How the Cross Changes Everything
This Lent at Martin Saints, we have prayed several versions of the Stations of the Cross.
We started with the Stations written in the 18th century by St. Alphonsus Liguori. These stations are a beloved baseline, traditional, intimate, and personal, about uniting Christ’s sufferings with ours.
Another time, we used a setting with a different Psalm for each station. The premise was that the Psalms were Jesus’ prayer book, that he would have recited them daily from childhood, so that when he was undergoing the agony of Passion, he would naturally have resorted to the Psalms to repeat to himself internally. If you’ve ever wondered how to pray the Psalms, how to adapt the Psalms to one’s own circumstance, you might find it to be a helpful little booklet.
Another week at school, Mr. Brett Cuddy, our music teacher, created a set of Stations set to the music of Bach’s St. Matthew passion. The beauty of the music - what we human beings are capable of at our best - alongside the misery of Christ’s suffering – what we human beings are capable of at our worst – was almost more than I could bear.
But probably my favorite set of Stations, was earlier this week, when a group of teachers and students got together, and we wrote our own. Trying to write your own Station is an incredible discipline. You might try it sometime, perhaps on Holy Saturday, as a devotion while Jesus lies in the tomb. I think all of us involved in that exercise were at first overwhelmed. How do we follow in the footsteps of St. Alphonsus Liguori, the Psalms, or Bach, and write our own prayer, our own Station of the Cross?
I think we all found that you just begin by describing what you see. When you look at a particular station, what is pictured? The grotesque faces of the Roman soldiers. The lacerated flesh of Jesus, bloody, maybe with a rough cloak clinging to his skin, painfully stuck into wounds with semi-dried skin. Maybe your station features Mary, who would have remembered wrapping the infant Jesus in swaddling clothes in the manger, and is now helping lower his body from the cross, and wrapping him for the tomb. Or maybe you imagine yourself as Veronica: the Romans forced Simon of Cyrene to help carry the cross, but Veronica was brave enough to step out from the crowd on her own initiative, when she saw Jesus passing and needing help.
One student looked at Jesus hanging on the cross, and wrote about it from his point of view, of what it would be like looking down on the crowd of people jeering at him, gambling for his clothes – how lonely and abandoned he must have felt.
The point is, is that a devotion like Stations of the Cross, or of a Good Friday liturgy like tonight, is that we slow down and behold Christ’s suffering. This is the opposite of what people do in tonight’s reading from Isaiah. It says in tonight’s first reading that the suffering servant’s appearance was so shocking that kings were stunned into silence, that people hid their faces from his awfulness. But in Stations of the Cross, and especially tonight, now is when we look and take it in.
And what kind of God is revealed when we adore and gaze at the cross?
I think it helps to consider the alternatives, the mythologies that rivaled Christianity in the ancient Mediterranean. Think what Zeus does when things don’t go his way: he hurls thunderbolts and abuses women. The whole Trojan war, the Iliad and the Odyssey, begin because another goddess (Eris) is angry that she’s not invited to a wedding on Mt. Olympus, and, in her affronted pride, starts an argument about who is the most beautiful. I think, in our everyday lives, many of us live quite close to the ancient pagan gods, because we too are so often animated by lust, pride, entitlement, and anger.
But looking at the passion and crucifixion of Jesus, we meet a new and different account of divine power, a new account of who God is. When we look at the cross, we notice the suffering, the patience, the sacrifice. Most importantly, we notice who is suffering and sacrificial. It is the Word of God, the Logos, the Creator himself. The crucifixion is not a metaphor, or a symbol. It’s a revelation about reality, of who is in charge. It is a revelation of how the universe ultimately works. It is a confession of where our trust and hope is ultimately anchored.
The other day I went for a haircut. I was on my way home from school, and I walked into the barber, dressed like a deacon, wearing a clerical collar. The lady who cuts my hair, she knows me, but I normally see her on a Saturday, when I am probably wearing jeans and a t-shirt, but that day I was dressed a little more properly.
Anyway, I think she’d forgotten that I’m a deacon, and so when my appearance reminded her, she was kind of making a big deal about it. With other people in the shop, she’s kind of teasing me, making a big deal out of “ok, here’s the deacon!” And so, as I’ve learned to see coming when I’m out and about dressed in clerics, she wanted to talk about religion.
She told me that she was raised Muslim in a middle eastern country, but that, because of what the mullahs have done to her country, the way they lie and bend the truth and enforce authoritarian politics, she no longer believes in Islam. She wanted to know what I thought about that. She said – where is God? if people are so cruel, if the religious authorities are so unjust, why does God allow it? That’s the reason, she said, why she didn’t believe in God, and she wanted to know what I thought.
I was like – really? really? you sure you want to talk about this? “Really,” she said. “Ok,” I said, “here goes…”
I think, I said, that it depends on your expectations of God, what you think God is like. I agree with you, that the authoritarian government is unjust and cruel. I think that kind of thing is anathema to God, especially when it happens in his name.
The twist is – and this is where Jesus and Mohammed point in different directions – what do we think God like, what do we expect from him in the face to suffering? Who is God – is he really a political leader? Is God in the dock because he doesn’t always overthrow corrupt political authorities? Where do these expectations come from?
