The Common Cross- 09/8/08- Jill Carrattini

"The cross," someone said recently, "has become so ordinary that we hardly
see it anymore."  The words at once sent through me a rush of lament,
which then settled into a pool of reflection. How can this be true?
How can an image once shameful enough to bow the proudest heads become
ordinary?  Could the gallows ever be innocuous?  Would the death sentence
of someone near us ever fail to get our attention?

Theodore Prescott is a sculptor who has spent a great deal of time
thinking about the cross.  In the 1980's he began working on a series of
crosses using different materials, forms, and processes hoping to
reconstitute the cultural and scriptural imagery of the Roman cross.  In a
sense, Prescott attempts to portray the incongruous.  The Roman cross was a
loathsome manner of execution that inflicted an anguished death; the Cross
of Christ held a man who went willingly--and without guilt.  Though a
reflection of beauty and sacrifice, the cross is also an image of physical
torture, inseparable from flesh and blood.  Even so, its image also bears
the mystery of being scandalously vacant.  These contrasts alone are
replete with a peculiar depth.  Yet, our daily intake of the cross
"precludes contemplation," notes Prescott.  The cross has become so
ordinary that we hardly see it anymore.

Maybe he is right.  But if the Cross has become merely a symbol of
Christianity, an emblem of one religion in a sea of others, it is still a
symbol that stands apart.  Even as an image among many, it stands
conspicuously on its own.  The symbol of the cross is an instrument of
death.  Far from ordinary, it suggests, at the very least, a love quite
beyond us.  Perhaps it is we who have become ordinary, our senses
dulled to unconsciousness by the daily matters we give precedence.  The
apostle Paul lamented such a blurring of the cross, calling us to a
greater vision.  "[A]s I have often told you before and now say again even
with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ.  Their destiny is
destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their
shame.  Their mind is on earthly things.  But our citizenship is in
heaven" (Philippians 3:18-20).

For those who will not look carefully, the cross can be perceived as
foolish or not perceived at all.  It can be stripped of meaning or emptied
of beauty, hope, and depth.  But it cannot be emptied of Christ.  "If
anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and
follow me.  For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever
loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it" (Mark 8:34-35).
The message of the Cross may be nothing to some, but to those who will
stand in its shame and offense, scandal and power, it is everything.

Moreover, where the cross is obscured, Christ is still near.  Ironically,
what started Theodore Prescott thinking about the absence of the cross's
meaning was a piece of his own art in which many people saw a cruciform
image, though this was not his intention.  For those who will see, the
Cross of Christ is expectantly present in every moment and every scene.
In its beauty, we are changed.  In the scandal of its emptiness, we are
left yearning for the face of the risen Christ:  "I want to know Christ
and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his
sufferings, becoming like him in his death and so, somehow, to attain to
the resurrection from the dead" (Philippians 3:10-11). 

The Gospel of John reports that Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened
to the beams of the common cross that bore the radical rabbi.  It read in
three languages: "JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS."  There is
nothing ordinary about the manner in which he died, the cross on which he
hung, or the symbol of death on which he inscribed a hope that would be
carried throughout the nations.  There was a cross in history with his
name on it, and he went to it with nothing short of transforming the world
in mind.


Jill Carattini is senior associate writer at Ravi Zacharias
International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.


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