A Dedication, a Relic and a Recovery

The Exaltation of the Holy Cross, on 14 September, celebrates the cross of Christ itself, and its date is tied to a building. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, raised by Constantine over the traditional sites of the crucifixion and tomb, was dedicated on 13 September 335, and the cross was shown to the people on the following day; the tradition of Helena, Constantine's mother, finding the relic of the true cross belongs to this setting. The feast keeps the memory of that showing-forth.

A second event attached itself to the day. In the early seventh century the Persians captured Jerusalem and carried off the relic; the Byzantine emperor Heraclius recovered it and, by tradition, restored it to Jerusalem around 630. The feast came to commemorate both the original exaltation and this recovery. In the East it is one of the twelve Great Feasts, kept with a strict fast and the bringing-out of a cross for veneration amid basil; in the West it gives its name to a season and to religious orders and it frames the theology of the cross as the "tree of life" and instrument of triumph rather than only of suffering.