Today Pope Francis resumed his morning Masses at the Casa Santa Marta after the summer break. On the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, the Pope in his homily – Vatican Radio reports – warned against two spiritual temptations before the Cross of Christ: one is to think of a Christ without a cross, that is, to think of Him as “a spiritual teacher” while the other is that of a cross without Christ, that is, living without hope in a kind of “spiritual masochism”.
That “mystery of love” which is the Cross was at the heart of the Pope’s reflection. The liturgy speaks of it as a tree, noble and faithful. Pope Francis explained that it is not always easy to understand the cross. “Only through contemplation can we move forward in this mystery of love”, he said. And when Jesus wants to explain this to Nicodemus, as we read in today’s Gospel, He uses two verbs “up” and “down”: “Jesus came down from Heaven to bring us all up to Heaven”. “This – the Pope said – is the mystery of the cross”. Indeed, to explain this, St. Paul in the First Reading says that Jesus “humbled himself” and became obedient unto death on the cross: “This is the descent of Jesus: to the bottom, to humiliation, He emptied Himself for love, and this is why God exalted Him and made Him ascend. Only if we succeed in fully understanding this descent will we be able to understand the salvation that this mystery of love offers to us”.
But it is not easy, Pope Francis noted, because there are always temptations to only get half of the picture. So much so that St. Paul spoke strong words to the Galatians “when they succumbed to the temptation not to enter the mystery of love, but to explain it”. Just as the snake had charmed Eve and had poisoned the Israelites in the desert, so too they had been enchanted “by the illusion of a Christ without a cross or a cross without Christ”. “These are the two temptations” on which Pope Francis focused. The first is, then, that of a Christ without a cross, that is, seeing Him as “a spiritual teacher”, who makes us go forward smoothly: “A Christ without the cross who is not the Lord: He is nothing more than a teacher. Perhaps this is what Nicodemus was seeking, without knowing it. That’s one of the temptations. Yes, Jesus the good teacher, but … without the cross, Jesus. Who has charmed you with this picture? Hence Paul’s anger. Jesus Christ was not presented as the Crucified One. The other temptation is the cross without Christ, the anguish of remaining down, humbled, with the weight of sin, without hope. It’s a kind of spiritual ‘masochism’. Only the cross, but without hope, without Christ”. 
The cross without Christ would, however, be “a tragic mystery”, Pope Francis said, as the pagan tragedies: “But the cross is a mystery of love, the cross is faithful, the cross is noble. Today we can take a few minutes and ask ourselves this question: is the Crucified Christ a mystery of love to me? Do I follow a Jesus without the cross, a spiritual teacher, who fills me with consolation and good advice? Do I follow the cross without Jesus, always complaining, with this ‘masochism’ of the spirit? Do I let myself be guided by the mystery of the Lord’s humbling, total emptying of Himself and exaltation?”. And the Pope concluded with the hope that the Lord may give us the grace “ideally to understand, or at least to enter” this mystery of love: “And then with our heart, with our mind, with our body, with our whole self, we will be able to understand something”.