A Twilight Musing

Do you wear a cross around your neck or have one on display elsewhere on your person?  If so, is it simple or elaborate, and what is your purpose in wearing it?  How many crosses might you see during the course of a day?  Most churches we pass have a cross somewhere on the building, most likely at the top of a spire, perhaps on the sign out front, and very probably at one or more spots inside the building.  If there are paintings inside, Jesus on the cross will be given prominence as a subject.   The very shape of many older churches is what is called “cruciform.” All this should cause us to ask, “What kind of religious purpose prompts its adherents to give such ubiquitous attention to an instrument of torture and utter humiliation?  Do we realize the strangeness of honoring such an image and wearing it as jewelry and giving it prominence in our art and architecture?

As we participate in the Lord’s Supper, we do well to consider whether we have appropriately assessed the cross of Christ.  Jesus regarded it as something to be taken up and borne, a token of self-denial, not only for Himself but for His disciples (see Matt. 15:24-25).  He set the example of embracing his cross, humbling Himself and “becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:8).   It is no light matter to be associated with the cross on which the Son of God died.  Paul considers the cross of Christ to be the instrument by which he “has been crucified . . . to the world” and the world to him.  In other words, the cross represents his sharing in the death of Christ, and thus it is to be to us.  It is a symbol of our willingness to radically forsake the supposed wisdom of the fallen world around us and to identify with “Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (I Cor. 1:23).

In making these remarks, I am reminded of a poem by T. S. Eliot, “The Journey of the Magi.”  It depicts the Wise Men making their arduous pilgrimage to see and pay homage to the newborn Messiah.  As they encounter bad weather, disloyal servants, and villages that gouge them with high prices, they wondered if “this was all folly.”  They finally come to the end of their journey and see the Christ child, but that epiphany is tempered by a concomitant vision of “three trees on the low sky” (i.e., the crosses on Calvary), leading the speaker of the poem to wonder,

Were we led all that way for

Birth or Death?  There was a Birth, certainly

We had evidence and no doubt.  I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

This is an appropriate presentation, I think, of the ambiguity of the Cross of Christ; it reminds us of the Divine Man whose very birth had death as its purpose, and it ought to remind us that we, like the Magi, can no longer be “at ease here, in the old dispensation.”  Also like them, we “should be glad of another death,” by which we are dead to the world but alive in the Christ who alone brought glory to the cross.      

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.