Sign of the Cross which appeared over Jerusalem
The Commemoration of the Sign of the Precious Cross which appeared in the heaven over Jerusalem
On 7 May in the year 351, in the first months of the episcopate of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, a great cross of light stood in the sky above the Holy City, reaching from Golgotha to the Mount of Olives and shining, in broad daylight, more brightly than the sun. The whole population — Christian and pagan, believer and unbeliever together — left house and workshop and ran to the church of the Anastasis in fear and thanksgiving; and the bishop wrote what he and his people had seen to the emperor Constantius in a letter which survives, one of the very few contemporary accounts of a public miracle written by an eyewitness bishop within days of the event. The Church keeps the memory of the sign every 7 May with a proper office of the Cross, reading it as a pledge that the Cross which was once the instrument of shame is now the standard of victory, "shining brighter than the sun" over the very place where it was planted.
The apparition
The event is fixed by its own primary witness. Writing to the emperor Constantius II, Cyril places it in the fifty festal days after Pascha, on the nones of May — 7 May — about the third hour of the morning, when a vast cross of light appeared in the heaven over holy Golgotha and extended as far as the Mount of Olives: not seen by one or two, but by the whole multitude of the city; not a flash quickly gone, but standing visible in the air for a space of hours, so that its light overcame the light of the sun. The populace poured together into the church of the Holy Resurrection — young and old, men and women, "of every age and condition," Christians and Jews and pagans alike, natives and pilgrims — confessing with one voice Jesus Christ the only-begotten Son of God. The historian Sozomen, writing in the following century, records the same wonder and adds that many unbelievers were converted by it and came to baptism.
The setting explains a great deal of the letter's tone. Jerusalem in 351 had only lately been given the physical shape it still keeps in the Church's memory: the Anastasis complex raised by Constantine over Golgotha and the Sepulchre had been dedicated in 335, and the finding of the wood of the Cross under Constantine's mother Helen was within living memory. Cyril writes as the bishop of a city that had, in one generation, become the visible centre of the mystery of the Cross; and he tells the emperor that this new sign in the heavens surpasses even the earlier grace of the finding of the Cross, since what was then brought up out of the earth was now displayed in the sky.
The letter to Constantius
The Letter to Constantius of Cyril of Jerusalem is a short document of great value: a bishop's report of a miracle, addressed to the reigning emperor, composed while the witnesses were still alive and the whole city could be called to testify. Cyril offers the apparition to the emperor as a sign of divine favour upon his reign — Constantius was at that moment moving against the usurper Magnentius, whom he would defeat at Mursa in September of the same year — and draws from it the lesson that the emperor should honour God who had granted the sign. The letter's closing doxology, in a form some manuscripts give in strongly Nicene terms, has been suspected of later retouching, since Cyril's relations with the Arianising court were delicate and he was himself soon accused and exiled; but the substance of the letter, and above all its account of the cross of light, is not seriously doubted. It is preserved among the very small body of Cyril's writings that has come down to us beside the Catechetical Lectures, and it is the reason this commemoration rests on firmer ground than most wonders of the fourth century.
The wonder and its meaning
The Church's reading of the sign is set out in the hymns rather than in argument. The apparition is understood as a public and daylight vindication of the Cross: the same wood by which the world was saved, once the mark of a criminal's death, now written across the sky over the place of the Skull for a whole city to see. Two associations were immediate. The first was with the vision granted to Constantine the Great before the Milvian Bridge — a cross seen in the heavens with the promise of victory — so that the sign of 351 could be read as the confirmation to the son of what had been shown to the father, and the proper apolytikion accordingly asks Christ to keep "our faithful kings" in peace by the power of the Cross. The second was with the finding of the Cross itself, and with the theme of the Elevation: the fourth century gave the Church three distinct Cross feasts — the finding, the elevation, and this apparition — and the Byzantine books draw freely on the hymnography of one for another. The Slavonic tradition, elaborating the account, remembered the cross as standing over the city for a week; Cyril's own letter says hours, and where the two differ the letter is to be preferred as the contemporary witness.
Feast and commemoration
7 May (church date; Old Calendar civil 20 May). The Greek Menaion heads the day "On the seventh of the same month, we keep the memory of the sign of the Precious Cross that appeared in heaven," and appoints a proper office of the Cross — apolytikion in the First Tone, kontakion of the Cross, canon and stichera — with which the day's saints, chief among them the martyr Acacius the Centurion, are joined. The same commemoration stands in the Slavonic books as the Appearance of the Cross of the Lord in the sky over Jerusalem in 351, with its own troparion and kontakion.
