Imagine
a boy born in captivity, born in a cellar, trapped. Imagine this boy has never seen
sunlight. He has only seen his murky
world clinically and coldly illumined by artificial, ill-colored electric
bulbs. His mother has told him of
sunlight, has told him of how wonderful it feels upon the skin, of how the
clouds flow past it leaving their shapes behind, of how it fills a space with
warmth and beauty, of how it’s like the lights he’s seen, but so much more, so
much better, that with it, he’d be able to see colors as they really are, that
he’d be able to distinguish blue from black (which yellow electric light can
never allow) and see the beauty. Slowly,
she comes to realize that the blacked out window in the basement is low enough
that she could break it. It’s too small
for either of them to be able to get out, but she could break it. Who knows what her captors would do to her in
response to this outrage against their control?
But she has to risk it. Whatever
it would cost, she’d dare to risk it, to let her boy see the sun, to show him
that there is an outside, there is a force invisible to him more ancient and
more powerful than the walls that confine them, a force able to truly illumine
them, that need not be overcome and shut out by walls, a force that could
pierce through that window that she would give all if needed to open, and let
in the light that would delight, that would warm, that might just excite her
son enough to turn to it, and seek the freedom it promised.
Imagine
seeing sunlight for the first time.
That’s what the cross does for us.
That’s why we exalt it. Not
because we delight in human suffering, not in Jesus’ suffering anymore than we
delight in our fictional mother’s lacerated hands as her fist punches through
the blacked out window. We exalt and
delight and marvel and trust and hope in the cross, because it shows us love,
and love lights up the world. The
crucifixion brings the glory of God within human experience, like the light
which transforms the basement walls, transfiguring sin and death.
But,
my image fails a little, as all images will fail before the throne of glorious
love that our God offers us. For the
cross won’t burn our eyes as the sun might.
God’s love combines the fieriness of a furnace with a gentle, tender
touch. God’s love invites our gaze, and
that gaze draws us forward, to desire the freedom only to be found in love and
virtue, and God love draws out our love and casts out our fear. We hear in our
first reading that the Israelites had to give up their valuable bronze to make
a bronze seraph serpent. And the serpent
was gazed on in order that the serpents that were attacking of them might have
no more power. In the crucifixion,
Christ gives what’s of ultimate value, that death may be gazed on, and the death
that attacks us might have no more power.
People show their love by what they’re willing to give, and on the cross
Christ showed the magnitude of his love for us by giving everything, his
clothing, his blood, his body, his life, that we might see love. Love we were created from and for. Love we’d heard about. Love we knew and can know in muted reflection
of fiery divine love. But love we saw in
full brilliance in a creator, who’d go to the cross at the hands of his
creature, to open that window and not just warm our hearts, but set them
aflame.
The
death of Life himself brings us life.
And we see in that life the true image of God. We see the love of God brought into our
language, our world. We see the
brilliance of selfless love that refuses to grasp, as St. Paul put it, refuses
to exploit the power it has for its own benefit. And we see in fresh relief the walls that
hold us in, the sin and division, the distorted copy of the image of God that
imprisons. Those walls quake when those grasping
forces collide with the love of God incarnate, and they disdain love, discard
love, kill love. And then power and
brightness of love shines forth as love rises from the dead, trampling over sin
and suffering to be with us even more powerfully, ever-lovingly. And we are invited, to leave the world of
grasping, and follow the way of self-emptying, in order to be filled with that
divine life, that love. To reclaim our
created loveliness.
And
that stark sight of love and sin colliding presented on Calvary hill is
re-presented to us. When we see a
crucifix, when we sign our bodies with the cross, when we see suffering, when
we see sacrifice represented and offered here in this Eucharist, we see love,
which lets itself be pierced by sin that it might pervade every corner of this
waiting world and illumine our way, our way home.
Crux ave, spes unica. Hail the Cross, our Only Hope.
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