Tell Me Why You Wear That Cross of Gold

The very first piece of “real” jewelry I ever owned was a 14-karat gold cross strung from a gleaming chain.

I had been longing for it, hovering over the case at our local Bible bookstore whenever we visited. There was a cross for just about any taste but Catholic (no crucifixes!) in that display: rows of gold and silver, some plain and thin, others larger and flattened out with embellished edges made to draw the eye, a few trendy Celtic designs along the edge next to the purity rings. Mine arrived in my Easter basket, nestled in a little velvet box like the ones that lined my mother’s jewelry drawer. The burnished sheen of real gold, so unlike the cheap brass rings from the mall kiosk that left green bands around my fingers, felt sophisticated and grown up. Expensive, even — which mattered, to my shame, given my parents’ policy of an unrelenting “No” to brand-name extravagances like Nike Airs, Guess jeans, and Hypercolor shirts.

That there might be anything incongruous about a thirteen-year-old girl from the suburban Bay Area sporting a Roman torture device around her neck never occurred to me, or to anyone I knew. Brio magazine suggested that wearing it might be a bold move in the hostile halls of my large public high school; in reality, as I quickly learned, high school hostility was mostly reserved for more common forms of social deviance, like being too smart, too awkward, too unversed in popular music or how to talk prettily to boys. I wore it earnestly and mostly unnoticed for a year or so. By the time I was a senior, I had swapped it out for hemp chokers strung with peace-sign beads. My cross and its chain were relegated to a tangle in the corner of my jewelry box, just another accessory.

That accessory — the little inch-high shard of precious metal — is a miniature of an instrument of death. (I gave it to my own daughter a while back, and she did wear it daily through her senior year.) So too is the small gold cross encrusted with tiny diamonds that was a gift from my mother-in-law early in my marriage. When the Roman Army laid waste to Jerusalem in 70 CE after a brutal siege, they rounded up thousands of Jewish resistance fighters for scourging and execution. The rubble-strewn streets were lined with bloody corpses, carrion feed hanging from wooden shapes just like the one around my neck, a little X shining with precious stones refashioned from an old cocktail ring.

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In The Crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann wrote, “The cross is not and cannot be loved.”

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Crosses as adornment are nothing new. You can find silver-plated charms in a spinning plastic rack at Wal-Mart, carved ivory pendants under glass at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and diamond lavaliers in the window at Cartier. And we wear them for all sorts of reasons: to show devotion, maybe, or to announce allegiance. Buffy Summers wore hers to keep vampires at bay. Walk down the street, flip on the TV to congressional hearings, mill around the coffee hour after church, and there they are, ordinary as day. Shrunken torture contraptions, cast in platinum and gold.

There’s a history to all of this, of course. Some 300 years after Jesus’ scourged back rubbed up and down the splintered wood of a Roman cross with his last, jagged breaths, a Roman general (of all people) purportedly had a vision. A cross in the sky and the words In hoc signo vinces: by this sign, you will conquer. He painted crosses on his troops’ shields, marched into battle, and won an empire.

In the years that followed Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge and his accession to the imperial throne, the cross got a glow-up of sorts. And as Christianity grew in royal favor, the symbol of its central claim to shame — the foolishness and weakness of a God who allowed himself to be ignominiously tortured to death — began to appear stitched in golden thread on vestments, gilded in precious metal on altars, and studded with jewels to be hung around wealthy women’s necks.

I love my own little diamond cross, both because it’s beautiful and because I love the woman who gave it to me. She knows what is waiting on its other side now, having followed Jesus into the shadowland of death. But I want to try and recover some sense of its shock. Like the rough and splintered beams I knelt before on Good Friday, resting my head briefly before slowly rising and walking away — a freedom not available to a cross’s victim — my little cross is beautiful for what it holds. But the holding itself, whether of flesh and bone or the cocktail diamonds that shimmer over that brutal truth, is obscene.

There’s a popular sermon illustration that likens our penchant for decorating our churches and ourselves with crosses to venerating the electric chair. But there’s something even worse about the cross. It’s more than just a tool for dispatching criminals (or the criminally disapproved). Electrocutions are awful, but at least they take place inside. The whole point of pinning someone up in public like an insect on a card was to render them a specimen: an example of what power can and will happily do to those it does not favor, and an invitation to look on with fascination, disgust, and even relief at being the one who remains on the ground, safely within the bounds of the recognizably human. The physical undoing of crucifixion, so clearly and cleverly devised to disfigure and defile its victims in their public agony is, well, diabolically effective at eliciting more horror and revulsion than sympathy in those unfortunate enough to witness it. It’s not only that the cross kills, and kills brutally. It’s that all at once, with its horizontal and vertical planks, the cross divides and isolates its victim from the fellowship of those who put him there and the God who fails to put a stop to this, who sits silently and apparently disinterested above.

