Journal

Mockery and perversion of the Cross

Posted on March 25th, 2005, in the evening

Good Friday has really been alive in my thoughts today. [Fair Warning: This post gets a bit graphic]

I see people all over the web on bulletin boards and forums perverting and mocking the Cross in images and words. They've completely missed the point. The Cross is a perverse mockery in the first place. Nothing more could possibly be done to make the Cross an obscenity. (Our sanitising and domesticating of the Cross in the Christian community is perhaps the really harmful distortion.)

I've been thinking particularly about the disciples going to sleep on the evening of Good Friday (if they got to sleep at all) having witnessed what they witnessed. Only yesterday it was the last supper. Yesterday they heard all the beautiful teaching recalled in John's gospel. Today they watched their master mocked, stripped, torn apart, abused by soldiers and crucified. What an absolutely bewildering perversion. What an obscene mockery.

There's nothing more to be done. No more mockery of Christ, no more perversion of his image. Nothing more awful for those who love and follow Christ than the Cross itself. Christians in England were up in arms recently over the portrayal of Jesus in 'Jerry Springer The Opera', but that pales by comparison. Good Friday was the real man, naked and bleeding on a beam of wood.

Here are some words from Psalm 22, the same Psalm from which Jesus quoted My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? on the Cross:

I am a worm and not a man,
scorned by men and despised by the people.
All who see me mock me;
they hurl insults, shaking their heads:
"He trusts in the LORD ;
let the LORD rescue him.
Let him deliver him,
since he delights in him."

Psalm 22:6-8, NIV

Modern-day mockers and perverters are just joining with the fallenness of humanity that crucified Christ in the first place. They add nothing with their coarse jokes and Photoshop images that we haven't done to Christ throughout history. This hate for Christ is like the discharge from an infected wound in humanity, an overflowing poisonous hatred.

But today I've seen a beautiful thing offset against this awful picture. Fallen and wounded humanity lashes out at Christ but from the very wounds this hatred inflicts pours the salve for the healing of fallen and wounded humanity. Christ's wounds are pure, there is no infected discharge, instead healing for the wounds of others flows.

To any modern-day mockers reading: we are all haters and mockers, but there is healing for the wounds in us that lead to the derision and the hatred. To any Christians: don't be complicit in the real distortion of the Cross, which is to sanitise it.