In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Light separated from darkness, waters divided, atoms coalesced into molecules, molecules into the building blocks for organic life, building blocks into creatures possessing consciousness. From these nascent, orchestrated movements, all things took on the Word, and more specifically the Word’s cruciform1 shape. The Cross, however would not occur for billions of years after the Bang. In the words of Sebastian Moore, O.S.B., evil finally crystallizes and nails the All Holy to the Cross, thereby manifesting the meaning of the entire cosmos in uncompromising clarity. It is, of sorts, a second Big Bang. Good and evil collide. Evil pours out its entire strength on God, who takes it on in order to drain the Enemy of his power. The stark illogicality of that event, its paradoxical stuff of bizarre nonsense, would draw into focus what the cosmos was created for, why the Big Bang even banged to begin with. Beauty and horror would coalesce in a revolutionary point of singularity.
All things are cruciform, so say the Paschal Mysteries. A few weeks ago, my juniors wrote a prayer service for the Stations of the Cross, seeking to identify human suffering with the calumnious inflictions imposed on Jesus, and the several acts of generosity that marked his path to the Cross. With the sort of genius that can only come from the marginalized and oppressed, these students explored a wide variety of ways in and through which people around the world suffer their own crucifixions, and in these cruciform experiences of humanity, God’s solidarity with humanity becomes readily apparent. Although I cleaned their writing up, keep in mind that the following reflections2 come from the minds of seventeen year-olds. It’s all proof that the Cross casts a shadow over the human condition, and that it can be seen lingering if we squint our eyes just right, or open them just wide enough.
Stations of the Cross as Told by High School Juniors
In 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen year-old boy from Chicago, was murdered. Carolyn Bryant, a twenty-one year-old woman, claimed that he whistled at her and attempted to flirt with her on the street in a Mississippi town. Bryant's husband and brother-in-law abducted Emmett in the middle of the night, beat him, and left his body in a river; it was found three days later, bloated and disfigured beyond recognition, and brought home to Chicago, where his mother insisted on holding an open-casket funeral. Tens of thousands came to see Emmett, and his death sparked the Civil Rights Movement of the past century. Carolyn Bryant later confessed to making up a lie: Emmett had never whistled at her.
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Around the country, hundreds of people have been murdered by domestic terrorists who are overwhelmingly male, white, and Christian. Their educational systems failed them: those entrusted with their care failed to notice signs. Their government failed them: lawmakers granted them easy access to weapons. Seeking revenge on their world, these terrorists do the unspeakable: despairing, they slaughter the innocent. Families of victims are left breathless, mourning the loss of young lives. The Stoneman Douglas shooting is just the latest of these horrendous evils. This image portrays a mother and her daughter outside of the high school, ashes placed on their foreheads for Ash Wednesday, soon after Nicolas Cruz murdered so many students.
Jews in Israel had been occupied for centuries by various empires: the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and during the time of Jesus, the Romans. Women had seen their children suffer, bearing the weight of Roman persecution. And now Jesus, the Galilean preacher and miracle-worker, was just the latest in a string of Jewish deaths. He was crucified just as so many others had been. And mothers and sisters and daughters looked on, mournfully. As he carried his cross to the mountain, Jesus met these women. In years prior, he had healed them, restored their dignity, included them passionately in his message of love and forgiveness. And here, Jesus meets them for the last time.
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When Jesus’ clothes were being taken away, a part of him was also being taken away. This act made him vulnerable and exposed to everyone: he was crucified naked for the world to see. This image shows how people in our world are similarly stripped.
Families, adults, and elders flee their countries because of ongoing violence and war. They are forced to flee to try to avoid getting hurt. What some don't realize is that it's not easy to just drop everything and move. Refugees have to leave family, friends, their belongings, their homes and their whole lives. The only life they know is the one they have lived in their homeland, so when war disrupts their lives, it takes away all they have known. They feel weak and vulnerable, the same as how Jesus felt vulnerable when his clothes were stripped from his body.
Refugees don’t have a say in what should be done. They can’t have an option to stay, because if they do, they face the chance of getting hurt. In this image you can see families walking with their children. These children probably don't know or don’t understand what is going on. Imagine being a kid and not knowing why your family is leaving. Refugees are stripped of their livelihoods and their ways of living.
Some of Dave’s Thoughts on Mark
This weekend, the Easter Vigil’s Gospel was taken from the Markan narrative, the shortest and most stylistically hurried of the Gospels. Mark punctuated his story with rapid transitions, moving quickly from one event to the next; he leaves out much of Jesus’ preaching in favor of a profound story-telling mechanic. Throughout the Gospel, Jesus instructs various people to keep his messianic identity a secret. Jesus clearly does not think that his role of the Anointed One can be completely understood in the midst of his ministry. We cannot see this reality early on, because it has not yet become cruciform.
In chapter 8, almost perfectly halfway through the entire Gospel, Jesus heals a blind man: sight comes gradually, for at first he can only see walking trees3 before the healing reaches its fullness. Immediately after the healing, Peter declares that Jesus is the Messiah (only to be silenced), and then Jesus proceeds to preach on the way of the Cross. Life cannot be found unless it is lost. Jesus transfigures, he drives out a demon, predicts his death yet again, preaches a little bit on the Kingdom, and then the Passion narrative begins, which consumes a bit less than half the Gospel. His preaching from here on in points to the Cross. As the cat-o-nine-tails tears through muscle, and as the nails penetrate flesh and bone, the Kingdom rips its way into the created order, penetrating through time and space.
The excruciating nature of the passion has been ingrained in our Catholic imaginations, and Mark makes it quite clear that all he has written comes to its conclusion on the Cross. Jesus hangs there for the world to see, a Roman soldier approaches and declares, “Truly, this man was the Son of God!” Be this sincerity or sarcasm, we cannot be sure. But Mark believes it to be true.
The full identity of Jesus can only be recognized when crucified. As he unveils this detail that changes all things, the centurion cannot be silenced.
Mark’s lovely resurrection account, in its original form, ends with verse 8, as was read at the Vigil liturgy; some later editor added the full resurrection story with Mary of Magdala and the eleven apostles, but the evangelist left his readers waiting in suspense with his first edition of the Gospel. Jesus leaves behind the empty tomb for his followers to behold and the Gospel ends.
This is all too true of our experience as well. We wait here, unsure of the Resurrection. There is no proof of Heaven, no surety surrounding the immortality of the soul. All we can do, really, is behold all things in their cruciform shape, and tremble with hopeful anticipation.
A Final Word
Jesus’ wounds inhere in his glorified body, as evidenced by Thomas’ poking and prodding. Churches with crucifixes depicting Jesus ascending heavenward tend to drive me a bit nuts, because they tend to lack these salving wounds.
I wonder, along with Augustine, if our resurrected bodies will bear our wounds as well. These are the defining signs that we have given our lives in service of justice, or endured persecution and martyrdom, or have grown close to Christ in his own suffering. Nothing but our woundedness can teach us the art of surrendering our presumptions of self-control and self-mastery. When I visited my dad on Good Friday, I wondered if his own resurrected body, for example, will still be marked in some mysterious way by Parkinson’s disease.
These wounds make us who we are, after all. They are sacramental. They mark our path to Heaven. And even that, my friends, may be cruciform.
1 A brief note on this term: by “cruciform,” I mean the shape of the cross. For example, churches are typically built such that their walls form a cross when viewed from a bird’s eye perspective. In this bit of reflection, I’ll be using “cruciform” symbolically rather than literally.↩
2 For the sake of brevity, I’m only including three: Jesus Is Condemned to Death, Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus, and Jesus Is Stripped of His Clothes.↩
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