On the Death of Christ on the Cross

This deep, beautiful reflection on the death of Christ by my friend and colleague Chris is a must-read for the Three Days leading up to Easter. An excerpt:

It seems to me that Christ without a cross dies twice, as I said above: his actual death, and the death of his relevance to us as Christians and to our or any culture, time or place. Our culture is not exclusively Christian, but it is one to which we might share a word from this perspective of death and resurrection, and at that a word of hope. Jesus without death is Jesus without resurrection is Jesus without hope.

There is an odd sense in which his writing gives thoughts and words to the spiritual and emotional reality I tried to evoke last night in our Good Friday service. It was as solemn and unidirectionally pointed toward the cross as any worship I had been a part of, and I hope the assembly was able to enter into this place of loss and emptiness and yearning as I was.

During the Three Days my sermons tend to become much more scripted than usual, and as such I suppose I could share a nearly-complete version of my Good Friday reflection. It was not a sermon, but an impressionistic reflection on the meaning of the sign of the cross we Christians make on our bodies.

The cross.

The ultimate Roman weapon of death,

tortuous, painful, public, shameful death,

Has become the sign of our faith.

What must it have meant for the first Christians to mark themselves with this sign? 

Try to imagine how radical it was for the first Christians who made that sign on their bodies. It’s the sign of death! Public, painful, tortuous, humiliating death!

It’s like if the French in the 19^th century marked themselves with the sign of the guillotine. Or if New Englanders in the 17^th century marked themselves with the sign of the burning stake. Today there is nothing like it for us. Would it be like marking ourselves with the sign of the lethal injection, or the electric chair? But those are neither public nor so tortuously painful? Marking ourselves with the sign of the waterboard? On TV?

What does it mean for us to mark ourselves with the sign of the cross?

How boldly does that symbol tell the story of our faith?

By making the sign of the cross on our bodies we are saying that in Jesus Christ,

God has experienced painful human death,

and that we dare to follow Christ into the same.

All that we have, all that we are as Christians comes to us through the cross, through this sign of hatred and death so inverted that is has become something else entirely.

The cross has become the most powerful possible symbol of

rejection of human power,

rejection of selfishness,

rejection of vanity or money or fame or even security.

When we make the sign of the cross on our bodies,

we proclaim, radically, boldly, against all odds,

that we trust God enough to dare to follow Christ through death.

We trust that even this most public, painful death is not the end of God’s story with us.

We trust that in Jesus Christ God will be our bridge across death,  through this Friday we call “Good,” through the Saturday we call “Holy” to the night of the Vigil of that which changes everything.  

Tomorrow we return to hear the rest of what it means for us to mark our bodies with the sign of the cross.