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WEDNESDAY OF HOLY WEEK, Year A: March 19 2008

The Scandal of the Cross

One of the difficulties we come up against in trying to live our lives as Christians and make sense of them in the light of the Gospels is that we become so familiar with the language of our religion that we no longer hear what it is saying. We become so accustomed to the ideas, the concepts, the words, that we no longer consciously register their meaning. Despite ourselves, we become deaf: we no longer have 'ears to hear'.

There's nothing we can do about this except to recognise that this is so, and ask the Holy Spirit to give us the gift of ears, so that perhaps just once in a while a familiar word or phrase from our religious vocabulary and discourse might light up with fresh meaning and strike us with fresh force.

Take for instance Our Lord's injunction recorded for us in the Gospels and repeated more than once, that 'if any one wants to become my disciple, he must take up his Cross, and follow me'.

St Paul — who wrote his letters before the Gospels were written (so presumably was drawing on teaching which was current among the early Christians) — writes in his letter to the Galatians, 'GOD forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world'. To the Christians in Corinth he writes 'We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles'. Furthermore he says that he has only one ambition, and that is to know'Jesus Christ, and Him crucified [...] sharing His sufferings [...] becoming like Him in His death'. And in the Acts of the Apostles we read how in the first sermons preached by the Apostles in the early days of the Church, there is the repeated emphasis on that fact that Jesus [the Messiah] had been crucified. There was no attempt to hide the fact or play it down.

1. We hear those words, and others like them, read in church.
2. We read them for ourselves in our own private Bible reading.
3. In our hymns we sing about Jesus being crucified.
4. In the Creed we assert that He suffered under Pontius Pilate and was crucified.
5. And the very heart of our worship, in the great Thanksgiving Prayer in the Eucharist, the fact of Jesus' death by crucifixion is given central prominence, together with His Resurrection.

We hear all that, we say and sing all that, but because it is all so familiar to us we don't register the enormity and the scandal of it.

But for those who first heard those words referring to the Cross and to the crucifixion of Jesus, for those living in the early centuries of the Christian Church, such language would have been deeply shocking, highly offensive, and utterly distasteful and revolting in an way and to an extent which we can scarcely imagine.

For those early Christians, living during the first three hundred years of the Church's existence, the Cross and crucifixion represented total and absolute degradation.

It was a method of execution initially invented by the Persians and adopted by the Romans to be used by them for dispatching those who were the utter dregs of society — run-away slaves and criminals who were not Roman citizens, the despised nobodies of this world, the riff-raff, the scum, those who didn't matter, who didn't count — those who did matter, those who were 'somebody', were executed with a sword.

There's nothing in our modern culture that is remotely equivalent. Crucifixion was public, and it was a cruel and ghastly and hideous way of being put to death. It was unimaginably agonising and horrible: the relentless, searing pain; the smashed bones, the torn flesh where the nails went through; the hideously contorted limbs; the scorching sun; the intolerable thirst; the flies; death throes that could last for days.

And yet right from the beginning this brutal spectacle of utter degradation and dehumanisation with which the first Christians would be familiar was accepted readily by them as the sign of their faith. What the world regarded with horror and loathing was for the first believers the gracious sign of the GOD who loves us so much that He sent His Son to save us from the power of darkness and evil. What the world regarded as ignominious, shameful, indecent and obscene, was for Christians the sign of salvation and of triumph.

From the beginning the Cross has been the most honoured and sacred symbol of our faith. It is traced on our foreheads in Baptism, and in the Sacrament of Holy Unction.

We make the sign of the Cross on ourselves, and over people, and over things, when we bless them.

We raise the Cross on the rooftops of certain buildings to show that this is a special place, consecrated to the worship of GOD.

We place the Cross in honoured places in our churches, and in our homes. It glitters on the crowns of monarchs; it is carried at the head of processions. Artists depict it in paintings, carve it in stone and wood, cast it in metal — though their representations of it cannot begin to convey the extreme agony of the real thing. All those crucifixes are sanitised representations, images of a reality which we would find unbearable and impossible to live with.

Sadly, it has even been turned into a trinket, into an article of adornment and decoration, worn thoughtlessly and careless, and often (I suspect) as a kind of charm against bad luck.

The Cross has been put to many uses, but for Christians who try to take their faith seriously, the Cross is the radical challenge which we cannot avoid or evade. The Cross, and all that it represents, makes its claims on us, makes its demands of us, for it is the sign of our discipleship: 'if you would be my disciple, take up the Cross and follow me' — the sign of our discipleship and the cost.

And how do we do that? How do we 'take up the Cross and follow' Him? What is the Cross? Where do we find it, and how do we recognise it?

The fact is that we don't have to go looking for the Cross and search it out. The Cross is already here. We don't have to invent the Cross. We don't have to devise it or manufacture it. The Cross is already present; it waits for us to recognise it and accept it, and carry it with Jesus.

The Cross is quite simply the most difficult thing in one's life at any one time. It is not necessarily something dramatic or spectacularly unusual. Indeed the Cross is usually very ordinary and commonplace.

And the Cross is always something given in the ordinary commonplace circumstances of my ordinary everyday life. If it is something which I have devised or constructed for myself, it is not the true Cross.

Perhaps there's a particular situation — at home, in the family, at work, with friends — which is difficult, causing my concern, and requiring my attention, energy, and I'd rather not have to deal with it.

Perhaps it's the boredom, the monotony, the pointlessness of my life, of my work. Perhaps there's a particular person whom I find tiresome and trying.

Or perhaps it's something to do with myself: infirmity or sickness, a feeling of being taken for granted, or of being misunderstood; perhaps it's anxiety about the future, fear of loneliness, of sickness, of diminishment and disability; perhaps it's a feeling of disappointment about myself, about the way life has turned out; a sense of inadequacy, a feeling of failure.

Whatever it is, and however it comes, it is quite simply the most difficult thing in my life right now: that is the Cross. It is not dramatic, it is very ordinary, but it pins me down — nails me down — and causes me discomfort, distress, anguish. I don't have to be dramatic about it. But whatever it is, and however it comes, it is to be accepted — not grudgingly, not in the spirit of self-pity or complaint, but in the faith that this is Christ sharing His Passion with me, uniting me with Himself in His offering to the Father for the healing of the world.