Sometimes I think about the cross
And shut my eyes and try to see
the cruel nails and crown of thorns
and Jesus crucified for me’
The child of that hymn is a Protestant child. If he or she were a Catholic there would no need for the effort of imagination to replay a past event. The cruel nails and crown of thorns would be all too visible, in the home, at school, in the pendant given at confirmation, and perhaps and most significantly in Church, on the rood screen or above the altar. Blood and thorns and wounds. The Catholic imagination is full of the violence and pathos of the cross the scenes all Catholics know from centuries of devotional art; the last supper, the scourging of Jesus, the pieta.
For years it was a shock to me to go into a convent or a school and see the crucifix on the wall, it was shocking that is, to my Protestant self. But I knew there was another story, for my mother had been a convert to Catholicism and I knew there were things like rosaries and stations of the cross and other horrifying and fascinating aspects of Catholic devotion. It surprised and intrigued me how easily Catholics seem to live with this daily depiction of torture. What disturbed me, was found by them to be familiar and reassuring. But of course, what was really disturbing for my Protestant self was the upsetting of the clean and empty cross; the bringing of all that suffering and pain into the present, into now, with its inescapable challenge and demand.
The crucifix makes us look on Christ’s suffering. We see him dying before our eyes. We see him offering up his life to the Father. And though this is a past event it is also an offering that is still in a sense going on. This, of course is what gives the mass its potency, to the horror of true Protestants. That self offering of Christ continues into our present and gathers us up into it. All our lives, our sins and failures, our gifts and talents. The chances we have missed, the graces we resist, Lord in this Eucharist, take and redeem’. As we look on Christ’s suffering, here, in the present, so we get an insight into the suffering of the world and whatever suffering life imposes on us. As I grew older and realised some intractable things about myself, some of the depth of childhood wounds nothing exceptional just the normal stresses and humiliations which mark us all, I found I moved quite slowly and surely from being an Anglican Protestant to being an Anglican Catholic and so took on some of the Catholic understanding of the cross. Crucifixes, rosaries etc became familiar.
Then I began to respond to the crucifix, as something profoundly comforting, strengthening. Those who suffer mental or physical pain are simply helped by knowing that Christ went through mental and physical pain. They see him bearing his cross, nailed to the cross, and know that their own pain is recognised. Not healed or taken away but recognised, acknowledged. That in itself can bring a real measure of relief and transformation. There are no answers, but there is the crucifix. What the Protestant part of me tried hard to avoid is here made explicit. Look on your Saviour, look on Christ your God. And of course there is a challenge in that, a real demand. Am I prepared to walk in the way of the cross? To give my life as Christ has given his? His life for me, mine for him? In this way of looking at the cross his death is not only a substitute for mine, it also challenges me to imitate it. Like the Carmelite brother or sister, when I find the cross empty it is because in some sense I am now bound up with it.
Soul of my Christ, sanctify me
Body of Christ, save me
Blood of Christ, inebriate me
Water from the side of Christ, wash me.
Passion of Jesus, strengthen me
O good Jesus hear me
Within your wounds hide me
This is the Christian call to identify with Christ in his death, to accept the call to martyrdom, to costly witness, to the pouring out of our lives in love and service. This is what has motivated that long line of Catholic saints and martyrs from the earliest days of the Church to our own time. It has enabled Catholics to work in the most desperate and appalling situations, to see the crucified Lord in those who suffer and to serve him in serving them. Mother Teresa often spoke in this way of the dying in Calcutta. Each individual simply was Christ to her and her sisters, Christ crucified in the poor and wretched. This way of seeing the cross frees us from the need for our efforts to be successful the point is staying with it, being present: Behold this thy family ..’
There is something so moving and so powerful in this way of looking at the cross that I almost hesitate to voice a reservation. But I do have a reservation and this is it. The call to follow Christ to the cross is given in our baptism etched in that cross we received on our foreheads. But the call is always a call to life. Life through death, of course, but still a call to life, not a call to death. The believer who longs for martyrdom is a dangerous person to have around. They can destroy themselves by the lust for a sacrificial death, and take others with them, whether they mean to or not. The constant presence of the crucified Christ can turn into a fascination with suffering, a kind of spiritual snobbery which patronises those who find life, real life, in ordinary things; in a job well done, a happy enough family, a good enough marriage, a working faith.
Catholicism, and I mean that not as a denominational word, but more as indicating a way of being a Christian in which the crucifix has a central place, this Catholicism makes great demands of those who would serve it as priests and missionaries, monks and nuns and of lay people in their personal lives. No doubt that is right and good, but I sometimes wonder what the hidden cost is of too extreme and exacting imitation of the crucified Christ? Those weird holy Anglo Catholic slum priests who lived lives of astonishing austerity and sometimes secrecy; caring for others round the clock, while suffering inwardly from desperate depression or addictions of one kind or another. There is a martyr complex which encourages people to feed others while starving themselves. This is like the anorexic, who loves to prepare food and watch others eating while standing back, secretly feeding on their own virtuous hunger. If our only valid and valuable life is a crucified life, if the authenticity of our service and commitment to Christ is measured by how much it hurts, then there is going to be grief and distortion, not life, not joy. I wonder too how much the Church’s identification of the suffering Christ with the poor and the needy doesn’t actually sentimentalise suffering and poverty and thus help to keep the poor and needy dependent.
These are heretical thoughts, I know, and perhaps not worthy of Good Friday, but I want here to stick to the sane wisdom that I have also inherited from our Anglican heritage. The cross is part of the whole, the key to life, but not the whole of life. Without it, there is no life at all, but the point is salvation, not hell, not torment.
I rather like the collect for the third Sunday of Lent, which to me, sums this up: Almighty God,
whose most dear Son went not up to joy
but first he suffered pain,
and entered not into glory before he was crucified;
mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace..’