Survey the wondrous Cross, and marvel
by Peter Mullen, TCW:
LAST Tuesday was the great Christian Festival of Holy Cross Day and I should like to say a few words about it.
I have two qualifications for this task. For 12 years I was Vicar of St Helen’s Church, Bilton-in-Ainsty, North Yorkshire, dedicated to the woman who discovered the original Cross in Jerusalem in AD 326 on the site of what was to become the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; and for 14 years I was Priest-in-Charge of St Sepulchre’s Church in the City of London.
Because the Cross is rightly the most important image in the Christian faith, we may find that its familiarity blinds us to the recognition of just what a shocking image it is. It is an instrument of torture. Imagine – the guillotine or the thumbscrews taking central position in all our churches. G K Chesterton preferred the Crucifix because it directly draws our attention to the Saviour rather than to the means of his execution.
There is something shocking also in the very name of this Feast Day: Holy Cross. For crucifixion was the extreme mark of curse and shame – the very opposite of holiness. But the word holy has a much older derivation according to which it means strange or awesome. And the Cross is certainly that.
There are churches where the Cross is nowhere to be seen: places where the prohibition on the making of images is taken too literally and therefore misconstrued. But there is a surmounting reason for images. When Christ became a man of flesh and blood, the faith became embodied. And so we don’t just have ideas, we have images as we have Sacraments. God chooses to reveal himself in things. All images have something of the icon about them in that they are not merely symbols but they embody the meaning which they present.
When we wish to approach as closely as we can, or as we dare, to the mysteries of God, we not only say something but we do something. The doing necessarily involves objects, and these objects are the essence of our actions: water at baptism; the ring at the marriage; the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist. Images and sacraments are at the centre of all divine revelation.
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