The same is true when I come to the cross in the sanctuary of the church, I am a part of, or in other locations. While it is just a piece of wood, metal, or plastic, it does help me to humble myself before the one who died for me. The second and more important significance of the cross is in what actually happened when Jesus was hung on it and died for us. On the surface, it seems like a tragic event. An innocent man cruelly put to death by the Romans at the instigation of the Jewish religious leadership.
But the surface picture is far from the reality of what happened there on the cross. The gospel accounts tell us, from a physical perspective, what happened that day nearly years ago. But Paul helps to pull back the curtain, enabling us to see what was hidden from human eyes. When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.
And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross Colossians , NIV. To those watching the crucifixion, it appeared that evil had won. Jesus was defeated and made into a public spectacle. His charges were nailed to the cross above his head. His life was taken from him. And the kingdom he came to establish appeared to have been thwarted.
But appearances were deceiving and just the opposite was true. In the Colossians passage above and others, we are enabled to see what was happening in the spiritual realm when Jesus went to the cross.
But, in reality, at the cross he defeated the powers and authorities of evil, disarming them. Centuries later, unearthed by Helena, it has become the new tree of life, plated in gold, silver and jewels, exalted beyond all other trees. The Christ upon that tree of life—nearly naked, chin drooping and belly collapsed, crowned with thorns, with rivulets of blood flowing over him—is the embodiment of St. The intensity of the desire for a sympathetic, merciful deity who knew intimately human pain is visible in everything from the stigmata borne by St.
Francis of Assisi, the first ever recorded, to the Isenheim Altarpiece. Anthony near Isenheim, whose monks ran a hospital with a reputation for providing care during plagues and at all times for those suffering from skin diseases.
The crucified Christ, in addition to his other marks of torture, is pitted with ulcers, a graphic avowal to patients that Jesus fully experienced their afflictions. The Catholic response was to double down on the richness and detail of the imagery, creating one of the enduring boundary markers of the two branches of Christianity.
The cross remains today as central and as debated an icon as ever. It shows up at non-sacred places, like the sites of fatal traffic accidents, in an attempt to sanctify them. The Ku Klux Klan still sets them ablaze, the Chinese government has recently removed crosses from the exteriors of churches, while Jews demanded their removal from Auschwitz in the s. For some Christians and would-be Christians the cross has lost some, at least, of its liberating lustre.
Jensen talks of how she has seen Christian places of worship across the ideological spectrum, from liberal Protestant to conservative megachurches, where religious signs of all sorts, including crosses, have been removed from sight. Pro Tip: Remember that regardless of your actions, Jesus still loves you. Nothing you can do is bad enough to change that. The meaning of this statement, and by extension the cross, is twofold.
First, the immediate earthly life of Jesus was over. He would show Himself briefly after the resurrection, but the cross marked a turning point in His relationship to other people. Second, the ultimate punishment for sin was and is complete. No amount of prayers or good deeds could ever make us more fit for Heaven than what Jesus did and completed on His own.
The cross represents that our punishment has been taken, and Jesus stands ready to accept and forgive us if we only ask. I don't believe it shouldn't be a piece of jewellery. But if you have either no idea why it's important, or if you simply want to wear it because it looks nice with that particular dress, that's appalling to me, because there's a huge cosmic significance in the subject. Otherwise, you may as well just wear a gibbet round your neck, or an electric chair.
And in fact if you look back at the history of the cross - that is what you're doing. So it has to mean something a good deal more than that to be something tolerable at all. Not long ago, you might wear a small cross under a shirt if you were a churchgoer, or a big one outside your shirt if you were a Cardinal. In recent years, though, it's become the height of fashion, and many celebrities won't step out in public without sporting a big chunk of jewel-encrusted silver.
But according to fashion journalist James Sherwood, they have more than glamour in mind as they fasten the clasp on their designer crucifix.
They hope it's going to do a job for them. I think we're in an era of "pick and mix" religion now, particularly with celebrities. They've probably just borrowed that little bit from Catholicism and I do think that they look on it as a talisman, as a protective force.
Liz Hurley, for example, wears a Theo Fenell cross and she calls the public "Civilians" - it's "Us and them" basically. And I do think it is a superstition, obviously, because they're not gonna hold the cross up to the public and make them wither away like vampires - that's ridiculous.
But there is still enough respect in this world for the cross, that when these girls are wearing it it gives them a kind of added piety. It lends them that sort of veneer of piety, which is obviously misplaced in a celebrity. Campbell Gillespie - a sales executive from Merseyside - believes that the gold cross his grandmother gave him both saved and almost cost him his life in August We were coming to the last part of the run on a Sunday morning, about 8.
Lightning attacked the gold cross round my neck that was given to me by my grandmother and put me six feet in the air. I landed head first into the concrete into a deep puddle, landed face first.
I stopped breathing. Ray resuscitated me and Norman held me in the recovery position while Ray ran for help. They put me in the ambulance. Unbeknown to me some of my friends had gone back to where it happened, and had found the gold cross which was lying on the concrete, not a mark on it. So they brought that up to the hospital, and I came out of the coma on the Friday. On the Monday I had a 6 hour operation where they rebuilt my face, basically. They put 12 plates in my face. So I don't remember anything of August.
I don't remember much of September. But things become much more clear in October. In a way, the lightning was attracted to the cross. If it saved my life, why did the lightning strike it? So I'm in "catch 22" over the situation. But I'm alive - and I don't know who I have to thank for that, but I thank them, because I was an inch off checking out, y'know? I will start wearing it again one day.
My mother's offered to get me a chain for it, but I'm just not awfully confident at the moment, for obvious reasons. I have it in my drawer but I don't wear it at the moment. The belief that the cross can ward off evil and protect the wearer goes back a long way. From the early centuries of Christianity, it's been a custom among Christians to make the sign of a cross on themselves with a hand. At first, it was done with the thumb on the brow, on rising in the morning, settling to eat, starting a journey, going to bed.
Then it grew into the fuller gesture we have today - from head to heart, and shoulder to shoulder. But this symbol means so much to people, they still can't agree on how it should be done.
Should it be made with three fingers to signify the trinity? Or five, to number the wounds of Jesus on the cross? Even today, the Catholic west crosses itself from left shoulder to right, and the Orthodox east does it from right to left. Clearly, this symbol still has the power to divide opinion, and some of the hottest debates about the meaning of the cross in recent years have been conducted not in churches, but in art galleries.
George Heslop is an artist who's been making and exhibiting chocolate crosses for over ten years. Not just crosses, but crucifixes, with the figure of Jesus also rendered in chocolate. For Heslop, chocolate offers the ideal medium for an exploration of his childhood faith. I make two types of chocolate crucifixion.
I make a series in dark chocolate and a series in white chocolate. At first, I was using the two different types of chocolate, one to represent bronze and one to represent marble. Chocolate is a very seductive material, and I found that I was seduced by the Biblical stories, the commandments and Jesus's miracles. I was looking for a material, and chocolate seemed to be the perfect balance. It was the perfect connection with childhood; chocolate can as a gift, it's a reward - but it's also a punishment if it's taken away or not given.
George Heslop insists that his work is not meant to debase Christianity, though he admits that when a visitor took a bite out of a chocolate crucifix - at a gallery in Liverpool - that did smack of blasphemy. But Heslop is not the only contemporary artist to appropriate the power of the cross into his work.
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