PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “INFECTED BY THE REAL GERM OF THE CROSS”.
By: Ron Woodrum
The Roman historian Cicero said, “The idea of the cross should never come near the bodies of Roman citizens. It should never pass through their thoughts, eyes or ears!” For the Romans, crucifixion was the cruelest form of captial punishment, reserved for murders, slave revolts, and other heinous crimes in the colonies. Roman citizens were beheaded. It was unlawful to crucify a Roman, unless it was a soldier, found guilty of desertion. The Jews shared such revulsion. their Scripture said, “cursed is anyone who is hung on a tree” (Dt. 21:23). Yet the Apostle Paul said, for the Christian, we should share his perspective. He stated “God forbid that I should glory, except in the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world” (Gal. 6:14). To the Corinthians he wrote, “We preach Christ crucified, unto the Jew a stumbling block, (skandalon) and unto the Greek foolishness, (moronic). For the preaching of the cross is to those who are perishing it is foolishness, but unto us who are being saved, it is the power of God unto salvation”. (I Cor. 1:18 & 23). Though the cross was preached as the center of the good news of the Gospel, it took the Church time to come to terms with the ignominy of the cross. Church fathers forbade its depiction in art until the reign of the Roman emperor Constantine, who had seen a vision of the cross and who also banned it as a method of execution. Thus not until until the fourth century did the cross become a symbol of faith. C.S. Lewis pointed out, the crucifixion did not become common in art until all who had seen a real one died off. But Jesus Himself spoke of the drawing power of the cross. He said, “If I be lifted up I will draw all men unto myself” (John 12:32).
The great British journalist Malcom Muggeridge felt the drawing power of that cross. He wrote, ““It is the Cross, more than anything else that called me inexorably to Christ”. But he admitted to his friend William Buckley that he had been drawn to the Cross of Christ for years, and fought off the drawing power of that cross. Late in life, not long before he died, he recounted that failure to respond to the call of the cross.
William Buckley recounted, in The Gargoyle, (the Journal of the Malcom Muggeridge Society), what Muggeridge said to him about the influence the Cross finally had on his life, and how he wished he had given in to the early calls of the Cross of Christ to bring him to salvation and surrender. “That trouble I think he disclosed when, in Rome, he touched down on the call of the Cross. Malcolm wanted to tell of his dereliction, of his failure to have acted upon an early epiphany of the cross”. “I can remember the first time my eyes rested on lines by Blake and the extraordinary feeling I had of some unique distillation of understanding and joy, a unique revelation of life’s very innermost meaning and significance”. He related Blake’s Sunflower to his yearning for the cross.
“Ah Sun-flower! weary of time, Who countest the steps of the Sun: Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the travellers journey is done.
Where the Youth pined away with desire, And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: Arise from their graves and aspire, Where my Sun-flower wishes to go”. William Blake
“I find it now” – (he spoke these words standing, dressed in his heavy black overcoat, guarding against the midnight cold in the Sistine Chapel that day in March )– “I find it more difficult to recall and recount the feelings I had about the Cross even before it meant anything to me as such. In an instinctive and intuitive way I understood something more important, more tumultuous, more passionate was at issue. It was, I now know, an obsessive interest; something I avidly sought out, as inflamed senses do erotica. I might fasten bits of wood together myself, or doodle it, or see it at the top of a telegraph pole, this symbol, which was considered to be derisory in my home but which was also the focus of inconceivable hopes and desires – like a lost love’s face, pulled out and gazed at with sick longing”.
“As I remember this, a sense of my own failure lies leadenly upon me. I should have worn it over my heart, carried it, a precious standard never to be wrested out of my hands, even though I felt still borne aloft (by Blakes words). It should have becomemy cult, it should have been my uniform,it should have been my language, it should have been my life. I have no excuse. I can’t say that I didn’t know. I did know, from the beginning, and I turned away. The lucky thieves were crucified with their Saviour. You called me, and I didn’t go – those empty years, those empty words, that empty passion.”
Buckley concluded, “The self-reproach for putting off his subservience to the Cross and its meaning brought with it his startling conclusion, that suffering is the singular font of learning and of joy, such suffering as he endured, on reflecting on his failure, for so long”. Though it came late in his life, Muggeridge was infected with the “real germ” of the cross of Christ that drew him, that delivered him, that dedicated him to the Saviour who gave his all there. The problem with our generation may be that we can be exposed to the cross, but not transformed by it. Chad Walsh, in his intriguing book Early Christians of the Twenty First Century, saw the failure of the cross to truly infect our generation as the most important issue we face, He wrote, “Millions of Christians live in a sentimental haze of vague piety, with soft organ music trembling in the lovely light from stained-glass windows. Their religion is a pleasant thing of emotional quivers, divorced from the will, divorced from the intellect, demanding little except lip service to a few harmless platitudes. I suspect that Satan has called off his attempt to convert people to agnosticism. After all, if a man travels far enough away from Christianity, (one centered on the Cross of Christ), he is liable to see it in perspective and decide that it is true. It is much safer, from Satan’s point of view, to vaccinate a man with a mild case of Christianity so as to protect him from contracting the real disease”. Only an encounter with the Christ of the Cross can transform lives, even in our generation. But it will take a generation who has followed Muggeridge in meditating on and surrendering to the Christ of the Cross. We must see the message of the cross as the only power to reach and renew a lost and dying world. We must commit to lift it back up in the center of the marketplace where it can draw those who need it the most.
One of my favorite quotes about the cross comes from George Mcleod, in his book Only One Way Left, pg. 38 He wrote, “I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage-heap; at a crossroad so cosmopolitan that they had to write His title in Hebrew and in Latin and in Greek (or shall we say in English, in Bantu, and in Afrikaans?);at the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where He died. And that is what He died about. And that is where churchmen should be and what churchmanship should be about”. In the days ahead we will be looking at the impact the Cross had on people who encountered it in the Gospel narratives. Beginning today we will encounter one whose life was intersected unexpectedly by the cross and his life was changed forever, In the next several weeks we will be lifting up the cross for us to meditate on the transforming saving power of the person and the preaching of the cross. Don’t be derelict in its call upon your life. Let it become “your cult, your uniform, your language, your life, your passion!” Otherwise you and I will regret empty years, empty words, empty passion too!