Rembrandt, 'Raising of the Cross'

C. S. Lewis once observed that “crucifixion” and “cross” didn’t carry the weight they once did. “Centuries of hymnody and religious cant have so exhausted these words that they now very faintly — if at all — convey the idea of execution by torture,” he said.

There is a tendency to sentimentalize the cross; it hardly maintains the grisly horror it once did. Songs like “The Old Rugged Cross” have inexplicably schmaltzy melodies. We even put the cross on greeting cards, for pity’s sake, never thinking of the the shock or confusion that someone would suffer receiving a Hallmark-stamped electric chair in the mail.

Coming to grips with the gravity of the cross involves a twin understanding of the crucifixion:

1. that we are responsible for Jesus’ death
2. that he suffered voluntarily

To the first point, I think there is much to gain from meditating on Rembrandt’s Raising of the Cross. The painting features a remarkable self-portrait. There in the middle of the scene Rembrandt wears a blue beret and actively helps to hoist the cross upon which Christ is nailed, saying in effect, “My sins are why Jesus is on the cross — I put him here.”

Meditating on the cross compels us to look down at the hammer in our right hand and the nails in our left, to wipe away the beads of sweat from our terrible labors.

But if Christ is our victim, he is also our Savior. Only a victim can forgive — something David seems to have understood when he cried to God in the fifty-first Psalm, “Against you only have I sinned.” Theologian John Behr expounds on this in his book, The Mystery of Christ, which warrants quoting at length:

[D]ivine grace is manifest when his betrayers, judges, and those who crucified him, turn to him (repent) to know him as their Savior. . . . [I]n and through the sufferings we inflict, he does not condemn, resist, or exclude; he suffers violence, but never inflicts it — he is the Lamb of God who bears the sins of the world (Jn 1.29). Such suffering is not merely passive — something forced upon Christ — but is voluntarily undertaken and, as such is creative, making all things new (Rev 21.5). . . . [Christ] is present, even now, to those who turn to him, as the victim of their own sins, and, as such, the one who is able to forgive and bring them into the life of God.

This is what consoles and even emboldens. When we face our participation in Christ’s death, we awaken to the fact that he undertook it voluntarily for our sakes.

Why would he do that?

In his homily this past Sunday my pastor pointed out that Christ looks down upon us from the vantage of the cross and says, This is what you are worth to me. The creator would not allow his creation to languish, alienated and ruined. He came down from heaven to be lifted up on the cross and draw all people to himself (John 12.32). That’s why he would do it: He loved us that much (John 3.16, 15.13).

However incomprehensibly weighty our guilt, Christ nonetheless “bears the sins of the world” — our sins — on the cross. When we contemplate the dread instrument, we miraculously gaze up into the eyes of endless, unstoppable love. As we labor through Lent, this is the light the guides our path and the divine grace that emboldens our steps.

Sources: C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 97. John Behr, The Mystery of Christ (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 75-76.

(William Warby, Flickr)

Lucy catches a glimpse of the great lion Aslan and knows that they should walk toward where she spotted him. The others disbelieve, however, and think they have a better idea. They don’t and after going their own way nearly get killed. Aslan appears again and directs Lucy to follow him even if the others will not.

Lucy tells her siblings about Aslan’s direction, and again they’re in doubt. They cannot see Aslan, but Lucy is insistent and so they follow her lead. Lucy keeps her eyes on Aslan, and everyone else keeps their eye on Lucy. Aslan leads through dangerous regions, down steep and narrow paths, but Lucy fixes her eyes and follows the lion. The others bound along in the dark, unable to see Aslan at all or even hear him.

Finally, after traveling a long distance, Edmund’s eyes open. He sees Aslan, at first just his shadow. But he keeps moving and then sees him fully. At last the others do as well, but not after traveling still farther.

For the Pevensies, seeing and knowing came by obeying. It’s the same for us: First we follow, then we see.

As Fionn and Felicity and I read this passage Saturday I was reminded of one of the lines that close Psalm 111: “A good understanding have all those who do His commandments.” Understanding comes after obedience. Knowledge follows action. This is roughly the inverse of how we want it to work. We want the argument, the rationale, the plan all laid out before we move. If I say I want the kids to do this or that, they want to know why.

