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| Byzantine Reliquary of the True Cross from Jerusalem, la Cattedrale di San Lorenzo, Genova (Photo Matthew Duckett 2018) |
Some of our well-known hymns have really exciting backstories. It was in the year 560 that Radegunde, Princess of Thuringia and Queen of the Franks, escaping from a dynastic murder plot at home, fled to the Bishop of Noyen, who ordained her a deaconess and professed her as a nun.
Being a Queen, she didn’t join someone else’s abbey, but built her own, at Poitiers, and persuaded her friend the Byzantine Emperor to give her a large relic of the True Cross, a fragment of the wood found by St Helena in Jerusalem a couple of centuries before. And she asked another friend, Bishop Venantius Fortunatus, to write some hymns for the occasion of its solemn reception.
We sang one of those hymns at the start of Mass today, “The Royal Banners forward go”. Another one is also familiar in our hymnals:
Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle, sing the ending of the fray;
now above the cross, the trophy, sound the loud triumphant lay,
tell how Christ, the world’s redeemer as a victim won the day.
The dominant note in these hymns is triumph. The cross is lifted up in celebration as a standard of victory. Our word “trophy” comes from the ancient custom, after a battle, of decorating a convenient tree with the captured armour and weapons of the defeated foe. It was called the tropaion.
In these hymns of the sixth Century, which are gold mines of the theology of the early Church, the cross is hailed as the trophy captured from the enemy by the conquering hero, and displayed to prove that the enemy has been defeated.
How are we saved? How does the death of Jesus on the cross save the world? How has he defeated death? And the answer the early Church gives is not a definition, but poetry. Glorious facets of a glorious and wonderful mystery, the triumph of the crucified one. A mystery in the Christian sense is not a puzzle to be solved, or something we can know nothing about. It is rather, something we can never wholly know, a journey into depth and meaning that will never be exhausted.
This is why the New Testament talks about the death of Jesus using so many different images. It is paradox: the stone that the builders rejected has become the corner stone.
It is sacrifice, which itself has different dimensions. Sacrifice is the surrender of a good thing in order that another good might come, Jesus giving his life so that we might live. But it is also in the strict sense an act of ritual violence which Jesus undergoes, becoming the scapegoat of humanity to take away our need for victims.
Again, the death of Jesus brings about reconciliation, in St Paul’s words, by putting to death hostility – the hostility between Jew and Gentile, the hostility between humanity and God.
Jesus himself describes his death as the new covenant, sealed with his blood, to reconcile humanity and God. He describes it as a ransom paid to free us from the captivity of sin.
Elsewhere in the New Testament the death of Jesus is described as an example inviting imitation, identity with Christ through patient suffering and acceptance of God’s will. It is the debt owed because of sin paid on our behalf. The death of Christ is also our death, baptised in him we have died with him and been buried so that we might share his resurrection.
Again, Christ is victor conquering the powers of evil through his death and resurrection, taking them captive and leading them in his victory procession – the imagery that Venantius takes up in his hymns.
In Hebrews, Christ is described as passing into the heavens through his death, so as to act as an advocate and intercessor, obtaining forgiveness for sins.
All of these scriptural images describe but do not exhaust the meaning of Christ’s death. And all of them lead us to the same truth, that by his death we die with him to our sins, and by his resurrection we are raised to life with him and in him.
Attempts to define the atonement as a sort of mechanism, to set out how exactly it works, always fall short of the rich tapestry of images in the New Testament. To say, so some Christians do, that God had to punish human sin and so punished Jesus instead of us, does not reflect the richness of scripture and tradition. Worse, it leaves the Cross still in the enemy’s hands, its power of death not overcome, just diverted elsewhere.
But the New Testament message, celebrated in hymn and liturgy, is that the Cross has been seized from the enemy, and paraded by the conquering hero, who voluntarily suffered on it for our sake. The lure the foe put forward, to ensnare humanity into death, has become instead the pledge of life and resurrection. “Death, where is your sting? Grave, where is your victory”
The Cross changes the whole way in which power is exercised in the world, and the meaning of human history. Hope shines forth where death once held sway. The Church celebrates the triumph of the Cross, in images, poetry, hymns and theology. Crosses are seen everywhere. And splinters and fragments of wood believed to derive from the original wood found by St Helena are still venerated throughout the world as the banner captured from the enemy, the sign of his defeat.
If you think that’s a bit old fashioned, you might need to look again. At the Coronation in May, as the King and all the panoply of state and church processed into Westminster Abbey before the eyes of the world, they were led by a new processional cross, the Cross of Wales, which incorporates fragments of the True Cross, a gift from Pope Francis. Radegunde, Queen of the Franks and Abbess of Poitiers, would have known exactly what was going on, as the Royal banners forward went. All earthly power acknowledges and bows before the Cross of Christ. And to the Cross all people may look in hope for salvation. For the Son of Man has been lifted up, and being lifted up from the earth, he will draw all things to himself.
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