The cross degrades. It unmakes. Standing there upright, arms out, it all but shouts, “This thing hanging from me: it’s not a human. Not anymore.” The crowd that gathers around it is absolved from responsibility to do anything but gape, while the wretch dying on it lies beyond any fellowship of human comfort or relief. “I am a worm and no man,” laments the psalm Jesus gasped out as he died; “maggot” is closer to what it really means. The cross is a place for things that the people in charge find foul or festering in the body politic, best stepped on or stamped out — or failing that, nailed to die of exposure in the sun.

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Writing from Tegel prison, enduring Allied bombardment, and waiting to be brought up on charges by an increasingly desperate Nazi regime, Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed: “God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross.”

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The gospel writers were well familiar with crucifixions: what happened to Jesus was no novelty to them. (My little diamond cross is another story, though. I suspect they would find it both confounding and grotesque.) Common criminals, would-be revolutionaries and messiahs, and disturbers of the Pax Romana were regularly strung up by the imperial powers, and the sight would have been a distasteful commonplace to Gospel readers and writers alike. Yet these writers insist that it is on the cross that God is revealed. A Roman centurion watches Jesus draw his last breath and confesses — is it with a sudden shock of surprise? Conviction? Horrified acknowledgement? — “Truly, this man is the Son of God.” Which, you know, was a title he was more used to seeing carved under likenesses of Caesar.

That’s how Mark’s Gospel ends. John, on the other hand, gives us an unveiled peek at Jesus’ identity right in the prologue: he tells us up front that the eternal Word of God “tabernacled,” or pitched his tent with us in our humanity. Either way, their witness is the same. God came to dwell with us, and it only took us about 33 years to push him right back out, right up onto that cross. To tell him, no thank you: we prefer our human nature godless after all. We’d rather not share that space.

And in response, how does God behave? God, it turns out, is revealed in the dead face of a defeated and degraded nobody, hanging lifelessly in a provincial backwater far from the center of the world’s glory and power. He let us push him away. Which is to say: as the fully human and divine one, Jesus lets the cross divide and display him like a specimen. He lets us banish him from our human fellowship, and he suffers that estrangement, apparently abandoned by God, under a silent sky.

There’s a strange glory to all of this. It’s a glory John calls “the glory as of a Father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14). Only that glory isn’t shining on a mountaintop. It’s not sparkling or dazzling in any way we might expect. Like my little cocktail-ring diamonds, John insists that this glory only glints from Jesus’ face when he is lifted up on the cross. And this glory has a slight air of rot, an embarrassing whiff of the graveclothes it has to shake off.

And shake it off, he does. The graveclothes get folded and left where Jesus’ head was laid; his divinity and glory, unveiled on the cross, flash out most clearly from the wounds in his resurrected body. The Gospels were written down as witnesses to his death, but only because that most degrading and dehumanizing of killings was transfigured when he emerged out of it.

Knowing all this gives me some pause when I go to clip my cross around my neck. After all, Jesus gave us fair warning: he told us that it’s the eventual destination for anyone who wants to follow him. Owning it, wearing it, is essentially to say, “That death belongs to me.” It binds me to actually obey Jesus. The path he laid down was one of absolute abandonment of love into the hands of his neighbors, into the hands of his enemies — our own hands — and into the hands of God. Most days, most moments, I don’t really have the stomach to follow.

Most days. Most moments. But sometimes I remember this. Human beings exiled Jesus to the cross, and to the grave. Sin and death held him there and held him under. And I don’t want to downplay the horror of Good Friday or Holy Saturday: on the cross, Jesus absorbed every ounce of cruelty, violence, and suffering that humans mete out to one another, and most especially to those too vulnerable or powerless to resist. The cross exposes our species’ capacity for malice, our diabolical ability to delight in harm.

But. At the same time and mysteriously, as the site of submission to his undoing, the cross was the safest place Jesus could be. Hanging there, Jesus was squarely in the center of God’s unending, uncreated, unfathomable love for all that he made. It turns out that we can kill God, but we can’t unmake him or undo his love. When Jesus laid down his life then was laid down in the absolute silence of the tomb, he came to rest securely in the hands of his Father. He was waiting — is that too active of a word for someone who has died? — for the humanity to which he had willingly married himself to be remade, called forth, enlivened in a new way that no grave could ever contain.

I want to be careful here. Talking about following Jesus to the cross is a tricky thing. I don’t really want to advise anyone to seek it out: we live in a world where the crucifiers remain happily in business, and if you’re reading this, I’d much rather see you safely on the ground. If and when suffering comes for you, if I’m at hand, I hope I’m brave and obedient enough to divert its attention if I can, or at least find a way to offer you some comfort and relief. But when the shadow of death shifts onto me, in whatever form it takes, I want to be wearing my cross. I want it to assure me that Jesus’ obedient trust can make its home in me as well: that I can be united with him whenever I, too, am laid down in the hands of God. To know that I don’t have to be afraid of pain or death, especially when it comes as the consequence of love. On that day — and in the small, everyday deaths to self that are love’s demand and delight — I hope I can close my hand around my little cross and know that when I die and come to rest with Jesus, he will bear me up when he is raised.