She’s still clipping my hair, and I’m carrying on: I point out that the prophet Mohammed, for the last ten years of his life, lead dozens of armies and military campaigns. He attacked the pagan Arabian tribes, he attacked a Jewish settlement in Arabia, he attacked the Christian Byzantine empire in the north of Arabia. His goal was to purify and unite the Arabian peninsula. You might even say, he was exactly the sort of political and military messiah that many had hoped for, since Old Testament times.
By contrast – she’s still cutting my hear – I let her know that next week, Catholics are going to celebrate how Jesus rode a donkey. Many people in his time wanted Jesus overthrow the Roman empire and set things right. We remember how Satan offered him political power after his baptism, during those 40 days in the desert. And in tonight’s Gospel, Pilate invites Jesus to claim a Kingdom of this world, with attendants who fight for him, but he declines. Jesus could have called down legions of angels to defend himself, but instead, he embraced humiliation, pain, loneliness, death.
The haircut lady looks at me like – “well ok, I didn’t see that one coming!” But she wasn’t mad, she didn’t think I had said anything rude. She appreciated that I’d laid out some differences. Ancient Greek and Roman gods were one way. Mohammed did it another way. And Jesus does it a third way. All religions are not the same, and genuine encounter and dialogue is not afraid to explore the differences.
Tonight when we venerate the cross, we’re choosing sides. We’re making a claim about reality, a confession of what we believe. We’re testifying how we believe God works in the world.
When we follow the way of the cross, we’re letting Jesus’ way of responding to the world soak into our hearts. The cross enters into our hearts and things start to change, to expand. We learn to love with his love, to desire and will with his desire and will. By dying for us on the cross, unlike a pagan god who is basically a projection of our own culture and psychology, Jesus is taking us someplace new, drawing us into himself. Left to ourselves, we typically flee suffering, or respond with despair, resentment, anger, or bargaining. Modern day myths and contemporary political messiahs remain so tempting.
But Christ on the cross, revealing the true God to us - that is Jesus raising us up to something new. On the cross, Jesus is taking us from a self-centered, sinful view of the world, into a loving, forgiving, sacrificing, suffering holiness, allowing us to share in his inner life. The cross re-creates the whole universe, as the creator of the world comes face to face with the depths of human sin, and converts its meaning. This atonement is every bit as astonishing and beautiful as the original creation ex nihilo.
Of course, we all know that over the centuries since the cross, various clerics, kings, and even presidents have not lived their faith well. Maybe even our parents or our friends have failed us too. We all know that Jesus’ followers often make a mess of it. Our failure is baked into the story – with Judas and Peter – right from the beginning.
But tonight, as we approach the cross – to give it a kiss, to lay our hand upon it, to kneel before it – it’s not about other people’s sins, is it? Getting stuck on somebody else’s failure is an excuse. Tonight it’s about us, and what we profess to believe, and where we put our anchor.
We see now, in the light of the cross, why suffering is not an obstacle and indeed can be a help for communion. We know this - if we have eyes to see it. My own parish has just experienced it. Our parish school was destroyed in a fire; the church was spared, but we're still not allowed inside, in case the school’s remaining walls collapse onto the church. Our parish fire has caused chaos, immense pain and suffering, throwing especially our young families, teachers, and kids into confusion. But it’s also been an occasion of great blessing, of discovering new friends, of partnering with our neighbors, of learning how much we love our home, of rebuilding and rededicating, of clarifying our mission and renewing it.
Our job in this life is to take those occasions of suffering – not just as a school or as a parish, but as families, as individuals, as students and teachers - and to serve, to make the same complete offering of our selves as Jesus on Good Friday. The Kingdom of God is when Jesus establishes this new reality, when He invites us all into a new intimacy with him.
Sin is a refusal to reciprocate this gift of self. Sin is when we invest in some other story about the universe, chase some other god, find ways to hedge on the sacrifice and obedience, to double down on self-service. Sin can be dramatic, stamping our feet and insisting on our own way. Or sin can be banal, drifting half asleep, slowly dulling our consciences and hardening our hearts, worshiping some alien vision or idea.
Tonight we re-center ourselves. Tonight, Jesus is doing something we cannot do for ourselves. Tonight he unites God and mortal flesh, opening gates which would otherwise be closed, revealing something that we would otherwise not know. The cross is the vehicle of grace, and if we embrace it, it will save us, and transform our daily lives, building our character through small acts of suffering redemptively.
Martyrdom, of course, is any disciples’ ultimate gift of self. We should take seriously that someday maybe we will have to offer our selves that literally. But in the meantime, we prepare internally, and we start small and daily. We cultivate humility, and the power to admit when we've made a mistake, the power to repent. The power to forgive. The power to deny the self. The patience to wrestle with a difficult church teaching, to not dodge the sacrifice. The power to say something unpopular but true. The power to be creative with your kindness and service.
The cross is a super power. Next time you say a “Glory be” or a “praise God,” don’t let it be rote. Remember, our God is a particular God, with characteristics that are unique to him. The revelation of his cross, the revelation of how to conquer evil and the devil, never let that become routine. The graces of the cross are Christian superpowers, redeeming us, establishing a kingdom, atoning for a fall, expanding our hearts until we can love like he does.
