When I teach Christology in my institution’s graduate pastoral ministries program, I begin the course with an exercise in theological reflection, inviting students to consider their relationship with Jesus as it has developed over the years, starting with their earliest memory of him. My earliest memory involves a crucifix.
The children of St. Barnabas Church in Arden, North Carolina, were going to sing a hymn for a liturgy (if I recall it was either “On Eagle’s Wings” or “Here I Am, Lord”). We were arrayed on the stone steps leading up to the altar, which was flanked by a stone wall and a dominating life-sized wooden crucifix. I recall gazing back at the representation of Jesus suspended on the cross and finding myself overwhelmed with utter love for him. I was rebuked for being off-task, which is an understandable, if ironic, reaction from the harried adults supervising this gaggle of parish kids. I was about 8 or 9 years old.
St. Barnabas was a thriving parish that had a series of dynamic priests. Later, in my early-to-mid 20s, I happened upon the news that one of those priests, whose tenure overlapped the most with my family’s time at the parish, pleaded guilty to obstructing an investigation into a music minister’s possession of child pornography. Aware that his employee was under investigation for this crime, he went to the man’s house and deleted thousands of images from the man’s computer to thwart the police.
These two episodes capture something pertinent about the cross of Jesus Christ, which we exalt and celebrate this day. The cross is at once the fullest expression of God’s boundless love for humanity, inviting our love in return, and the most gruesome expression of human depravity and injustice. Similarly, the parish where I first had a self-consciously loving encounter with Jesus was also served by someone who aided, abetted, and provided cover for sexual abuse. (So far as I’ve been able to ascertain, Fr. John did not directly commit any abusive acts or possess abusive content—and I never had the slightest hint of that, despite working closely with him as an altar server. But enabling abusers is inexcusable and abhorrent.)
Fr. John’s complicity in the abuse and exploitation of minors is a potent reminder of why the theology of the cross has fallen upon such hard times in recent decades. Theologians, particularly theologians working in the feminist and womanist traditions, have rightly excoriated the ways in which appeals to the cross have been used to underwrite abuse and acquiescence to it.
On this, Presbyterian theologian Delores Williams, and her critiques of the surrogacy that runs from Hagar’s abuse at the hands of her enslavers, Abraham and Sarah, through enslaved Black women in the Antebellum South, to the “mammies” in post-abolition American culture and beyond, is particularly trenchant. Williams uncovers the ways in which surrogacy does not simply operate through coercive means. That’s easy enough to identify, and most people would be pretty quick to denounce it as an abusive structure.
Even more pernicious, though, is voluntary surrogacy, by which people—and especially women, and even more especially Black women—renounce their well-being in favor of others, of their own volition. This dynamic leads Williams to dismiss Christ’s cross as having no redemptive value or potential.
I at once believe that we must take these critiques seriously, face them squarely, learn from them, absorb their lessons, and let them transform our theology, and that we must still “lift high the cross,” because it is still on Jesus Christ crucified and risen that all our hope is founded. But we must not rush to this affirmation, lest we run roughshod over the vulnerable and abused as we do so. It’s easy enough to insist that the evils that Delores Williams condemns are simply distortions and perversions of an otherwise integral tradition: the real gospel of the cross doesn’t do that.
There’s something to this approach, of course, but what it fails to reckon with is just how common these distortions and perversions are. Clarifying what’s good and authentic is perhaps important work, but all these women and children and racial and sexual minorities have still suffered oppression and abuse in the name of the cross. Precision and correction can never undo that abuse.
It might be good information that no true Scotsman would leave me beaten and robbed by the roadside, but if a surfeit of false Scotsmen, perhaps decked in kilts, are waylaying travelers in the Highlands, that knowledge doesn’t make my journey any safer. We need to ask ourselves why these deplorable results are so prevalent in our churches and cultures. If they could never result from preaching the cross properly, and if they keep happening, then we need to face the fact that a good deal of preaching of the cross is done improperly.
And we should be wary of the lazy assumption that it’s only other people who are doing it wrong or that our proclamation of the cross could never contribute to injustice or abuse.
And yet the cross is inescapable, “towering o’er the wrecks of time.” Jesus himself admonishes his would-be followers that to be his disciple will involve walking in the way of the cross. The New Testament and the theological tradition are replete with the insistence that it is by his dying and rising that Jesus Christ has accomplished the salvation of the world. There is hope in the cross because by it, the Word made flesh has placed himself alongside and identified with the suffering and oppressed over against their oppressors.
Just as crucially, he has done this not to validate their suffering, but to end and reverse it. The feast we celebrate in the middle of September, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, draws upon language from the Fourth Gospel, in which the climax is Jesus’ being “lifted up,” because his cross is inseparable from his resurrection. He went to the cross not primarily to suffer, but to gather the whole world to himself, to gather all those on whom suffering has been inflicted throughout history, and to bear them through his Passion into the triumph of resurrection.
Beware a theology of the cross that glorifies suffering, for such a theology can lend itself to enshrining suffering as a status quo. Instead, suffering can, and sometimes should, be borne for the cause of resisting evil and establishing justice. It’s one thing to suffer because you insist on doing the right thing and refuse to deviate from it—this is what Jesus did. Or to suffer in your resistance to the sinful impulses that remain even after your baptism and conversion—this is what Paul did, along with the great cloud of witnesses who’ve followed the way of Jesus through the centuries. It’s quite another thing to suffer because you’ve been told that this is your lot in life or the path to Christlikeness in and of itself.
Thomas Aquinas is instructive here. Thomas explains that in his crucifixion, Jesus offers a sacrifice because he bears the cross in love for humanity, from whom he refuses to be separated. The Romans who crucified him do not offer a sacrifice, but instead commit a grave evil (Summa theologiæ 3.48.1–3). If your theology of the cross leaves the powerful unchallenged—if it’s busy rendering unto Caesar—it’s a theology of the cross narrated from the perspective of Pilate and the Centurions, not the Nazarene.
Jesus calls upon his followers to take up their crosses and follow him. And to walk in the way of the cross is “none other than the way of life and peace” (BCP, 99). But we must be sure that when we proclaim the cross we do so in the manner of Jesus: in solidarity with the oppressed, entrusting ourselves to the God of justice, confident that because Christ has offered “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world” (BCP, 334), the outcome of the way of the cross is the glory of resurrection.
So, lift high the cross. And take care to do it in a way that honors the fact that by his cross, he who spread out his arms upon its hard wood has “lifted up the lowly,” so that his exaltation is also theirs.
Eugene R. Schlesinger, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University. He is the author of several books, including Salvation in Henri de Lubac: Divine Grace, Human Nature, and the Mystery of the Cross (Notre Dame, 2023). Schlesinger served as Editor of Covenant, 2019-2024.
