We venerate thy cross, O Lord and glorify thy holy resurrection, for by virtue of the cross joy has come into the whole world.’
The third cross I want to look at this Good Friday is less familiar to most of us. It takes us back centuries before the controversies of the Reformation to perhaps the most primitive strand of the Christian tradition, kept alive today by our brothers and sisters of the Orthodox churches. If you go into an orthodox church you won’t easily find a cross and if you do, it is unlikely to be dominating the church as a focus for the eyes.
This is odd for us. But in the earliest Christian centuries the cross was not the universal Christian symbol it has become. When Christians expressed their faith in visual form they did so by showing not the cross itself, but the effects of the cross, in other words, salvation. They showed themes from the scriptures of how God saved: Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac, with the ram waiting to be caught in the thicket, Moses striking the rock; Shadrach Meshach and Abednego singing the praises of God in the burning fiery furnace; the virtuous Susannah, whose story is told in the Apocrypha, being saved from false accusations.
I have a Russian icon at home which I bought in Jerusalem. It shows twelve mysteries of the Christian faith as little pictures round a central panel. You can see the annunciation, the birth and baptism of Jesus, the transfiguration, the entry into Jerusalem, the ascension no cross. And the centre panel is reserved for the central mystery, the Resurrection. Only here it is not Jesus rising from the dead, or meeting Mary Magdalene outside the tomb it is Jesus standing at an open grave, dragging out a whole company of the dead, with Adam and Eve at their head. The very last panel on the icon does have a cross in it and it is being held by the emperor Constantine, the first Christian emperor and his mother Helena who is famed for having discovered the true cross on her travels to the Holy Land. This cross has three cross bars. One is the arms of the cross on which the Lord was crucified, the top bar carries the title that Pilate had put on the cross and then the bottom bar is at an awkward angle it is positioned diagonally so one end points upwards and the other downward. This is to highlight the meaning of the cross. Downward is the direction of death, upward is heaven.
What I understand by this is that the primary meaning of the cross is the defeat of death, and Christ’s redemption at heart is the resurrection of the dead. It’s not that Christ dies and then his death is received as a sacrifice and then we sinners are forgiven as a consequence. It’s not that Christ’s death challenges us to bear our sorrows bravely in the hope of eternal life beyond this world. It’s more that the cross and the resurrection are inseparable. Death is defeated because the one who died is immortal, and because he is immortal he comes back from death bringing the dead with him.
This is the cross of victory, a cosmic victory, which has effect for all human beings of all times and of all ages. This puts a different and perhaps an unfamiliar slant on Good Friday. But perhaps that different slant is the one which we need. And if I spell out a little of what that different slant involves it is not because I am insensitive to the problems which the Orthodox view of the cross might lead to. But today I look at it as an outsider and it speaks to me of the world we live in. We do live in a fearful world, the shadow of death is over us and within us.
I think the great temptation for many of us today is to believe that life has no meaning, that God is dead or absent or indifferent. Or perhaps, almost more insidiously, that God is well-meaning but powerless. For centuries the worst fear for a believer was the fear of hell, that he or she had done things which condemned them in God’s sight and for which there was no forgiveness. Today I think our problem is not guilt but despair. We secretly believe that there is no God and that therefore we are already in hell, that this world is a kind of hell. That the suicide bombers and terrorists and brutal repressions are what is normal and inevitable and all the kind and heroic and faithful responses that people make towards one another are really just drops in the ocean, they make no ultimate difference.
It s precisely that moment of despair that is being brought into Holy Week. Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and to those in the tomb he has given life’. Holy Week does not end on Good Friday in the quiet garden of human impotence. It is one of the most ancient traditions of the Church that Christ descends even deeper than into death, he goes down into hell, to set free those who are in hell. A text from the Eastern liturgy speaks of Christ coming down to save Adam, and not finding him on earth goes looking for him in hell.
That is so important when we feel as so many do, trapped in hell. A hell of our own making or of our own circumstances, or a hell imposed by others. I am buried beneath the weight of it. I can hardly breathe, I have not prayed for months or years, I am hardly human at all. That is the self -Christ came to save. Or the world locked in its spiral of aggression and retaliation. This is the world God loved so much that he sent his only Son.
There s something utterly inclusive and all embracing about Good Friday. Nothing that is human is outside the scope of the cross, nothing in all creation is left unaltered by the Passion. The living, the dead and the unborn, the tortured and the lost, those who have disappeared, whose bodies were never found, who lie beyond the horizon of human sight. Those who have been obscenely reduced to body parts’, nothing that is human is outside the scope of the cross. Nature itself, creation, the sea and the stars, all are swept in to the unity which the cross reveals. The arms of God held out wide to embrace the universe in its heights and depths. And to show that in the embrace of God all are one; churches, souls, enemies and friends.
Which is why the final note of Good Friday is not one of sorrow, or regret, or remorse, or that mourning over the cross, which can be in its way a self-centred preoccupation. The final note is one of wonder, awe, praise, thanksgiving. The cross is where God reaches us and when we are not on earth he comes down to hell, he opens the gates of hell and draws us out with him. That is why in Eastern Christendom it is not the cross that is visible but the tomb and why the liturgy refuses to separate Christ’s death and resurrection from our death and our hope.
Yesterday I was crucified with Christ;
today I am glorified with him.
Yesterday I was dead with Christ;
today I am sharing in his resurrection.
Yesterday I was buried with him;
today I am waking with him from the sleep of death.