Word on Fire is brought to you by Catholic cemeteries, serving the Chicago area since 1837.

This is Cardinal Francis George, and I invite you to join me for the next few minutes to reflect with Father Robert Barron on the Word of God, which is the Word on Fire.

Father Barron will challenge us to open our hearts to the Word on Fire, which is God's Word of Love for each of us.

If our hearts are open, the Lord can change and transform us, who we might speak with love about the one who is love.

The Archdiocese of Chicago, through the generosity of Sacred Heart Parish and Winetka, now presents the Word on Fire.

Peace be with you.

Friends, how strange this feast would have sounded to someone in the ancient world.

We're celebrating this Sunday, the feast of the exaltation of the cross, the triumph of the cross.

This would have been for ancient people precisely analogous to someone speaking today of the triumph of the electric chair, or the triumph and exaltation of the news.

The cross terrified people in ancient Greco-Roman times, and that was the entire point of it.

The cross was, if you want, state-sponsored terrorism.

A form of capital punishment reserved for those who had in the most egregious ways undermined the authority of the Roman state.

People condemned to this death, were stripped of their clothes in order to humiliate them, then either tied or nailed to a cross, and essentially left very slowly and painfully to die, fully exposed to the glare of the public.

The Romans always made sure that crosses were visible erected at very public places.

The whole idea was that people would watch you as you died in this terribly humiliating and painful way.

What caused death on the cross? A very gradual process of asphyxiation, as the victim struggled to raise himself up to breathe.

What was happening was you were being very slowly and painfully suffocated.

If one was nailed to the cross, this process became unspeakably painful as well.

Think of as you're rocking your body up and down precisely on these nails that are in extremely sensitive parts of the body.

Victims were known to linger on the cross for days.

That's why, by the way, Pilate is so surprised when he learns that Jesus had died after only a few hours on the cross.

People would spend days sometimes.

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