1 March 200, First Sunday of Lent, 'The Wondrous Cross'

‘Many people today go around with a cross on their earrings, bracelet or necklace. We are so used to seeing this that we are not shocked by it. We might be if we saw someone wearing a gallows or an electric chair on a chain; but the cross was just as much a form of execution. Indeed, it was one of the cruellest forms of execution known to mankind. It was abolished in AD 315 because even the Romans considered it too inhumane.’

With those words, taken from the opening paragraph of the third session of Holy Trinity Brompton’s Alpha Course, the curtain is raised on our Lent programme. Isaac Watts calls the Cross ‘Wondrous’ and we have named our programme after his verse; yet our colleagues in SW7 remind us that there is little that is wondrous about the historical cross or the historical crucifixion. The curtain is raised upon an instrument of torture; in the centre of the stage there is a killing; for through these days of Lent we will study in word, art and music a judicial murder, the judicial murder of the man Christian faith claims is the Son of God.

You’ll have heard this before. The simple fact of the cross - and it’s one of the Biblical events that we can confidently call a simple fact, for who would have invented it? - the simple fact of the cross is an insurmountable stumbling-block to many. The cross is a fate so scandalous and so demeaning that our Muslim brothers and sisters, for example, do not accept that God can have allowed his blessed prophet Jesus to suffer it. The Holy Qu’ran insists that there is no blood-soaked death upon Calvary’s hill, that God raises Jesus up to himself. The transcendent God cannot suffer as we suffer, and he will not suffer his prophets to suffer either. That sense of horror at the mere idea of a Son of God suffering ought to send tremors rippling through our veins too. A few years ago a BBC series on twentieth century art was famously entitled ‘The Shock of the New’. Contemplating the cross we too experience the shock of the new, or we ought to. We experience it not in piles of bricks or splurges of colour but in remembering and recognizing the shocking gash that rips through the fabric of eternity when Jesus Christ hangs upon the cross. In accepting the wretchedness and agony of Calvary God does something startlingly, shockingly new.

Perhaps this is unhealthy and morbid. We are a resurrection people, and ‘alleluia’ is our song. Our deacon Mark posed the question on Ash Wednesday: in the light of the empty tomb, why focus upon the cross? His answer was that without the cross there can be no resurrection. He was quite right. Without the cross there can be no resurrection; indeed, without the cross there can be no incarnation. Our proclamation is that in Christ God becomes a human and lives a human life. Death is a part of life. If God lives a human life then God must die a human death. If Christ does not risk the pain and misery that are the lot of so many men and women, of so many of his brothers and sisters; if Christ does not die, then Christ can in no real sense live. Without the empty tomb the cross has no meaning, true; without the years spent healing the sick and proclaiming God’s kingdom the cross has no meaning, equally true. Yet without the cross the life and the empty tomb have no reality. Christ’s death matters because Christ’s life matters, because it is in his life, in the whole of his life, that earth is rejoined to heaven and that our salvation is somehow wrought.

Somehow wrought: as we confront the shock of this new thing that God does through the blood and tears of Calvary, we cannot avoid the question of our salvation. What does this death achieve? The claim that God’s Son dies upon the cross is distinctive, as we have seen. What claims do we make for this distinctive claim? How does that death then affect our lives now? Our ancestors in faith, who compiled the catholic Creeds as defences against encroaching heresy, were reticent. The Creed does not spell out how the cross works. It confines itself, as we shall say shortly, to stating that it was ‘for our sake’ that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. God comes among us in Jesus. Jesus dies among us and at our hands. His death is for our sake. The fathers of the Church would go no further than that. Perhaps they sensed that to go farther would be to stray into the realm of the unknowable, to second-guess the mind and purposes of God, and to sow seeds of dissension in the Church.

For as long as there has been a Church there has been dissension about this crucial - an adjective used properly for once - about this crucial article of faith. Successive generations have produced successive accounts of what the cross achieved and why, and it is these that we are to explore in the weeks ahead. Was the cross an atoning sacrifice? Was it a decisive victory? Was it the payment of a debt? Was it an act of love? These are the theologies of the cross that the Church has generated over the centuries. All are compatible with the doctrine of the Creed; by pondering them all (and only by pondering them all) we will perhaps have a chance of comprehending the mystery.

Over the next few weeks a number of speakers will address us on the theology and use of icons, and their words will be an important part of our preparation for Passiontide. Yet it is an icon of the crucifixion that we are to receive, not an account of the crucifixion or a theology of the crucifixion. And fundamentally an icon is not to be understood; it is to be gazed upon. An icon is a participation in wood and paint in the reality that it depicts; it is sacramental; it bears the one who gazes upon it into the realm that its images represent. We will find our interior lives profoundly enriched by contemplation of Silvia Dimitrova’s work. What applies to the icon of the crucifixion applies to the crucifixion too. Ultimately it is not something to understand, to gut and fillet, to appropriate and fix with a pin beneath a glass screen. It is something to gaze upon, to fall silent before, to be still before, to know our need of God before; for revealed on the Cross as nowhere else we see God as God most truly is.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

Amen.