What The Crucifix Tells Us

By JAMES MONTI

Recently, upon entering a church where “virtually perpetual” Eucharistic adoration was taking place not in a separate chapel, but rather at the main altar, I was struck by the compelling juxtaposition of the sanctuary’s exquisitely beautiful large crucifix, suspended from above, directly over the majestic monstrance that enclosed the Most Holy Sacrament.
Even though the sanctuary was relatively simple, its classic Gothic features fashioned in wood, a traditional red sanctuary lamp, as well as subdued lighting conducive to recollection, together with a lovely statue of the Blessed Virgin at a side altar to the left with flickering blue candles (real votive candles, not electric) beneath our Lady’s feet, spoke powerfully, even irresistibly, to the heart.
It reminded me just how perfectly the crucifix explains what the Holy Eucharist truly is. Indeed, the crucifix explains everything of what it means to be a Catholic. And it is the crucifix that makes sense of what in life seems most senseless of all — suffering.
One of the most powerful reflections upon suffering in the Sacred Scriptures can be found in the third of the Lamentations of Jeremiah (Lam. 3:1-20):
“. . . He has driven and brought me into darkness without any light. . . / he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation; / he has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago. / He has walled me about so that I cannot escape. . ./ though I call and cry for help, / he shuts out my prayer; / he has blocked my ways with hewn stones. . . / my soul is bereft of peace, / I have forgotten what happiness is” (Lam. 3:2, 5-9, 17).
These words are unsparing in their depiction of suffering at its worst — suffering that is relentless, without relief or pause, suffering devoid even of perceptible consolation from God. Indeed, the Church has recognized in these words a prophecy of what Christ experienced in His Passion — for centuries they have been sung as part of the Holy Week office of Tenebrae.
Yet these images of grief and sorrow are immediately followed by the divine answer to man’s suffering:
“The Lord is good to those who wait for him, / to the soul that seeks him. / It is good that one should wait quietly / for the salvation of the Lord. / It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. / Let him sit alone in silence / when he has laid it on him; / let him put his mouth in the dust — / there may yet be hope. . . / For the Lord will not cast off for ever. . . / for he does not willingly afflict or grieve the sons of men” (Lam. 3:25-29,31,33).
There are some sorrows that God subsequently reverses, crosses that loom just long enough for us to make a decision as to how we will respond to them, after which they are withdrawn. The prime biblical example of this is of Abraham being asked by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. Artists time and again have depicted the climactic moment when as Abraham is about to plunge the dagger into his son out of obedience to God, the angel of the Lord intervenes, staying the hand of the Patriarch with the joyful news that God does not intend to demand this ultimate sacrifice from him.
It was from this moment of Abraham being put to the test and then being spared that there arose the entire Jewish race and the lineage of Christ, all descended from the child Isaac whom his father had showed himself ready to surrender out of obedience to God.
The sacrifice that God the Father spared Abraham from making He did not spare Himself from making. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son” (John 3:16). So with us as well, there are crosses that God will not withdraw from us, such as the death of a loved one, sometimes coming at the conclusion of an illness when we had been praying for the loved one’s recovery. It is in these instances that we are drawn especially close to our Lord in His Passion.
The fact that our Lord rose from the dead so soon after His death does not diminish the fact that He died a very real death on the cross just like ours. He experienced death in all its bitter pain, darkness, and finality; the knowledge that He would rise from the dead did not prevent Him from crying out on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46).
This is why the Protestant tendency to gloss over the Passion of Christ, to leap from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, to celebrate the triumph of Christ in such a way as to plaster over His sufferings and make His death on the cross seem almost as effortless as a victory lap, is so wrong-headed.
Decades ago this mentality also seeped into Catholic circles, especially in the way that some liturgists were reinterpreting the Church’s liturgical celebration of Holy Week. We were told by such liturgists that the Church had decided to toss out the idea of Good Friday as a day of mourning, that instead we should see it as nothing other than a bright and joyful day of victory and happy tidings, effectively absorbing it into the celebratory tone of Easter Sunday. According to this mindset, traditional crucifixes depicting Christ in His sufferings were to be banned from the Good Friday liturgy and replaced with plain crosses to be presented as nothing other than a trophy of triumph.
The academic rationale for this “re-engineering” of the meaning of Holy Week stems from the claim that devotion to the sufferings of Christ was a medieval invention that arose in or around the eleventh century, a deviation and break from how the early Church commemorated and celebrated the Paschal Mystery.
Yet the reality is that there are texts dating from long before the eleventh century that testify to meditation upon the sufferings of Christ, including the second century Paschal homily of St. Melito of Sardis, the Spanish pilgrim Egeria’s vivid account of the celebration of Good Friday in late fourth-century Jerusalem, and the depiction of the sufferings of the Blessed Virgin Mary on Calvary in the seventh century Life of Mary attributed to St. Maximus the Confessor.
As another twist to this story, one scholar has attempted to interpret such early evidence for devotion to the Passion as supposedly an exclusively grassroots piety of the lay people that for centuries the ecclesiastical and theological higher-ups vigorously opposed, as if there were a “class struggle” between the clergy and the laity over this.
These theories alleging to explain how devotion to the Passion of Christ developed fail to recognize that the Church has always understood the Passion as a twofold mystery that is both mournful and triumphant. We find it so beginning in the Scriptures. St. John records our Lord saying of His impending Passion, “Now is the Son of man glorified” (John 13:31), and the Letter to the Hebrews affirms, Christ “endured the cross, despising the shame” (Heb. 12:2).
Yet St. John also tells us that at the Last Supper Christ was “troubled in spirit” (John 13:21), and St. Matthew relates that upon arriving in Gethsemane, our Lord told the apostles, “My soul is very sorrowful even to death” (Matt. 26:38). There is no contradiction here, for it is precisely through the intensity of Christ’s sufferings, by their utter and unrelenting bitterness, that He triumphs over sin and death. The breadth of Christ’s victory is measured by the depth of His sorrow.

Finding Our Way

It is precisely through suffering that we are drawn closest to Christ; the martyrs knew this. In his spiritual classic Transformation in Christ, Dietrich von Hildebrand observes, “We should bring ourselves to recognize in our cross the countenance of the suffering Savior; to experience the nearness to Christ implied in its acceptance” (Transformation in Christ, Manchester, NH, Sophia Institute Press, 1998, p. 458).
In a 1911 book on the final Holy Communion of life, Viaticum, Fr. Daniel Dever movingly describes the soul’s union with Christ through suffering as a journey made in the footsteps of Christ Crucified:
“We ourselves still must onward wander, along earth’s cruel passageways, to seek and find crimson traces of those sacred feet once so deeply wearied and so deeply wounded, like our own, in the outside world; still seeking and still finding our only rest and our only strength where He Himself reposes, in each more distant sanctuary; that so blessedly marks the ever more arid reaches of life’s otherwise desperate, hopeless way, till we sink at last at His opened side by the brink of life’s last and darkling void” (The Holy Viaticum of Life as of Death, New York, Benziger Brothers, 1911, pp. 13-14).
In many churches the scene of the crucifixion is depicted with St. Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross, clasping the wood with her hands, embracing it, and even pressing her head against it. Now more than ever, in this time of darkness in the Church not unlike the darkness of Good Friday, we need to be where the Magdalene was, at the foot of the crucifix, clasping it with ours hands, pressing it to our foreheads. It is there that we will find our way through the darkness, that we will find our way to the bliss of Heaven.