Earlier this week I was intrigued by the provocative question on another priest’s blog: “If the Cross is the answer, what is the question that it is answering?”[1] On Good Friday, the Cross is certainly the center of our attention. We open our hearts to it; we praise it; we bow before it; we weep over it. A brutal instrument of torture and death, more painful than a guillotine or an electric chair, the Cross has become for us a strange symbol of victory and healing. But we have an awfully hard time explaining, even on Good Friday, why Jesus had to die on it.
Over the centuries, Christians have struggled with various images that would help us to interpret Christ’s death on the Cross. Most of the images are helpful, at least to some extent, but none of them has ever been able to stand alone as the one true explanation. As we imagine Jesus hanging on the Cross, we often see him as suffering unjustly for Justice, by enduring the lashes that our sin inflicts on his innocent body, as we see all too graphically in the infamous Mel Gibson movie, “The Passion of the Christ.” We imagine a crucifix, with a pale and twisted Jesus upon it. His wounds seem to be painted a deep red that will never fade, dripping blood for eternity, his eyes cast down, alone in our rejection of him. He is the Suffering Servant, the lamb who was slain, the One who is given over to wrestle with death for the sake of us all. As our minds carve out the details of this crucifix, however, it is all too easy for Jesus’ suffering face to begin to resemble our own. When Jesus looks just like me, his voice starts to sound like my voice. The question that he answers, the question posed in his death, is then reduced to the question of my own favorite cause. The suffering of God on the cross can get lost as we contemplate the intricacies of our own pain, until we are testifying only to ourselves, to our own victimhood, to our own version of justice.
Another way to imagine Jesus on the Cross is to shut our eyes to the painful sight altogether and to envisage the clean, clear truth of the empty Cross, where the Cross answers only, “To whom is victory?” The straight, perpendicular lines of a shining golden Cross proclaim a Christ who bears witness to a cosmic Victory over Death and Sin. As we wait here in the heavy silence of Good Friday, it can be tempting to close our eyes prematurely to the darkness around us, to shut out the ugly pictures of crucifixion, and to dream only of Easter. We dream that we can rub the sticky fingerprints of humanity and history from the shiny metal of our empty cross; we try to make death a distant thing or sin a trivial thing, easily conquered by an all-powerful God, in whom everything is all worked out for us ahead of time. When we take Jesus off of the Cross too soon, however, we lose sight of the human face of Jesus, and we are left holding an empty Cross and searching the heavens for a God lost into the sky.
For me, the question that the Cross asks is neither one connected to my own personal cause nor relegated to some vague cosmic victory. In the Gospel of Peter, one of those strange Gospel texts that didn’t make it into the Bible, there is a peculiar resurrection story with a talking Cross as a character. According to this text, some Roman soldiers standing guard at Jesus’ tomb watch in amazement as two angelic figures come down from heaven, while the stone in front of the tomb rolls away on its own. The angels enter Jesus’ burial place and come out holding Jesus by the hand between them, their miraculous height reaching from the ground all the way up to heaven. Behind Jesus and the two angels, comes the Cross, following them out of the tomb. From heaven, God calls out, “Have you preached to those who sleep?” And the Cross answers, “Yes!”
“Have you preached to those who sleep?” Perhaps this is indeed the question that the Cross answers. For the author of the Gospel of Peter, of course, this question refers to the dead. “Have you descended to the dead to bring them the Good News of the victory?” the apocryphal Gospel’s author probably means. But I like to think of the question in its plainer sense. The Cross preaches to us who are sleeping like the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, oblivious to God’s presence among us, unmindful of the needs of our brothers and sisters, unaware of the glory of God that surrounds us. We have fallen asleep on our watch, and we are sleeping so soundly that it takes the profound shock of the Cross to wake us up. Jesus’ teachings, Jesus’ healing deeds … we tend to sleep through them with only a grimace or a twitch of acknowledgement. Yet the horror and absurdity of the Cross opens our eyes, opens them to look straight into the eyes of God, into suffering eyes that are imploring us to look at each other, to look at and to recognize our new mothers, sons, brothers, and sisters standing with us around that terrible Cross.
Imagine on the empty altar before us not a bloody crucifix or an empty golden monument, but a giant Cross of glass, a mysterious glass that reflects like a mirror the loving eyes of Jesus, surrounded by the reflection of a collage of human eyes of all shapes, colors, and sizes, eyes that are open and awake to life and death, awake to one another, awake to the love that God pours out into Creation. Open eyes that meet in the Cross. “Have you preached to those who sleep?” asks the voice from heaven. And the Cross answers, “Yes!”
[1] Tony Jones, quoted by Nick Knisely in “Entangled States,” https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/13664cf2f27964ef
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