CROSS AND COSMOS

            Just as a loud explosion can precipitate an avalanche, so when the crucified Christ “cried with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit” (Mathew 27,50), certain cataclysmic phenomena occurred like so many echoes of his final cry. As the body of the Crucified writhed “in extremis”, the earth trembled in earthquake horror at what took place on Calvary: the Master of the universe was being broken by his own creatures’ malice. Darkness enveloped the land, the Temple curtain was torn in two, and the earth convulsed and regurgitated the dead who walked the earth again in a zombie daze. Trembling nature got a slice of the action that decided the fate of the world forever.

          Wherever the story of Golgotha has been told, the role of nature as partner in the drama could not be left out, as if the mystery of divine suffering was conveyed through the compassion of nature. And the pagan Roman centurion was drawn into it by witnessing to the Crucified when, with numinous awe, he perceived in a naïve-profound way that something more had happened than the death of a holy and innocent man.

The sun veiled its face in shock horror at what it witnessed, and by that token lost its own erstwhile divinity: it conceded all power to the One who, in ultimate agony, surrendered to that which is greater than a million suns. Thus, a suffering and struggling soul, which cannot be broken by all the powers of the cosmos, is the true image of divinity. There is no more a “Sun-god”, only a “brother Sun.”

          “The curtain of the Temple was ripped in two.” The Temple tore its gown, as mourners do, to show its nakedness and shame for what its servants did by rejecting an innocent worshipper from its precincts. Plucked asunder, the now ragged weave lost its separating quality. He who was expelled for blaspheming the Temple had cleft the curtain and exposed the Holy of Holies for every man and women, for all time. From then on, every place became a god-unforsaken place, in the name of the One who hung upon the Cross in the name of the holy place.

Like the temple, the earth was judged at Golgotha, judged to be unfit of itself to be the safe ground for building our cities and religious systems. Trembling and gurgling, the earth pointed to another foundation on which the earth itself rests, and that was the self-surrendering love on which all earthly powers and values concentrate their hostility but which they cannot conquer. Since the hour when Jesus uttered his loud cry and breathed his last and the rocks were split, the earth ceased to be the foundation on which we build on her. Only in so far as it has a deeper root in which the very Cross is rooted can it last.

Finally, the body of God was too sublime to be contained within earth’s bowels. The boulders split, as the land quaked, in deference to the Lord’s passage from darkness to light. No longer is the universe subjected to the law of death out of birth, but to the law of life out of death by the One who passed from death to life, from earth to heaven. From the moment that the Divine Son surrendered his spirit to his Father, the universe has received another meaning. History has been re-directed and draws us human into its sweep unto God who is all in all.