Searching for the Cross
Jesus asked them, "For whom are you looking?"
For most of my life I have searched for the cross. Somtimes I have felt very close - sometimes far off. I have tried to imagine myself at the foot of the cross - I have been that close.
As a young and strongly religious boy, I had a small crucifix on my orange box altar, one of the nails was missing, and Christ hung so precariously - almost dangerously. Perhaps I was closer then to a broken Christ than my imagining of Calvary.
As a teenager I had a small crucifix on a chain that hung around my neck. Always covered by my shirt and schoolboy tie as if ashamed, somehow, of my allegiance or my love, or looking back, ashamed of the shame of the cross.
Then I fell in love, or thought I had, and gave my crucifix away to my French girlfriend. Where is it now, I wonder. Does she still have it with some vague memories of me and some sense of what it meant, if only to me? Or is it lost and disappeared from sight? Lost.... Lost...
Has the world lost sight? Has the world lost sight of the cross?
All my life I have been searching for the cross. In the Cathedral yesterday I stared, yes, stared with longing at the great cross hanging there above the altar. There is something in that great stark Christ suspended there that moves my heart to tears.
Then I lost it - Christ’s body painted in gold like some young model selling costly perfume in a magazine. Yes, I know, it reflected the glory of the cross; of Christ lifted up ready to rise in glory; but, for me, something of the price paid by the Son of God was lost.
How strange the mind is. Minds wander, and standing, staring at that great Cathedral cross, my mind must have somehow caught my words ‘price paid’, and recalled and almost found, almost found the cross for which I searched in a long lost poem:
And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As though through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows; a bright
Serpent; a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill, a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
Had my mind, at last, grasped some essential truth that the cross for which I searched might have been in my mind all the time, or, if not my mind, my very being? Close at last but not close enough.
Standing there, I looked again at that great Cathedral cross above the altar. Then, at last, looked down and across to the altar and saw our dying bishop breaking bread and remembering for us the words This is my body given for you. Beneath the cross, almost at its foot, I saw our dying bishop take the cup of wine and say Drink this, all of you; this is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for many.
Beneath the cross I found the cross at last.
And then so many images came rushing like a storm into my mind, into my very being. So many images....
A dead baby, mottled blue, in its pram. Mucus still pouring from her nose. Cold and neglected by its neglected parents.
A roadside crash outside my house, a brave girl with one leg hanging off and changed forever.
An old doctor with a long, long list of names, of all his patients who had died, tucked in his ageing tattered prayer book from which he prayed.
A winter tree, yards from my house, standing stark against the sky, below plouged fields waiting for life to begin again.
A man, I had known for only minutes, sitting up in bed, breathless, sweating, cold; asking for my prayers minutes before he died. Later I wept, pleading with God for the faith he had.
Our son’s newborn twins, one beautiful and alive, one beautiful and dead. Both beautiful still, I hope you understand.
Images, images - the word does not do them justice.
A mother sitting, staring bleakly with her small, bald-headed son - treated for his cancer in a stark, bare, dirty Siberian ward - covered with one small blanket. Hope gone, if it were ever there. And outside, Lenin’s statue pulled to the ground, warehouses becoming churches once again, full of icons, candels and resurrection hope.
Winos - what a judgemental word - standing and sleeping in a London park full of rubbish and cans and black, despairing black bin liners, flapping eerily in the wind.
My friend, Rod, a tumour in his head, holding a cross in his hand, now lost without it.
Then, just last night, late and coming out of church - stark and bare, stripped of all its decoration - lingering memories of feet washed and kissed, of bread become Christ’s body resting on the Altar of Repose. Coming out of church to fighting in the street, drunk and noisy and unaware of the cross across the street.
That last image stays with me still. Those fighting, swearing boys as unaware, as I have ben my 60 odd years, of the cross for which I searched.
It is there, and always has been, beside me. There with the winos, the frightened little Russian boy, the dying man who asked me to pray, the girl who lost her leg and has girls of her own now, there with that dead baby in the pram, the winter tree waiting for Spring, the ageing doctors prayers, there with Thomas our stillborn grandson and with Alex his growing, glowing brother, there with our bishop breaking bread, there with my friend Rod, holding his cross.
Holding his cross, as many of you will do a few minutes from now, as you hold and grip the cross and kiss the feet of Christ.
But there it is. At last. It is not us who hold the cross - for the cross holds us and always has. Christ suffering for us still, suffering on his cross until this world comes to an end.
All my life I have searched for the cross and it is there right beside me, always has been, always will. Holding me. And, in a few moments when I, like you, kneel before the cross, my prayer will be that I might, just for a moment, be transformed into what I kneel before. Amen.
John Smith, Good Friday, 2009