I’m no different. If God tells me to do one thing or another, I want to know why. But understanding follows obedience. I can see and know Christ only if I turn and follow him.

Meddygarnet, Flickr

I have another friend who reads Thomas Howard’s Evangelical is Not Enough about once a year. It had a profound influence on his life when he first read it many years ago, and I imagine that his annual return helps him keep the edge on the blade. He talks about it like a guy recalling an old mentor.

What I find in such conversations is that people often have a few titles like this. Re-reading books is one of life’s joys, and for many of us it’s a necessary part of our literary experience.

“I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once,” wrote C.S. Lewis in a letter to his friend, Arthur Greeves. Greeves was apparently not much of a re-reader, but Lewis confessed it “is one of my greatest pleasures.”

One the volumes to which I make frequent pilgrimage is Lewis’s own Till We Have Faces. It’s a stark and beautiful novel about all the good stuff, love and pride and jealousy. I don’t know how many times I’ve read it now, but I just can’t stop.

Montaigne’s Essays are like that for me as well. My copy migrates from room to room over the year as I pick it up and casually read a few essays here and there. I find him funny, shrewd, thoughtful, deeply feeling. If someone were to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I might say Montaigne.

I think that’s partly why we re-read books. We see something of ourselves in them. They are like inky mirrors that give us glimpses of our hearts and hopes. We add their words to the sentences that describe ourselves.

Perhaps it’s a value they extol, or a character we admire, or an adventure we wish we could join. Whatever the particular reasons for the particular book, we identify with them and just can’t do without.

Question: What are the books you come back to?

Detail from the cover of The Discarded Image by C.S. Lewis

Here’s Lewis: “In a prolonged war the troops on both sides may imitate one another’s methods and catch one another’s epidemics; they may even occasionally fraternise. So in this period. The conflict between the old and the new religion was often bitter, and both sides were ready to use coercion when they dared. But at the same time the influence of the one upon the other was very great.” The Pagans and the Christians, says Lewis, “were in some ways far more like each other than either was like a modern man.”

So, too, with us moderns. Christians have many foes today: atheists, hedonists, materialists, secularists, etc. But we are more like them than we realize. Oftentimes Christians are as reflexively materialistic and hedonistic as an unbelieving neighbor or—more to the point here—opponent in a social or political dustup. Just think of two areas of concern:

(1) Our response to taking care of widows and orphans (literal or metaphorical) is often more political and civil than ecclesial or communal. Why?

(2) Our defense of traditional marriage against “gay marriage” is usually cast in sociological and cultural terms, not theological and sacramental. Why?

These and many other current social and political skirmishes are ongoing aspects of the long-raging battle between Christianity and modernity (along with its bastard child, postmodernity). But the reality is this: Despite our sometimes sharp and pitched fights, we share more presuppositions with our foes than we even know. We imitate their methods and catch their epidemics. We fraternize.

Just listen to the language we use in formulating our positions (even when talking amongst ourselves). True, we can often tack scriptural proof texts to the back end of our arguments, but that doesn’t redeem the basic assumptions beneath them. And our vices, virtues, and values are conditioned by—in many cases—the same assumptions that condition the world’s. There are differences, to be sure, but we’ve already discarded many of them.

See also: No ideas in a vacuum

(Photo by Phillie Casablanca, Flickr)

Sometimes people are struck by this aspect of the faith. The image or concept of death can take on an uncomfortable prominence. Baptism is, after all, a picture of dying. We follow Paul’s advice and “Put to death . . . what is earthly” in us. We sometimes even call our daily sanctification mortification. This is not a tame and peaceful death, a graceful slipping out of consciousness or drifting into nothingness. It’s violent. Jesus tells us to deny ourselves, pick up our cross, and follow him. The word excruciating comes from the practice of crucifixion. Jesus asks a lot.

But Jesus promises a lot, too. Think of the parables of the hidden treasure and the pearl of great price in Matthew’s Gospel. The two men sell everything they have to gain the Kingdom. The takeaway is simple enough. We give all to get more. We sacrifice our egos, ambitions, lusts, goals, agendas, everything for the sake of Christ. Real grace, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us in his book Discipleship, is not cheap; it costs your life. Which is exactly what Jesus said: “whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.”

