Putting an end to scapegoating
Giles Fraser writes at Ekklesia on the meaning of the cross in a modern setting:
Somewhere in the Middle East, Jesus Christ is strapped to a bench, his head wrapped in clingfilm. He furiously sucks against the plastic. A hole is pierced, but only so that a filthy rag can be stuffed back into his mouth. He is turned upside down and water slowly poured into the rag. The torturer whispers religious abuse. If you are God, save yourself you fucking idiot. Fighting to pull in oxygen through the increasingly saturated rag, his lungs start to fill up with water. Someone punches him in the stomach.Perhaps this is how we ought to be re-telling the story of Christ's passion. For ever since the cross became a piece of jewellery, it has been drained of its power to sicken. Even before this the Romans had taken their hated instrument of torture and turned it into the logo of a new religion. Few makeovers can have been so historically significant. The very secular cross was transformed into a sort of club badge for Christians, something to be proud of.
Citing the work of Rene Girard, Fraser continues:
The crucifixion turns this world on its head. For it is the story of a God who deliberately takes the place of the despised and rejected so as to expose the moral degeneracy of a society that purchases its own togetherness at the cost of innocent suffering. The new society he called forth - something he dubbed the kingdom of God - was to be a society without scapegoating, without the blood of the victim. The task of all Christians is to further this kingdom, "on earth as it is in heaven".
Read it all here.
Fraser is spot on when he writes "ever since the cross became a piece of jewellery, it has been drained of its power to sicken". This can be said of many symbols of our faith.
Dr Margaret Miles discusses the relationship between visible objects and the human mind in 'Image as Insight'. "Visible objects reflect and participate in the being of their prototype." (p.66, Image as Insight, Wipf & Stock Publishers (September 2006))
So it follows, then, that if the cross is a piece of jewelry, a 'sort of club badge for Christians' as Fraser so starkly puts it, then generally speaking the cross's prototype has been altered from abominable inhumanity to one of banal personal adornment.
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March 25, 2008 11:28 AM