Last Friday evening I picked my husband up from the airport. And because he’d been away for the week I wanted to do something fun, but also something that wasn’t dependent on his flight getting in on time.
To make a long story short, we ended up at St. Antonius Coptic Orthodox Church in Hayward, at their annual weekend-long King Tut Festival, which was a delightful exhibition of Egyptian food and music and crafts. Before I venture into the complex symbolism of the cross we venerate today, I do have to confess that a Christian church holding a festival in honor of an Egyptian pharaoh was a surprise to me. But then, the symbols we live by—the ones that endure the test of time, anyway—are be their nature multivalent. There are lots of ways to connect to them.
But back to Hayward. Despite the best efforts of google maps, it was not at all obvious that we’d make it to St. Antonias Church. It happens to be buried in the middle of a residential neighborhood in an unincorporated part of town, behind a huge high school that obscures the street views. So as we were driving up and down the darkened street wondering what we were looking for, I finally spotted what looked like a cluster of tents Illuminated by… wait for it… none other than a glowing Greek cross. There it was; the cross as beacon and cross-cultural symbol.
As we finally made our way into the crowded festival, we ran into two cassocked priests benignly standing watch over the whole affair. So naturally I had to strike up a conversation with one of them. We talked about all manner of lively and connective things, as Christians sometimes can do across cultures, and then he happened to mention to me that their community was in continuous prayer for the Coptic Church in Syria. A stark reminder that the cross can never be separated from its original identity as an implement of judicial execution.
That’s evidently what Helena, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, was looking for when in in 355 CE she discovered what she believed to be the true cross upon which Christ was crucified in Jerusalem. It is because of her that we venerate the Holy Cross on our liturgical calendar today. Which, if you’ll permit me this digression, strikes me as a somewhat oxymoronic title. Venerating the Holy Cross like saying that we venerate the sacred profane.
That’s because the symbol of the cross, which cannot be separated from the execution of Jesus, can neither be separated from the triumph of his resurrection. What Jesus accomplished on the cross was to turn the logic of coercive and retaliatory violence upside down. He accepted suffering and forgave those who killed him. He rose to fill his disciples with spirit of reconciliation. And many of them went on to die on crosses themselves, singing the praises of God.
Our Holy Cross. Implement of shame and humiliation and symbol of death? Yes. Means by which Jesus humbled himself and identified with the oppressed? Yes. Throne upon which God’s chosen was elevated into triumph? Yes.
The cross we venerate is all these things and more. I myself rather like the homely ways in which Christians find the symbol of the cross to be meaningful in everyday things. People wear crosses of all sorts for reasons, at home I have a wall of crosses from around the world, and my husband like to collect rocks with crosses embedded in their veins.
Minucius Felix, a Christian who wrote before 200 CE, observed that the shape of the cross is to be found everywhere you look—
“Indeed, we see the sign of the cross naturally formed by a ship. When it carries a full press of sail, or when it glides over the sea with outspread oars.”
I love this image of the cross carrying a sail. It reminds me that one of the structural functions of crosspieces is to support tension. So whatever else it may be, we can trust that our central symbol is strong. The cross is capable of bearing the weight of all our sorrow and all our hope. The cross is capable of holding in balance the realized hope of heaven meeting earth, of eternity meeting time, of death meeting resurrection.
Which means that the cross is certainly capable of bearing the tension that is inevitable our own human lives. The cross will hold us, if we allow it to. In whatever way we are able to, let us lay down our burdens at the foot of this Holy Cross and approach anew the one who draws all people to himself.