Any Christian really working out their salvation knows the meaning of the word struggle. It’s a battle in the heart, in the mind, in the soul. We have our old lusts grabbing at us from one corner and resentment and discontent and any number of other evils tugging at the rest. To prevail we have fight back. The trouble is, like Paul found in his own life, these urges and habits and temptations are native to us. The lingering effects of the Fall must be battled to the death every day.

And it’s more than just sins we’re putting to death and leaving behind. Sin as we often understand it is too narrow a word. We’re talking here about anything that might hinder our pursuit of Christ. If it cannot become sacramental and part of what draws us into deeper fellowship then it must go. We do not want Christ and something else. We want Christ alone. If our satisfaction, our contentment, our comfort, our security, our poise, our position, our purposes get in the way of treading the narrow path, then we die to those things.

These are small and shabby things anyway. Like Paul says, “what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed?” Nothing, really. Our sublime satisfactions and lofty plans are lowly and childish compared what God has in store. Recall C. S. Lewis’ observation in The Weight of Glory, “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

And don’t mistake it, infinite joy is on the table. We do not die for nothing. The Christian way knows nothing of morbidity or masochism. Mortification is not mere self denial. Sanctification is not simply self negation. Just as Christ, we lose to gain. As it says in Philippians, Christ became nothing so that God could make him lord of everything. The Letter to the Hebrews urges us to look to Jesus, “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross.” Jesus died for the joy that his victory over sin and death would bring. We die with Christ to participate in his victory. That is the treasure buried in the field; that is the pearl of great price.

The path of Christian suffering is one of exchange. We are trading lesser things for greater things. We are trading the meaningless for the meaningful; the worthless for the worthwhile; our materialism for real riches; false security for true peace; false peace for a real fight.

Death precedes life. It’s a curveball, yes. It may seem backward. But the witness of the saints is this: It doesn’t work any other way.

Mosaic of many crosses from a chapel in Alswede, Germany (Wikimedia Commons)

In his fourth letter, senior demon Screwtape holds forth on the subject of befuddling a new Christian in his prayers. He starts by mentioning a line from the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge about how he prayed without “moving lips and bended knees.” Coleridge thought he nailed it well enough by merely feeling prayerful, a view that Screwtape endorses in the lines that follow. “At the very least, they [Christians] can be persuaded that the bodily position [like kneeling] makes no difference to their prayers,” he says, “for they constantly forget . . . that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.”

What we do physically affects us spiritually. The most obvious picture of this is the one Lewis mentions, kneeling in prayer. Whether it’s bowing our heads, hunching over the seat of a chair, leaning into a kneeler at church, or hitting the floor with full-on prostrations, bending to God in prayer has a qualitative effect on our prayers and on ourselves. God made us with bodies and spirits; they are linked. If demons know this about us better than do we, we’re in trouble.

Another example of this is crossing yourself. I grew up in an evangelical church and only saw people cross themselves if they were Catholics. Generally I was taught (or at least assumed) that this was vain superstition at work. Perhaps in some cases it was. All I know now is that making the sign of the cross has a powerful qualitative effect, much like kneeling in prayer.

I make the sign of the cross when I pray, when I’m tempted, when I drive, when I walk, when I’m thankful, when I face something horrible or difficult. Having grown up the way I did, this did not come easy at first. I felt very self-aware and hesitant. But the more I did it, the more I came to cherish—and even need—to cross myself.

For one thing, it’s a form of prayer. It’s also a powerful form of identification. Making the sign of the cross says to yourself (and anyone watching) in a bold and physical way that you belong to Jesus, that you belong to God. When faced with temptation, wrestling with a bad attitude, or even feeling grateful for the mercies of God, is there anything better? Identifying as Christian by using the sign of the cross is a physically demonstrative way to communicate your reliance on God and your identity in Christ, and it affects your spirit in a positive way.

For any believer—whether Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox—such a confession is the furthest thing from superstition. It’s another step (watch out, Screwtape) toward serious devotion.