Holy Cross

Jesus did and taught many things in the course of his ministry, but said that it was by being lifted up from the earth that he would draw all people to himself.

St Paul worked and taught amongst people to whom saying clever things in public was competitive sport. He was a man never slow in his own defense and a canny public speaker, yet he said to the Church in Corinth, “I determined to know nothing among you except Christ, and him crucified.”

When in answer to a lifelong prayer God gave Julian the gift of a vision, almost its whole visual content was of Jesus on the cross. Julian spent twenty years and more thinking and processing just this.

And one of the constants of our life here in the monastery is the presence of crucifixes. They are everywhere we are, everywhere we look, in the chapel, in the refectory, in the chapter room, in our cells, in the workshop, in the library, in the parlor.

When Jesus said that by his crucifixion he would glorify the Father, and by it make him not only known but compelling—what is it about this that St Paul, St Julian, the Church and the monastic tradition have all understood?

The cross is to us, and continually presents to us, the whole of the truth of the Gospel, God’s endless, limitless love for us, and our immediate response to it. Jesus came to show us the Father and his love but we could not take it on. Anything we humans do not understand and that threatens our stability we try to make go away, by violence if necessary, and we did this to Jesus.

Jesus had no need to respond to difference in this way because he was secure in his communion with the Father. He suffered all that the people could think to do to him and loved them still, and loves us still. Jesus’s cross is the story of our liberation. Working on us visually, slowly by slowly, it is the icon of our transformation from a people whose response to inexplicable love is rejection to a people who, in the security of God’s love and for love can suffer anything and love as Jesus does. We desire what we see, we become what we desire, people bearing the likeness of Jesus, people of peace.