From Bishop Stephen Cotterell
The things he carried Lent 1 - the cross 26/2/23
They handed it to him like it was nothing. Like it could be thrown away; like they were going to throw him away, this thing of terrible beauty.
He held the rough wood in his hands; gripped it, felt its shape, tested its weight, imagined the plane upon it, the axe striking the base of the trunk, the weight of the leaves upon the branches fluttering in the air of a spring day, breathing their last, gasping, falling, crashing down. He saw it dragged away, cut open, dissected, and used.
And now a grim vocation: to be the place where death is distributed.
He shouldered the weight. It could carry him and it could crush him. He felt its roughness against his rawness. The splinters that pushed into his flesh anticipated the nails that were to follow. It was the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands, this wood he carried.
It was half a cross. He didn’t carry the whole thing, though that was how it would usually be remembered. But nobody ever got him right. And he always evaded those who clung too tightly. Just the crosspiece which his hands would be nailed to: he carried it. And he knew that when he reached the place of execution a stake would be ready, and the beam attached to it; and his hands nailed to it – actually his wrists, in-between the bones, so that the flesh wouldn’t tear, and he could hang there longer. He would be hoisted up. It would make a cross, and then his feet would be nailed in place.
It was about five feet in length – the height of a small person. It weighed about five stone – as much as a bag of cement. And he was already battered and broken from being flogged. And the crowd that had welcomed him days earlier now bayed for blood. And the pallor and expectancy of death were already upon him.
He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave …
He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death …
Perching with the full weight of your body on a square nail driven through the middle bones of your feet brings intolerable pain. The victim soon lets his knees sag and is once more hanging from the wrists, and so the cycle repeats itself, over and over again. Death comes slowly.
As he carried this weight through the streets Jesus knew what was in store for him.
We imagine him, stumbling through the narrow, crowded alleys of Jerusalem on a hot, humid Friday afternoon: we sense the frenzied animation of the crowd; we see the spiteful excitement etched into the faces of those who shout and jeer; we feel their spittle on our face; we see their hands waving, their fingers jabbing; we smell the rank odour of blood and sweat; we feel the weight of the cross pressing us down; and then we hear the blood lust of the crowd boil over. We know in our hearts how easy it is to run with the crowd, and we know how we would have responded. With horror, we see it is our hands upon him; our fingers pointing; our voices jeering.
And then we see him fall – as if in slow motion – tumbling, stumbling, reaching out for a support that has been taken away, vanquished: his hands sliding in the dust, straining for purchase; the beam itself crashing down, the crowd laughing, the soldiers who accompany him pointing, heaving him to his feet, bidding him continue.
And suddenly it seems to mean nothing. Another useless dreamer. Here he is, one more man going to his death, silent before his accusers, stoical in his suffering, useless to stem the flow of hatred and revenge that consumes the human heart. After the defeat of the Spartacus uprising in 71 BC, 6,500 rebellious slaves were crucified. Their crosses lined the Appian Way from Cappadocia to Rome. Their names are forgotten, as in the end all names are forgotten. But the carpenter’s son from Nazareth – this man stumbling to this death – he is remembered. And of all the things we remember about his life and teaching, it is this event – his dying – that we remember most. And the means of his death – the cross – we remember it. Why? Is it because this man is not just a man – not less than a man, but God contained within what it is to be a man? And is his suffering and his dying not just one more notch carved in the endless torment of human misery, but God sharing it, God involved in the world he made, God stretched out on this fearful piece of wood?
When I am lifted up …
He carries the cross, and he treads a path of suffering, step by painful step, that is the suffering of the world. He carries the battered woundedness of everyone who has been trapped and convicted by the foul depravity of all the awfulness we do to each other. He can taste its breath. He can feel its hands upon him. But he carries something else. A light flickering within him that will not be snuffed out. Not when the soldiers mock him; not when he is stripped and beaten; not when they drive in the nails; not when he hangs there ridiculed, forsaken, defeated. He carries half a cross; that half which is God’s determination to plumb the depths of that dark river that is the human heart. But the other half is entirely something else: something that also needs to be nailed down and joined up. He carries the purposes of God. They will be shaped into a cross