Wearing a cross
A reader found my Ethical
Musings posts on Why
people go to church and What
was Jesus’ brand interesting. The posts prompted the reader to wonder if I
had given any thought to the number of people who wear crosses. The reader
accurately surmised that by comparing the number of church attendees to cross
wearers, a significant number of people who wear a cross have no connection to
Christianity or to the theological meaning of the cross.
I found the reader’s observation
insightful and thought provoking. After receiving the reader’s comment, I began
paying more attention to the number of people wearing a cross and was startled
at the number of crosses I saw, especially when contrasted with church
attendance and membership statistics for Paris and London, the cities in which I
made my observations. Some individuals wearing a cross were obviously American.
Even ignoring those, a still surprising number of French and British persons
wore crosses. Since returning to the States, I’ve found that a disproportionate
number of people sport crosses in comparison to U.S. church attendance and
membership statistics.
Why the disparity?
The explanation that I find
most cogent is that the cross has become a common cultural symbol and has lost
its historic and theological meanings.
The Romans used crosses,
generally shaped like our letter “T,” to execute tens of thousands of criminals.
The Roman army (there was no separate police force) was highly competent and
professional. They crucified Jesus in a way that from the Scriptural record
(the only available source) appears fully consistent with their standard practices.
Nothing significant about Jesus’ crucifixion seems to have been exceptional.
Non-Christians originally
associated a cross with Christians as a form of insult. Christians, however, quickly
adopted the symbol as a source of pride, reveling in its scandal. Early Christians,
aware of the near unanimous public revulsion to the cross, also saw it as a
safe symbol for identifying their meeting places, houses in which Christians lived,
etc. No sane person would voluntarily associate him or her self with a cross.
Today, the scandal is gone. The
cross has become a good luck charm (think of crossing one’s fingers, which originated
as a way of making a cross) or even a meaningless decorative item valued for
its craftsmanship or giver rather than its shape.
What if Christians wore an
electric chair or noose instead of a cross? Those symbols would restore the
scandal; those symbols would also underline the meaning of Jesus’ death
(innocence in the grip of systemic power that led to the power’s unanticipated unmasking
as evil and subsequent defeat) in a way that is perhaps more comprehensible by
twenty-first people century. Unfortunately, in both instances the connection
with Jesus would be lost. Perhaps Christians who wear a cross should consider
wearing a cross with a hangman’s noose or electric chair superimposed.
As I write, I am aware that beheading
is another form of capital punishment in current use. Regretfully, a sword has
too many interpretations to permit its clear use as a scandalous symbol of
capital punishment.
God is life. The scandal of the
cross is that death, particularly a death caused by a ruling power’s imposition
of capital punishment on a conquered peasant, led to life. May all who wear a
cross dare to live into the hope and reality of the cross.
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