The commemoration is classed here as dominical — a feast of the Lord, kept with the Church's other feasts of the Cross (the Elevation and the mid-Lenten veneration) rather than of a saint — though it is not itself a Great Feast and carries no fast or festal rank of its own. Falling in the fifty days between Pascha and Pentecost in most years, it is normally served together with the paschal or post-paschal propers of the day, which further subordinates it; where 7 May falls in the paschal season, the resurrectional material takes precedence and the Cross is kept as the day's fixed commemoration. Because the date of Pascha varies, the position of 7 May within the season is not fixed and no seasonal rubric can be stated flatly for the day.
The feast belongs particularly to Jerusalem, whose own liturgical memory it is, and it is honoured by association with the city's bishop Cyril of Jerusalem, whose letter is its charter. Alongside it, the calendar keeps the two great Constantinian Cross memories — the finding of the Cross and the Dedication of the Anastasis — so that Golgotha is commemorated in the Byzantine year three times over.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 1
The figure of Thy Cross hath now shone forth brighter than the sun, that Cross which Thou didst stretch out from the holy mountain unto the place of the Skull, making plain thereby, O Saviour, the strength that is in it; and by it Thou hast given strength also to our faithful kings. Keep them evermore in peace, and by the intercessions of the Theotokos, O Christ our God, save us.
Kontakion — Tone 8
O thrice-blessed and all-venerable Cross, hymning thee and bowing down before thee I am now made holy; for upon thee was Christ lifted up, and saved the world. Make haste therefore and save me by thy power, and deliver me from every danger, that I may cry unto thee: Rejoice, O blessed Wood!
Original translation from the Greek
Appointed readings
Epistle — 1 Corinthians 1:18–24
18For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. 19For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. 20Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? 21For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. 22For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: 23But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; 24But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.
Gospel — John 19:6–11, 13–20, 25–28, 30–35
6When the chief priests therefore and officers saw him, they cried out, saying, Crucify him, crucify him. Pilate saith unto them, Take ye him, and crucify him: for I find no fault in him. 7The Jews answered him, We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God. 8When Pilate therefore heard that saying, he was the more afraid; 9And went again into the judgment hall, and saith unto Jesus, Whence art thou? But Jesus gave him no answer. 10Then saith Pilate unto him, Speakest thou not unto me? knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee, and have power to release thee? 11Jesus answered, Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above: therefore he that delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin. 13When Pilate therefore heard that saying, he brought Jesus forth, and sat down in the judgment seat in a place that is called the Pavement, but in the Hebrew, Gabbatha. 14And it was the preparation of the passover, and about the sixth hour: and he saith unto the Jews, Behold your King! 15But they cried out, Away with him, away with him, crucify him. Pilate saith unto them, Shall I crucify your King? The chief priests answered, We have no king but Cæsar. 16Then delivered he him therefore unto them to be crucified. And they took Jesus, and led him away. 17And he bearing his cross went forth into a place called the place of a skull, which is called in the Hebrew Golgotha: 18Where they crucified him, and two other with him, on either side one, and Jesus in the midst. 19And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. And the writing was, JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS. 20This title then read many of the Jews: for the place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city: and it was written in Hebrew, and Greek, and Latin. 25Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene. 26When Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son! 27Then saith he to the disciple, Behold thy mother! And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home. 28After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst. 30When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost. 31The Jews therefore, because it was the preparation, that the bodies should not remain upon the cross on the sabbath day, (for that sabbath day was an high day,) besought Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away. 32Then came the soldiers, and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was crucified with him. 33But when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs: 34But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water. 35And he that saw it bare record, and his record is true: and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe.
Iconography
The commemoration has no portrait but a scene, and the scene is composed with great economy: the walled city of Jerusalem below, its domes and towers drawn in the conventional shorthand of the Holy Places, and above it, spanning the sky, a great radiant cross, its arms reaching from the rock of Golgotha at one side to the summit of the Mount of Olives at the other. Below, the people are shown streaming from the gates and from among the buildings with hands raised or heads thrown back, some kneeling, and — in fuller redactions — the bishop and clergy coming out of the Anastasis with censer and cross to meet the sign. Where the image is given a Constantinian colouring, the cross may carry an inscribed legend, on the model of the vision before the Milvian Bridge. The type is close kin to the Elevation of the Cross in its composition of city, crowd and lifted Cross, and later Russian menologia place it under the seventh day of May as a small marginal scene. No pre-1900 image of this specific commemoration has been located for storage in this collection; the Menologion of Basil II, the usual first resort for the fixed year, covers only September to February and so cannot supply it.