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When I survey the empty cross

Katie Funk Wiebe

Vernon Sigl

I am in favour of Lent. Not in the sense of my childhood friends who selected their Lenten sacrifice carefully to keep pre-Easter days only a few degrees below their normal comfort level. Nor in the sense of inviting the commercial world to suffocate us with more cotton-wool chicks and stuff us with more chocolate bunnies.

I’m for Lent if it means moving more slowly through the period before the celebration of our Lord’s death and resurrection. I’m for Lent if it slows down the tendency to hop, skip and jump through a period in the church calendar at least as significant as Christmas.

In a scene in Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, a prisoner in a forced labour camp in Siberia is sentenced to 10 days in the cells for having worn more than regulation clothing to work on the frigid tundra. As he is led off to his cruel punishment, a fellow prisoner comforts him by saying, “At least you will have time to think.”

I vote for Lent as a time to reflect on the meaning of the cross in the Christian life. “When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of glory died,” we sing at Easter. During Lent, I can survey the cross more slowly, and reflect on the reason the hymn writer called it wondrous.

What other objects do I call wondrous? One winter, I chanced upon some wondrous clusters of tiny, frost-fashioned feathers attached to a metal grill. Some superglue kept these miniature works of art suspended for hours, yet they were so fragile a rough breath easily destroyed them. Yes, they were wondrous.

But Christ’s heavy, splintery cross was not like these delicate creations of nature. It was ugly, a thing to turn from. I recall that as a child I flipped the pages of our family Bible storybook quickly when I came to the Easter story. I didn’t want to be pained by the pictures of Christ’s suffering. I was always glad when the season was over and Mother read us more interesting stories. In that small memory lies, for me, a clue to our need to get done with Easter as quickly as possible. We want to get past Christ’s suffering, for we cannot see it as wondrous.

Now, as I contemplate the cross, I realize the wonder is not in its appearance but in the superglue of love that took Christ to the cross and held Him there.

On His part, it was strong. On our part, it is fragile. One hard puff of difficult circumstances may shatter the mystery and wonder of the cross if we do not understand it.

To survey the cross is to know its meaning for us. Writer Langston Hughes tells the story of a black man during the Depression. One winter night, he is out of work, cold and hungry. He applies first to a white preacher for help but is turned out. The rescue mission to which he is sent is full. As he passes the church, he notices the cross hanging high above him: “a round lacy window with a stone crucifix in the middle and Christ on the crucifix in stone.” Like Samson, he tears down the church pillars, crashing the entire stone front of the church into the snow – rafters, cross and Christ. He has set Christ free. As Christ and the man walk down the road toward Kansas City, Christ says, “You did a good job. They have kept Me nailed on the cross for nearly 2,000 years.”

At first, I resisted the story. A Christ permanently fastened to the cross, even in image form, does not belong to our Mennonite tradition. Our crosses are empty to show He lives in our hearts. Even the empty crosses we hang anywhere are symbolic ones – and we discourage exhibiting too many of them. A little gold cross dangling from a chain or an ear or used as a bookmark is OK.

Now, as I survey the empty cross during Lent, I begin to understand. Crosses may be empty because we have allowed the resurrected Christ to enter our lives – or because no Christ ever hung on them for us personally. An empty cross is only significant when it becomes the starting point for the continuing journey of our faith.

At the cross, the world clearly showed what it does with someone who tries to set people free: It crucifies him. On the cross, Christ made common cause with God the Father against sin. At the cross, we make common cause with the power of His redemptive love.

This article is reprinted, with permission, from the March 4, 1999 issue of Mennonite Weekly Review. Katie Funk Wiebe lives in Wichita, Kan. and is a professor emeritus of English at Tabor College in Hillsboro, Kan.

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Last modified May 4, 2000.

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