crosses

Crosses are a point of intersection, a point in time and space where two things meet. We have cross stitches and cross roads these are places of meeting. Then there are places of contrary meanings cross purposes and crossed swords. But for Christians there is one very central meaning of the cross and that is the cross of Christ, the place where Jesus died for us and then an empty cross symbolising the fact that death could not hold God and that the resurrection brings new life and new hope.
Just like our secular uses of the word cross to mean both meeting and divergence, the Cross of Christ is a place of paradox and unity.
So when Jesus tells us to pick up our cross and follow him he is inviting us to a journey both of radical involvement with the world and of separation from it.
Too often, in Christian spirituality, taking up your cross has been seen as a declaration of renunciation of the world, of a drawing away from things, of a passive acceptance of violence and injustice. But this creed is not fulfilment, moving into a holy and exclusive huddle does not follow, at all, the tradition of a Creator God, which is expounded in the Old Testament, a creator God who is passionately in love with and involved with God's creation.
So when we take up this challenge from Jesus it is not an easy one. We will have to face head on the pain and suffering in our own lives and those of people around us but we are also called to enter deep into the causes of violence and to be the voice of Christ in seasons of injustice. And this radical involvement will often be unwelcome, human beings all of us have our own sense of justice and revenge and often this is swift and brutal...precisely the sort of eye for eye pseudo justice which we are called to avoid by Jesus.
Most of us will remember where we were on September 11th 2001. The horror and anger were real and immediate. I was living in the USA several hours from any of the crash sites but still the calls for something to be done, for someone to he blamed and punished came fast and without thought of any complicated reality being at play in any of the events.
Crosses often come in two pieces - the cross which Jesus carried is not likely to have been the whole thing, as in so many stained glass windows, but rather the heavy and crushing cross beam, to which he would have been strapped for his long walk through Jerusalem. Many of us like linear images and the cross provides two - one this horizontal beam representing the weight of the world which Jesus carries and the other a vertical down from heaven kind of shape. It is a very simplistic picture in some ways but a powerful one - the world and humanity laid on Christ and in that action of crucifixion there is a meeting, and intersection between heaven and earth.
Don't hear that I am denying that there is real and present evil in the world, or that we have to battle against it - we do. Don't hear that I am saying there should never be judicial process - I am not saying that either. What I am saying is that for enduring peace and lasting resolution we have to go beyond the simple answers and explore the paradoxes which surround our existence. This is nearly always impossible in the heat of the moment - we are just too fragile to be rational when we are hurting and so we have to do the work at other times.
What is our reaction to extreme violence, how far are we willing to go to explore its causes and refuse to be exploited by it. What are we willing to say or do, do chase or too give up on to prevent radicalisation and factional hatred spreading? The problem is, that whilst individuals who kill others are always to be condemned, you do not have to dig very deep on a societical level to discover blood on the hands of every nation. We western nations have been proud and arrogant, assuming that we can take things where we find them and assuming also that our methods of government and structures of life are superior to those which we encounter elsewhere.
Poverty and lack of power are key indicators in communities which are radicalised. Lack of hope and opportunity turn the young to seek certainty in dangerous creeds rather than in a self-determined future. And too us much of that is other and it can't be - it cannot be that we simply leave places of injustice and inequity - not by our own standards but by the standards of the God who created every human being on earth and loves each and every one, no matter how violent and dangerous they may become.
Thus the cross is a dangerous and daring point of intersection - it calls us to find our own point of stillness so firmly and so definitely in Christ that we can stand at the swirling intersection - sure of our own safety and purpose. The cross is a place of refuge precisely because it encompasses all the violence and hatred of humanity and yet is not overcome by it because of that constant and amazing intersection with the Divine, with life and with peace.
Taking up our cross is not an act of resignation it is an act of engagement - it is a sensible and patient battle cry against all the forces which frighten and diminish humanity. There is little doubt that there will be more terror, that there will be more pain and that the clever people of the world will offer more easy answers. But they are not real, the easy answers, because answers come from involvement and risk, answers come from challenge and engagement - and wee only see that truly enacted in one place - in Jesus Christ.
So read the Gospel but with the eyes not of Victorian kindness, instead with the eyes of those who see point after point of God's interaction with humanity until the whole images of the cross becomes dynamic and all consuming - incarnation is that place where everything is rolled into one - God and humanity and as we take up our crosses - we too enter into that all consuming and all fulfilling journey.