the letter it is sitting in. Most scholars think Paul is quoting a hymn the churches were already singing, which means people sang these lines before anybody wrote a life of Jesus.

And it has a shape. If you charted it, it would look like a V. It starts high, at the top of the left arm, and then every line takes a step down.

Step down: "Though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave." Emptied himself is kenoō, where we get the word kenosis. To pour a container out until there is nothing in it.

Step down again: "He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death."

And then the last step, the one that lands on the floor of the poem: "even death on a cross."

That phrase is the bottom of the V, and here is why it matters. Everything above it is bad but conceivable. A god becoming a man, a man dying. That is tragedy, and the ancient world had a category for tragedy. "Even death on a cross" is the sentence that would have made a first-century listener physically wince. Crucifixion in Roman law was for slaves and rebels. It was designed to be public and slow and to strip a man of every last piece of standing before he died. Cicero said the word itself should be kept away from a Roman citizen's ears. Execution was only part of it. The empire was announcing that this person counted for nothing.

That is the floor. There is no lower step available. Some scholars think Paul added that phrase himself, that it breaks the rhythm of the hymn he is quoting and he wedged it in because the church was already starting to sand the edges off. I do not know whether that is right. But it reads exactly like a man interrupting a beautiful song to say: and don't forget how he actually died.

Then the hymn turns and the right arm goes up. "Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name."

Which is the part of the shape that is not really a V. A V comes back up to where it started. This one does not. The right arm goes higher than the left arm began. He ends up above the height he emptied himself out of. And look at the hinge word between the halves: therefore. God exalts him because of the descent. The bottom was the road.

Psalm 98 does the same work quietly. "Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things. With his right hand and his holy arm has he won for himself the victory." That is a battle psalm. Trumpets, the horn, a king coming home with an army behind him. And the church assigns it to the day we look at a man executed as a criminal. Somebody made that pairing on purpose. It is a claim about what winning turned out to be.

Can it save you?

Look at the verse sitting just before the Isaiah reading starts. "They have no knowledge, those who carry about their wooden idols, and keep on praying to a god that cannot save."

That is the setup for everything after it. Isaiah is standing in front of people who have made something, called it a god, and arranged their lives around it. And he does not argue about whether it is real. He asks one question.

Can it save you?

That is the whole test. Never mind whether it is powerful or impressive. Can it save you.

So run it. Once a year a magazine publishes a ranked list of human beings, in order, by net worth. It runs as news. We call the men at the top titans. We call them visionaries, which used to be a word for prophets. We shape our common life around them, where people work, what gets built, which towns live and die, and their position on the list moves by the hour.

I am not going to be coy about what that is. That is a list of gods, and we pray at it. And Isaiah's question is the only one worth putting to it. Can it save you? Ask the men on the list. Not one of them has bought a single hour past his allotment. An idol that cannot save is a thing you find out about at the very end, and by then you have spent your life on it.

The room you just walked into

I could stop there. It is satisfying to stop there. But that list is a mirror. Nobody builds a god he does not already worship in miniature, and the list is only news because we already believe what it assumes: that human beings can be put in a line from most to least, and that the line tells you something true about them.

You do not need the magazine to run one. There is a shorter version in every room you walk into. Who got asked to speak. Who gets deferred to when the table disagrees. Whether you are the one being introduced or the one doing the introducing. None of that is written down anywhere. All of it is known.

A hundred years ago your standing was mostly settled by two hundred people who had known you your whole life and had long since made up their minds about you. That was a hard ceiling and probably an unfair one. But it closed. Now the comparison set is everybody, and the list never closes. And it only knows one direction. Up is good, down is failure, and the whole logic is: get lifted, stay lifted, don't slip.

Then here comes this feast, on a Monday, with a hymn from the first century saying the highest thing that ever happened went straight down.

And it is not down as a strategy. I have heard it preached that way, and I have certainly thought about it that way. Humble yourself now, get exalted later, the meek shall inherit, hang in there. That version is still the machine. That is just taking the long way to the top. The hymn is stranger than that. He emptied himself. There is no calculation anywhere in the sentence. He did not play the position well. He let go of the position.

Which is why the cross ends idolatry instead of adding to it. An idol is something you climb toward. It sits above you, it demands the ascent, and it cannot save you because it has never once come down. Isaiah's people were carrying theirs. You have to carry an idol, it cannot walk.

This one came down on his own feet, all the way to the floor, and got carried out.

Two things to try

First, catch yourself measuring. Once today, notice the moment it happens. The small flicker when somebody else gets praised. The sentence you were quietly composing to establish that you had also done the thing. Or just the scan of the room on the way in. Don't stop it. Name it, out loud if you are alone: I'm checking my altitude. That phrase is accurate and slightly ridiculous, and slightly ridiculous is what breaks the spell.

Second, go down an inch on purpose. Something small, and unrecorded. Take the job nobody wants. Apologize first, before you have established that it was mostly the other person's fault. Let somebody else tell the story at dinner and don't add the better version you were holding. The rule is that nobody finds out. If it gets seen, it counts as a climb, and the machine takes it back.

That is the actual discipline of this feast. Anybody can admire the cross. The feast is descending an inch, in private, where there is no return on it.

Walk while you have the light

John does not end on the lifting up. He ends with a clock. "The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you."

The verb is walk. Move your feet while it is still bright enough to see the ground.

And that is the thing about a feast for an execution device. It only makes sense from the far side, once you know how the story turned out. From inside Friday it looked like the end of everything, and the people standing there were not being stupid. They were reading the evidence correctly. They just did not have Sunday yet.

Which means some of what is happening to you right now, the part that feels like losing altitude, you are currently seeing from inside Friday.

You don't have to be able to read it yet. You just have to keep walking while it is light.