The Crux of the Cross

Gospel Reading: Matthew 26:14 - 27:66. The Passion Narrative.

On Palm Sunday and throughout the Holy Week we are taken to the foot of the cross through story and ritual. What we can actually do there is difficult to grasp and very often we end up as solemn observers rather than bringing our own story to the terrible hill of crucifixion. No, it’s certainly not easy to participate rather than observe.

Two different people recently presented me with two very different pondering questions, both of which I am going to use to see if we can carve out a meaningful place for ourselves at the foot of the cross. At first glance, the two questions seem to have nothing to do with each other and one question seems to have nothing to do with the theme of Holy Week at all but bear with me as we go to find our space and place at the Cross of Christ.

Question 1: Did Mary struggle with forgiving the soldiers and the temple authorities for what they were doing to her son?

Question 2: How do we know when we are hearing the voice of God?

Think…what is hurting you or challenging you right now? What are you struggling with that is with you daily? What is causing deep weariness, anxiety or grief in your soul? It doesn’t matter if what you think of is a huge unbearable wound or if it’s a series of small but inescapable irritations that sometimes threaten to overwhelm you. If you’re not wrestling with something, I would be worried about you because suffering is part of the full human condition.

Mary’s struggle at the foot of her son’s cross would have been sheer agony and no one would dispute that. But have we made our image of Mary so perfect that we feel that her grief was ultra pure and didn’t contain any of the negative emotions that we so often grapple with? Was she immune to furious gut reactions like tearing resentment or bitterness towards the people or conditions that were causing the pain? Did she totally escape selfish feelings like terror and fear for her own wellbeing in the place of her son’s torture? Did she not ache to run away, hide and deny the reality facing her? Did she not wrestle with survivor's guilt that she was spared the agony of the cross while her son was not? If Mary did not struggle with these emotions or emotions like them, then the foot of the cross is just a place for the pristine pure of heart who have the super spiritual ability to suffer with immense grace and dignity and we followers of Christ have no place there.

Experiencing natural human emotion is not sinful. It’s what we do with that emotion in the long run that can become the sin. If Mary had not been overwhelmed with outrage toward the soldiers and temple authorities, she would not have been human. And when Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Mary’s inner pain must have reached critical mass. Where could she go with her faith when Jesus himself seemed to have lost his God and felt completely abandoned? How do you feel when the little bit of faith you have is not enough to give any comfort at all to a loved one who is suffering and when you have absolutely no power to rescue them? You feel acutely helpless and abandoned as well. What good is your faith if it can’t save you or anyone else and if it has no power to bring comfort and healing? You have been there. We have all been there.

The cross was more than the death of Jesus; it was the crux of all our hopelessly harsh and painful circumstances and every person who was present at Golgotha was there on our behalf. Only Jesus would have realized how all of humanity was represented there, not only on the cross with him but also in the people at the foot of the cross, in the ones who were nailing him there and in those who ran away because they were emotionally incapable of being there. The cross is the place of reality for the weaknesses and pains of all of us, not just of the super spiritual. And every one of those people there experienced a huge crisis of faith.

The cross is a faith crisis but it is the only door to the capacity to hear the voice of God in a new way – and that door is at the very center of all the agonizing situations in which we continually find ourselves. We can’t avoid suffering because suffering means not being able to control the things that are happening to us or to the ones we love and there is so much in life we have no control over. Mary suffered terribly and suffering means feeling it all – the sorrow, the rage, the desperate helplessness, the resentment, the fear and the crisis of faith. Somehow, in the midst of all that pain, if we don’t deny it or hide it away, we can come to a point of hearing the voice of Jesus saying, “I know! I know how it is. It’s brutal. I could save you from the pain but then I would be saving you from the portals to the very heart of God. You need to go through the pain and through the cross to find the place of stark but fiercely beautiful simplicity. It is there that God’s voice is always speaking to you. You are his Beloved and you are my Beloved. I am with you through it all. You just can’t see me because I am on the cross with you.”  

Mary lost much from those terrible hours of watching her son die horribly. She was stripped of more than she ever thought she could be stripped of and still live. But it is my belief that for the rest of her time on earth Mary was a full vessel of God’s voice for the rest of the disciples, for the newborn church as it waited for Pentecost and for all those who were part of that early church. She was able to hear the voice of her God with new clarity and with a very different level of intimate understanding. John, too, was one who became utterly familiar with the mystical voice of God. If we cannot bring our sufferings to the cross, stand beside Mary and believe that she and Jesus are in complete solidarity with us as we struggle through the pain, it will be very difficult for us to ever hear the voice of God.

It would seem that the pain and suffering of our circumstances are the only things that can strip us of all our false ideas of God – ideas that hold us hostage, make us fearful, distort our expectations or were appropriate for a certain stage of our growth but now are ones that we need to let go of in order to move to higher ground. It’s the only way we can be opened to resurrection life. Mary had to go there. She had to have Jesus, her son, wrenched from her in order that she could receive Jesus, her Lord. She had to go through the door of raw pain in order to find the grace and wisdom needed to hear the new and bigger voice of Resurrected Life.

This Holy Week, go to the cross and bring all of your sufferings with you – even the small stuff. Bring it all and stand beside Mary. Give yourself full permission to be there and to experience every nuance, large and small, of your own suffering and crises of faith. Allow Jesus and Mary to accompany you through the door of life, all three of you stripped, naked and exhausted. 

And then…listen.