When I survey the wondrous cross, on which the Prince of glory died…’ What does happen when I survey’, gaze on or contemplate that cross? What do I see? What is my understanding of what happens on the cross. The answer depends on what kind of cross I am gazing at, for they are not all alike.
Today I want to look at three kinds of cross; three portrayals of the cross which belong roughly to the three great divides of Christendom: Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox. The Protestant cross is the youngest, the fruit of the Reformation, the Catholic Cross belongs to the Church of the West of the Middle Ages and beyond. The Orthodox Cross is perhaps the oldest, the cross as it is understood in the Greek speaking and Russian churches; that goes back to the deserts and imperial cities of the Middle East. Because I am an Anglican I don’t see any of them purely and yet in different ways, I have learnt from them all.
I start with the most modern. The Protestant Cross. And that is an empty cross. True Protestants don’t go for visual imagery, they like to be functional. Protestantism is protest, against the excesses and distortions of mediaeval Catholicism. So the Protestant church is pure, functional space. Plain walls, churches like warehouses, nowadays with the sound equipment strewn in the space where an altar might have been. But when they allow themselves to depict the cross, in a church, on the cover of a Bible or prayer book, or as a pendant given at baptism of confirmation, it is most often an empty cross. Wood, or gilt or silver, but always plain.
The plain cross is empty because Christ is not there. Christ is not on the cross because the cross is in the past, and Christ no longer suffers because he is in heaven. The empty cross, then is the sign of a victory won, a finished fight, a done deal; and it is often associated with views of redemption which stresses the forensic requirement that a just price to be paid for our salvation. Christ has died for me. Therefore I need not fear death or condemnation. The judgement of God which should have been poured out on us, has been poured out on Christ, our substitute. The Father drew his awful sword, and slaked it, Lord, on thee….’ was a particularly awful hymn I learnt when I attended Christian Union meetings here as an undergraduate in Cambridge. Because the cross is empty, I know I am free from my sins, all torment of anxiety and guilt that I might otherwise have had is over and done. I can stand on the promises of God, giving thanks for the sure and certain gift of personal salvation.
For a time I understood this way of looking at the cross. It gave a huge sense of security and assurance. It took away feelings of guilt. It meant I didn’t have to feel responsible for my sins or failings; all was dealt with by the sacrificial death of Christ. I didn’t have to worry about the future, all that was safe in God’s hands. If I had any doubts, the empty cross was the proof that Christ’s sacrifice had been acceptable. It had worked. It’s meaning was replicated in the service of Holy Communion where the emphasis was always on the past: once only once and once for all, his precious life he gave’, the one sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world…’ Thankful remembrance of that long ago death was the right, the only possible response. Not for me the gaudy crucifixes of Roman Catholicism, with their crowns of thorns and bloody wounds; I found them repellent, they niggled away at the certainty that the empty cross proclaimed, suggesting that perhaps the fight was not so finished, the deal not so done. Not for me the suggestion that there was any kind of offering involved with the Eucharist. To think so was a kind of blasphemy, a negation of what Christ had done. The empty cross was tidy, neat and clean.
The empty cross is also very attractive in a world which looks for quick fixes and done deals. And yet one should not think that the great founders of the Reformation in any way looked for quick fixes or done deals; what they wanted us to start from was gratitude. Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Melanchthon, the great English Reformers, Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer all knew that even if the doctrine of salvation was simple and clear and direct, the assimilation of it was anything but. The truth of the empty cross took a life time to assimilate. Undergraduates these days don’t go to church or to their college chapels very much but some of them do respond to the cleanness and clarity the sheer cleverness of the empty cross. Salvation by simple faith. How could anyone believe it?
The problem of it is that life is not so tidy, neat and clean. Several strange things happen if the cross is only ever seen as empty. The first is that you start to believe in your own invulnerability. If the cross is empty, if Christ has died for you, if the blood of Jesus has taken away your sins; then it becomes quite hard to acknowledge your own weakness and mortality, and even those long term character traits which seem at odds with the victory won through that now empty cross. Christians can only live victoriously, so what happens when you are bereaved, or you fail your exams or lose your job, or you suspect you might be gay, or you are stricken by that mental pain and helplessness we call depression. There is no place for your suffering on an empty cross. Suffering is an embarrassing redundancy in a universe where God has chosen you to be triumphant.
The other thing is that it’s lonely. The empty cross leaves each of us alone and requires that we accept it alone. I heard a very Protestant preacher speak last year of the four great alones of the Reformation: Faith alone, Christ alone, scripture alone, grace alone. And yes, lonely was what that sounded like.
And the third thing is that it can judge others cruelly. The empty cross demands a decision based on a reading of a past event. In some odd way the world, the outsiders, the unbelievers are necessary because they are outsiders and unbelievers, a sinful mission field waiting for the word of truth.
So alone with Christ’s empty cross, pretending there is no pain or suffering in my life that cannot be overcome, poised to convert my atheist friends at the first sign of weakness this was not, in the end a place I wanted to stay. But it is part of what has formed me, and perhaps all Christians, certainly all Anglicans and especially those brought up on the Prayer Book. Cranmer, a true Protestant I think – only his ears were Latin, they still drummed to the text of the old Mass – and even as he transformed our liturgy to express the convictions of the Reformation, some other part of him knew that suffering and sorrow remained part of this life. It certainly remained part of his, poor man…….. That the cross must comfort and strengthen us to bear the pain life brings as well as assure us that our sins are dealt with.
I was intrigued to discover recently that the empty cross is not only a Protestant cross. It is also the cross of the Carmelite order; those friars and sisters who live by one of the most austere monastic rules. Among them were the two Teresas. Teresa of Avila and Terese of Lisieux. Each Carmelite brother or sister has an empty cross in their cell, and this carries a meaning which is quite different from that of the empty cross in Protestantism. For the Carmelite, the cross is empty as a sign of the crucified life each one is called to live. Christ is not on the cross because I am there: this life of prayer is an identification with the suffering of Christ. This is very far from the normal Protestant meaning of the empty cross it would be hard to imagine and yet I wonder whether this isn’t the way that that cross can be transformed.
It cannot quite be true that Christ dies for us without also taking us with him into his death and so into his resurrection. This is the meaning of baptism. At the time of the English reformation the hard line Protestants wanted to remove all ritual, all signs from the church’s worship. Our Church of England forebears, though sympathetic in general drew the line at the use of the sign of the cross at baptism. This, they insisted should be retained. So each of us even if we were baptised as babies have our foreheads etched with that cross, the cross that tells us that we die with Christ and that we live with him.
Almighty God,
we beseech thee graciously to behold this thy family
for which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed and given up into the hands of sinners
and to suffer death upon the cross
who now liveth and reigneth with thee
in the unity of the Holy Spirit
ine God now and for ever.