Thomas Howard on the Image and the Mystery of the Cross

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Thomas Howard on the Image and the Mystery of the Cross

From the essay, "The Image of the Cross", taken from the collection, The Night Is Far Spent: A Treasury of Thomas Howard (Ignatius Press, 2007):

At the center of Christian vision and imagery stands a great and enigmatic sign, the sign of the Cross. Like the brass serpent held aloft on a pole by Moses in the desert, the Cross has drawn and fixed the gazes of men ever since it was raised. It is there at the center of Christian vision because it is there at the center of the divine drama celebrated in that vision—the drama unfolded on the stage of our history in the sequence of Annunciation, Nativity, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension. And, like all these mighty mysteries in this sequence, the Cross defies all our efforts to grasp its full significance, and all our attempts to respond adequately. Shall we approach in sackcloth or in festal garments? Shall we sing songs of penitence or of triumph? Shall we bring ashes or garlands?

The difficulty we mortal men have in the presence of the events that make up the Gospel is that, while the events themselves are straightforward enough for any peasant to understand (the angels appeared to shepherds), the significance of those events exhausts the efforts of the most sublime intellects to grasp them. The plain Gospel story is told, century after century, to peasants, children, and philosophers and calls forth adoration and faith from all alike. The stable, the Upper Room, the garden, the Cross, the tomb, and so forth: these are points in a tale that is plain enough for all of us. But these are also points on the frontier between the seen and the unseen, the historic and the eternal, the contingent and the unconditioned, and hence open out onto vistas where the divine immensities loom in all their terror and splendor.

For this reason, the Cross, which is a clear enough object, attracts the unceasing efforts of man's intellect and imagination and affection to respond in some manner fitting its significance. It is carried in procession with great pomp in Rome and hangs on a string around the neck of an Irish farmer. It glimmers from a plaque next to a child's crib and shines from the pages of Aquinas, Calvin, and Barth. It is hailed in sorrowful chants ("O vos omnes ... videte si est dolor sicut dolor mei") and in hymns of contrition ("When I survey the wondrous Cross") and of triumph ("Onward, Christian soldiers"). There are gold crosses, plastic crosses, wooden crosses, jeweled crosses, and stone crosses. There are huge crosses towering in the Alps and the Andes and tiny crosses on dashboards and shelves. There are crosses on spires and crosses on gravestones. There are Celtic crosses, Crusaders' crosses, crosses of Saint Anne, and Coptic crosses. There is the bare cross, the crucifix, and the Christus Rex (Christ crowned and in royal robes on the Cross). And of course there is no counting the frescoes, mosaics, icons, and oil paintings that have for their subject the crucifixion scene.

What can we say of the Cross—this mystery celebrated, extolled, lauded, adored, and followed for two thousand years? Nothing new, certainly.

For Protestant imagination, the focus has always been not so much on the image of the Cross as on the work on the Cross: the work of atonement wrought by Christ there for us, from which proceed our redemption and the forgiveness of our sins; and the work of the Cross in the heart of the Christian who embraces it, dealing death to the Adam in us with all of his sin, and opening the way to new life. Hence, in this imagination, the Cross is thought about, and spoken about, and preached and written about, but not much depicted. The idea here is that if you externalize and visualize your representations of the Cross, you will get: to looking at the thing you have made and miss the significance behind it. It is a caution that has been alive in the Church from the beginning, and one that will need to be kept alive until we pass from faith to sight in the final triumph.

But whether Christians' meditations on the Cross have been accompanied by any sort of visual representation or not, all Christians have known that this Cross is right at the center for them. The story that they call Good News anticipates and moves straight toward the Cross from the outset; nay, there is shed blood and the promise of bruising some thousands of years before that story itself unfolds. And there is no victorious denouement to the Gospel story (what Professor Tolkien calls the "eucatastrophe"—the good outcome) in Resurrection and Ascension without the Cross first. There is no question of eternal life for us without our going down into crucifixion and burial with Christ, like seeds of wheat planted in the ground before the crop and harvest. There is no putting away of sin by any method other than crucifixion. There is no doing away with the debt piled against us unless it is nailed to the Cross.

Christians see themselves, then, as a people under the sign of the Cross. It is the sign of their salvation; it is their ensign, their banner, their cover, their plea, and their glory. It is an interesting datum in the history of the Church that there has never been defined for Christian orthodoxy one universally satisfactory doctrine as to what happened at the Cross. All creeds and councils agree that at the Cross Christ effected our salvation, and that our debt was, somehow, paid there (paid to whom? God? the Devil?), and that we have forgiveness of sins and eternal life on the basis of that event. But the fullness of the transaction remains a mystery. The words offering, sacrifice, substitution, atonement, example, and victory all crowd around the Cross, but no one can get all the pieces fitted together, any more than they can fit together the pieces in the other events of the Gospel story. We affirm these events and the dogmas that define them; we confess them, we believe them, we bow to them, we preach them, and we sing of them. But we cannot explain them.

This, surely, is at least part of the glory of Christian Faith: it speeds like a light between two poles, the one pole being the plain events in the Gospel story, the other being the great mysteries evinced in the events. For Christians, the very act of contemplating the events and the mysteries is nourishing and gladdening. For two thousand years now, peasants and sages have focused on the few simple events of the Gospel in their meditations; but no one has come near to exhausting it.