Series:What We Believe as Followers of the Way of Jesus
Annie Dillard a well known American writer once said, “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? ….It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.”
I first encountered these words several years ago, and I’m still pondering them. Do we have the foggiest idea of the power we so blithely invoke? Or, that the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return? Crash helmets and life preservers, indeed. But it was exactly this quote that came to mind as I set before me the task of walking around the significance of the cross in the Christian faith. To consider the cross is an invitation to enter a hard-hat zone because it involves life and death. We might want to hold on tight. We might want to prepare for the very real possibility that we will not return to our life as we know it because where those two beams intersect is the epicenter of God’s transforming power.
Let me be clear. We are fooling ourselves if we think we can sanitize and domesticate this power in order to feel good about ourselves and avoid the real wood and nails of its significance. The cross was one of the most brutal and public forms of Roman torture and execution. It was used to send powerful signals to anyone or any group that opposed Rome or was perceived as a threat. It was designed to quell any hint of revolution. Rome’s strategy was to take out the leaders of such groups. Jesus was believed to be a danger to Roman peace (pax romana).