THE SHADOW OF THE CROSS
Palm Sunday
28 March 2010

There is something about the Cross which is very difficult to deal with, something that goes against the grain of our hopes and desires. That is, perhaps, a strange thing for a priest to say; The Cross is supposed to be the means by which everything was put right. Jesus was the One, was He not? who bore all of the contradictions within himself so that we wouldn't have to. Or so some have said.

Archbishop Michael Ramsay, talking about the Passion of our Lord, said that one of the great and baffling mysteries of the Old Testament had been the suffering and death of God's righteous servants. The very people most committed to the Truth and the Will of God often had to suffer for it—not always, of course, but often enough to make people wonder what God was up to, what all of his promises meant. If he didn't watch out for his own best servants, what was the faith for? But Bishop Ramsay contrasts the old Israel with the New Israel, the Church, at this point, and says that the Church "does not find death and suffering to be its baffling problem." This is because it has been created as a people through the suffering and death of Christ. Christians are people, according to Bishop Ramsay, who live within the mystery of the Cross of Christ and explain themselves and the world in its light. In other words, the Passion of our Lord provides the clue to the meaning of the world and existence, and Christian existence in particular.

And that, I think, is what goes against the grain of our hopes and desires and marks the chief point of tension between real Christians and the world. For death and suffering are still baffling problems, often for those who think of themselves as Christians and who know about the Cross. The Cross shows us the fate, often enough, of innocence in this world. Here was One who had done no wrong, rather had performed immeasurable good, and for his efforts was unjustly condemned as a criminal and executed with excruciating torture. What kind of world is it in which things like this happen? Of course, it is a sinful world and we know, deep down, that our own sin is a part what is wrong. If we accept that the Cross is the very image of what is wrong with our world, then why is it that we try so hard to be safe and secure in this kind of world? Isn't that one of our deepest natural longings: to be safe at home, here where there is so much to love in spite of all that's wrong with it? Isn't that why we take such pains with financial planning, saving for retirement, exercising and fitness, worrying about nutrition, spending vast sums on medical care? Do we not want to believe that if we take care of ourselves and live rightly, then everything will be alright? That only people of a certain type are at risk in this world? Do we not, in fact, take great effort to avoid facing squarely the implications of the Cross, namely, that there is something so fundamentally wrong with our world that the desire we have to be at home in it can never, and ought not to, be fulfilled? That in trying to preserve our life in this world, we may in fact be jeopardizing everything truly worthwhile?

Many Christians even get it wrong. They imagine that because Jesus died, they do not have to; if he suffered, they shouldn't have to. Some even claim that prosperity is the intention of God for all his creatures. To hear them explain it, God loaded everything on to Jesus on the Cross so that they can be happy and safe in this world and still get heaven, too. But that doesn't really get to the heart of our Christian understanding.

The Death of Christ on the Cross contains many meanings, but here are two important ones. First, how, on the Cross God chose to identify with us most profoundly. That is, somehow death speaks to us about our fundamental condition. The New Testament sees man, for all his achievements, as a dying creature, a morning mist which vanishes by mid-day. We were created that way. As Neville Ward put it: “Death and time seem to belong together as the conditions under which human beings can learn faith and love. Death helps us to see what is worth trusting and loving and what is a waste of time.” But death is not only a physical fact, it has become a moral one as well. We are dying, we are in a state of death before death because of our sins. As Ward put it: “The only death to be feared, in Jesus' view, is spiritual death, the death of the heart that can no longer want or cheer or protest because it is overcome by indifference or despair.” Ward recounts a story about Dr Erich Fromm, who, about 40 years ago, was at a meeting to talk about the “God is dead” discussion of that time. He said that the problem did not interest him but that we confronted the possibility that “it is man who is dead in that he has been transformed into a thing, a producer, a consumer, an idolater of other things. He sits in front of a bad television program and does not know he is bored. He reads of Vietcong casualties and does not recall the teachings of religion. He learns of the dangers of nuclear holocaust and does not feel fear. He joins the rat race of commerce, where personal worth is measured in terms of market values and he is not aware of his anxiety. All this represents death as Christians understand it.” [Ward]

When we see Jesus dying on the Cross, with even a sense of abandonment by his Father, what we see is our essential condition. There is no help for us in this world, no finding of what we need to enable us really to live. We have gone, like sheep, each in his or her own way---and have lost ourselves. But Jesus died the death which belongs inherently to our sin and alienation from God and by taking it on himself, he broke its power over us. We are still dying creatures, but our spiritual death has already been died for us. Life now awaits us, but life of a particular kind.

We see what this life consists of when we look at the second mystery of Jesus' death upon the Cross. He not only went to his death burdened with the sin of the world, he laid down his self, he gave himself unreservedly to the Father in total self-abandonment with the same kind of self-less love he had always shown, even before his Incarnation. This means that long before Jesus told his disciples that they had to die to themselves in order to live, he had already experienced life that way in his relationship with his Father. In giving up himself to the Father, Jesus finds himself, and always had, because the center of his life is not in himself, it is in the Father. As Ward puts it: “Jesus is the great sign to us that life need not be dreary, need not be saved, but can be, must be, entirely spent. It is fear that makes us hold on to life or to what represents life's meaning for us. The cross marks the place in history where a superb victory over fear was won, the public fear in religion and politics, the private fear within the individual's insecurities. The proof of that is simply the verdict of time, that at the cross it is clear that life is represented by the man who died there, and death by the people who put him there.” It was this love, this self-giving, which took place on the Cross, even to the point of physical, human death. But such love was of the power of God, in his dying thus Jesus was already in the glory of the Father, and so it broke death's power by the force of a more powerful life, and was revealed in triumph on Resurrection morning. As Bishop Ramsay puts it: "His entry into man's death is a mighty act of divine power, for God's power is manifested in self-emptying love, and to be made man, to die, to be buried, is of the power of God no less than is the creation of the world. He died, and, being made nought with nothing of his own, He is in the Father's glory, and in that glory He is raised from the dead."
And that is where the message of Cross comes home to us. Jesus died for our sins so that we would not have to die the death of sinful alienation from God. But we still have a death to die and that death is to ourselves, to our desire to find our center in ourselves and to make our home in this world. As Christ abandoned all claims for himself, so he wants us to abandon all claims to ourselves and let him claim us for the Father. He invites us into his Passion to die the death to ourselves. Only in that way can the Father fill us with his life.

This gives us the answer to the question with which we began, how we are to deal with the baffling mystery of suffering and death in this world and with that deep desire we have to be at home here. The Cross means that the world cannot be healed until it is willing to die and allow God to remake it. We cannot be fully at home anywhere the love of God is resisted. Suffering and death are no longer our baffling problems: we live in virtue of a suffering death, we live by dying to ourselves. And we hope for a future, we are promised a future, in which all of the tensions and conflicts are resolved in the love of God. There we shall finally be secure and at home. The world as it is cannot endure, we have no hope for it; but the world as God is remaking it will endure forever and we along with it—and we are called to work with Him it its creation.

[Quotations are from Michael Ramsay's The Gospel and the Catholic Church  and Neville Ward's Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy]