When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
I Corinthians 2:1-2
If your faith has a cross at the center, then at the center of your faith is suffering—not as an abstraction, but real, as real as bones breaking and muscles tearing, as real as broken hearts and shattered dreams.
This faith of yours, with a cross at the center, isn’t detached from the pain you suffer in body, mind, and spirit, nor from the pain you experience in response to another’s suffering that you would gladly take on for yourself if you could.
This faith of yours, with a cross at the center, is in a God who is not indifferent to suffering, but there in it with you and for you, and for others who have suffered or are suffering now. Your God understands the pain of suffering that you not only endure in this life, but also that you cause. The cross holds it all.
If your faith has a cross at the center, then at the center of your faith is politics—not partisanship, as we experience it, but a sober appreciation for the ways human beings use and abuse collective power.
To downplay the politics of the cross is to gloss over the fact that those in charge of the Roman Empire in Jerusalem perceived Jesus as enough of a threat to crucify him, a form of execution reserved for insurrectionists and escaped slaves.
Thus the way of the cross is not only concerned about what lies beyond this world, but God’s vision for this world. It is not an individual path alone, for our personal salvation. It is a collective journey, one that engages us in faithfulness to that vision of justice, mercy, and love that God has instilled in our hearts. The cross is a reminder of the price we must sometimes pay for the vision entrusted to us.
The cross holds all that, too.
If your faith has a cross at the center, then at the center of your faith is sacrificial love. Jesus loved his friends and followers with a fierce and loyal love, even when they denied and betrayed him. For love, Jesus sacrificed whatever kind of life he might have had for what all might have.
Remember that Jesus died as a young man. And if he was, as Christians profess, God, or one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, then he gave up all that fullness might mean in order to live and die in solidarity with those rejected and scorned, those who do not yet know themselves to be cherished by God, all of us caught in the anxieties and uncertainties of human life. He emptied himself, the Scriptures say. He gave his all, and he did so for love.
The way of the cross is sacrificial. It costs us something, if nothing else than to be present to it, awake and mindful of all that is happening, and responding with whatever it is that we have to offer.
The way of love is sacrificial; we know this. To love costs us; to be faithful to a vision that others do not yet see costs us; to seek to love others as God loves costs us, in ways large and small. How could it be otherwise?
In response to the cross, how can we offer back that which costs us nothing?
If your faith has the cross at the center, rest assured that you will spend not only this weekend but the rest of your life struggling with what the cross means. People throughout the ages have interpreted its meaning through the prism of their experience and understanding, and we are no exception.
The cross is our core symbol, one that can hold a wide array of meaning and offer different insights over time. The cross, in other words, might mean something different to you this year than it did last. Perhaps it speaks only too clearly of what you’re going through right now, or it doesn’t seem to speak at all. But don’t diminish the cross or yourself by telling yourself that it has only one meaning that you must accept or reject.
If your faith has the cross at its center, then it is your center, too. Starting tonight, Maundy Thursday, and through to Easter morning, we gather as Christians to walk with Jesus to the cross, ponder its meaning, to see ourselves through its prism, and wait for its promise of resurrection.
It is our time to hold the cross of Jesus alongside the reality of our lives and of the world in which we live, and ask ourselves: What costly and wondrous love is this?
