The Cross of Christ
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin on the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (B), September 12, 2021
Isaiah 50:4-9a, Psalm 116:1-8, James 3:1-12, Mark 8:27-38
He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34).
The New York Times archives hold as many photographs of September 11, 2001, as you’d ever wish to see, more than I could bear to see. One of them is particularly striking.
Here’s what it captures. Where the World Trade Center stood only days before, a massive piece of the steel structure, once the backbone of the iconic towers, stood above the wreckage. It had toppled and split in half, landing straight up in the form of a perfectly symmetrical cross.
The Times reported:
The cross has become an inspiration to many workers and others at the site. Frank Silecchia (one of the ironworkers) found it the third day after the attack, as he was pulling bodies from the rubble and dust. He looked up at the light, saw the cross, and wept. “I was overwhelmed by it really,” he said.
Chris Ryan, of the Fire Department’s Rescue 3, said, “It was pretty much miraculous. Without a doubt it is one of the few good things we have seen down here.” [1]
Of course, we must be wary of assigning meaning to the cross that does violence to its truth. We have seen, unfortunately, since September 11 an associated rise of Christian Nationalism, Xenophobia, religious intolerance, and military violence. The use of the cross for these ends, or for any ends that are ours, is an abomination that must be resisted.
Fleming Rutledge, preaching on the first anniversary of September 11, remarks:
We must take care, because the symbol of the Cross is not self-interpreting; it takes on meaning according to the meaning assigned to it in each concrete situation. But a cross raised above the desolation at Ground Zero speaks to us of the One who “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.”
Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again (Mark 8:31).
This is the Crucifixion of Our Lord. Physical, unimaginable torture. Social degradation. Total Exposure. Love unto Death.
This is the Cross.
What does it mean, Rutledge asks, to see this Truth, the Cross:
Rising out of the graveyard of four thousand unsuspecting, defenseless people? What does it mean to invoke the presence of a crucified man in the midst of so much pain? What does it mean to erect an instrument of torture and death over a scene of hatred and destruction?” [2]
Ground Zero has been referred to as both hallowed ground and as God forsaken. The latter characterization, God Forsaken, in this context as far as I can tell doesn’t merely speak of desolation but of the absence of God. This characterization hasn’t necessarily carried over to the destruction at the Pentagon or to the final resting place of those on board United Airlines Flight 93, that crashed in western Pennsylvania. And I’m not quite sure why. The devastation at both was tremendous and continues to grieve so many even now.
Maybe Ground Zero, as icon of the unspeakable, bears the brand God Forsaken so that the rest don’t have to.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was in NYC, at Trinity Wall Street, very close to the Twin Towers, when the planes struck. He, and those with him, thought they would die. The next day, in the still quiet hours of the morning, Williams encountered an airline pilot on the dust-filled streets. The pilot asked a simple, expected question, “Where . . . was God?”
Was Ground Zero God-forsaken? Was America? Were we all?
Later, in an impromptu Eucharist at St. John the Divine Cathedral in NYC, Williams relived this encounter and simply said that God is useless in times like these. In that, God didn’t cause these horrific events, nor was God ever going to stop them from happening. God has granted us free will, and therefore God must suffer the consequences of September 11, of evil in all forms –God has to suffer the consequences of these just like we do. [3]
God is useless, Williams seemed to be saying, if what we want to do is to use God. If what we want God for is to blame, or to explain, or to account for, answer for, what happened to us on that day (and all the days before, and all the days after). If what we want is for God to deliver us from the suffering caused by our own hands.
He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
Physical, unimaginable torture. Social degradation. Total Exposure. Love unto Death. By our own hands.
This is the Cross that we are called to take up; the very Cross whose assurance is that nothing and nowhere and no one is beyond the reach of God.
When I was a younger, Southern Baptist version of myself, there was a story about taking up the cross. It was pulled out often and usually told admonishingly when someone started complaining.
A man goes to Jesus and says, Jesus, I know I am meant to take up my cross and follow you, but the cross you have asked me to bear is just too heavy, just too much. I can’t do it. And Jesus would say, “Son, I hear you. Behind this door is a room with many crosses. Go in and choose the cross you feel you can bear. Behind the door, the man finds many crosses and, after carefully evaluating each one, chooses the smallest, exiting back through the door and thanking Jesus for the chance to lay down his many burdens. Jesus then says, “Son, that is the same cross you came in with.”
Often, we believe our burdens too much to bear until we see the burdens of others –that’s the moral of the story. And, it’s a fine one.
And yet, notice something. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
Let them deny themselves.
How can I take up my cross if I have denied the me that takes it? Samuel Wells writes:
In one sense . . . taking up the cross inevitably means denying oneself. It means leaving aside security, even survival, and probably a deep sense of [personal] justice.
In another sense, however, there is a deep contradiction. For if you have denied your “self,” the cross you take up isn’t exactly yours. If you want to be Jesus’s follower, you are realizing that the true human life, the true goal and destiny of all human striving, is not your life but his. [4]
There is but one true Cross, and that is the Cross of Christ. It is why we can sing, “All my hope on God is founded” even “as tower and temple turns to dust” (The Hymnal 1982, #665).
Because the Cross bears a truth like no other: that even in our deepest sorrow, we are not alone. God never forsakes us. That even where evil lurks, Christ has ultimately prevailed. That neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, Almighty.
This is the Cross that we are called to take up, not an individual cross, but His Cross. And we bear it together, as the Body of Christ. With every cross-shaped, cross-inspired word and thought and deed, we bear it, and we share it.
Amen.
[1] Jennifer Steinhauer, “A NATION CHALLENGED: THE SITE, A Symbol of Faith Marks A City’s Hallowed Ground,” The New York Times, 5 Oct. 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/05/nyregion/a-nation-challenged-the-site-a-symbol-of-faith-marks-a-city-s-hallowed-ground.html.
[2] Fleming Rutledge, “A Cross at Ground Zero,” in The Undoing of Death: Sermons for Holy Week and Easter (Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002), 227.
[3] Rupert Shortt, Rowan’s Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop of Canterbury (Michigan: Eerdmans, 2009).
[4] Samuel Wells, “Holiness: Sacrifice (Mark 8:31-38),” The Christian Century, 8 Mar. 2000, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/holiness-sacrifice.