THE TREE OF LIFE: THE CROSS AS A SYMBOL
OF MERCY, WISDOM, LIFE AND LIBERATION 13 April 2017 | by Frances Young
Language and words alone will never be enough to enable us
to understand the mystery of Christ’s brutal death and Resurrection. Only if we
explore its symbolism will we recognise the Cross as a symbol of mercy, wisdom,
life and liberation
Scratched into a stone in the servants’ quarters of the old
Roman Imperial Palace on the Palatine Hill is the earliest known image of the
Crucifixion – a cartoon, a graffito discovered in 1856. A person is sketched
raising his hand towards a crucified figure which, towering over him, has a
donkey’s head.
The rough lettering below it reads when translated, “Alexamenos worships his god”. It is a striking reminder of the shame and ridicule the Cross would evoke, and perhaps the reason why no early Christian depictions of Christ on the Cross have been found: it was a symbol of disgrace and defeat.
Or was it? To my amazement, reflection on early Christian material suggests that from the beginning the Cross, celebrated in cryptic signs and symbols, signified not suffering and death, but wisdom, life and liberation. And it was symbolic meanings that mattered, not the literal depiction of that most cruel form of public execution.
Many years ago on a cycling holiday in France, I wandered into an old church, partly tumbledown, and there I saw an extraordinary modern crucifix: a couple of flat pieces of wood, one a cross shape, the other forming a distinctly sinuous figure – a sort of “serpent-Christ”, I thought. And few days later I nearly ran over a snake basking on the tarmac in the sun. It set me thinking about John 3:14-15: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” The allusion is to Numbers 21:4-9, recalling the Israelites in the desert, who, bitten by snakes, poisoned and dying, received healing and life by gazing at the bronze serpent that Moses was told to set up on a pole.
That, I realised, is a highly symbolic story. For across the ancient Near East the snake, or serpent, symbolised wisdom – in the Greek world it was the sign of Asclepius, the god of healing; in Egypt a magician’s staff had a serpent’s shape; the Cretan goddess of wisdom had snakes in her hands. So the snakes who bit the Israelites were the snakes of human wisdom: “Why continue struggling and starving in the wilderness?” they seemed to say. “Let’s go back to the stewpots of Egypt – it’s only commonsense!” And how were the Israelites healed? By the antidote, the sign of divine wisdom: the serpent-sign that anticipated the Cross.
Very occasionally, the serpent-Christ is found in Christian art, but it is rare. For the ambiguity of the image of the serpent meant embarrassment soon set in. The serpent in Genesis is, after all, the tempter. To make it worse, some early groups, now described as “Gnostics”, read Genesis upside down: they venerated the serpent, the bringer of knowledge and wisdom, for this serpent enabled escape from the clutches of the Creator-God who had trapped their true spiritual selves, sparks of the divine world, in material flesh. In response the serpent was firmly put in its place as the embodiment of the Devil.
But opposing the Gnostics meant that the Genesis-story became the “type” in light of which the meaning of the Cross was discerned. Paul had described Adam as a “type of the one to come” (Romans 5:14), and had written, “as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:22). By the end of the second century this had become the key, and at the heart of this re-reading of Genesis 1-3 was the symbol of the tree. In Genesis there are two trees, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life – knowledge and life being divine prerogatives, both ultimately intended for God’s representative on Earth. But, as a fifth-century bishop would put it: “Adam was set a trial with regard to the tree of knowledge of good and evil, whereas the tree of life was proposed as his prize for keeping the commandment.”
Adam failed, of course; but according to the second-century anti-Gnostic writer, Irenaeus, in hiding himself he showed repentance, and so he was driven out of paradise and removed far from the tree of life because God pitied him – otherwise he would be a sinner for ever and evil would be irremediable. Exclusion from paradise was an act of God’s mercy. But, explains Irenaeus, “by means of the obedience by which he obeyed unto death hanging on a tree, Christ undid the old disobedience occasioned by the tree”. Irenaeus explains that he did this by becoming obedient unto death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2:8) – that is, by obedience shown on a tree. Our debts were fastened to the Cross (Colossians 2:14) so that “as we were debtors to God by a tree, by a tree we might receive the remission of our debt”.
Later writers soon identify the Cross, not just as the tree of obedience, but also as the tree of life, to which there is now access because the disobedience of Adam has been reversed. That the Cross could be assimilated to the trees of paradise was facilitated by the Greek word, xylon, used for the trees in paradise in the Greek translation of Genesis, and also in general use for a gallows-tree or Roman cross. Through this association the Cross was understood symbolically: the Cross imparted both the knowledge and the life originally meant for humankind but forfeited by Adam.
Why does all this old stuff excite me? No doubt partly because I have learned to gaze at trees with my profoundly disabled son, for whom trees have an endless fascination. But also because attending to symbols provides a salutary contrast to thinking and writing about the Cross as if it represents a kind of transaction – in other words, it is something of a reaction against so-called “theories of atonement” that tend to characterise Christ as somehow mercifully making up to the God of judgement for our faults and taking the punishment in our place.
Exploring the symbolism of early Christian reflection on the Cross makes one thing very clear. God’s mercy is fundamental. It was God who took the initiative to heal and restore what was lost, to make good the ultimate divine purpose. It surely is Good Friday if the Cross is itself the tree of life – there is not just lament, but joy … especially as trees burst with new life in the spring.
Yet in this day and age how on earth do we make sense of this overarching story of Fall and Redemption, given both our individualism and our evolutionary understanding of human origins? These are huge questions, but if we do not learn from the Christian past about becoming part of something bigger than ourselves, about human solidarity in sin and redemption, about being incorporated into Christ so that we are freed from self-obsession to love God and others, then our version of Christianity is surely too much conformed to current cultural norms.
And if we do not relearn the importance of symbol for discerning fundamental truths, then our literalising take on language will eventually destroy all possibility of religious thought or expression. For no language is adequate to the transcendent God, and it is symbol, even myth in the technical sense of a transcendent, symbolic, unverifiable story, that gives meaning to existence, which allows us to speak of the inexpressible.
So the Cross becomes a symbol of wisdom, life and liberation. The earliest way of understanding the Cross, one that surely goes back to Jesus himself, was through the Passover. The slain lamb set up the Israelites for their escape from Egypt, its blood protected them from the angel of death, and the rescue was commemorated in the Passover meal year by year. Thus it prophetically anticipated the Eucharist, a meal commemorating liberation from sin and death through the Cross. Again the emphasis is on community, not discrete individual, salvation and also on God’s initiative to save, and so fulfil the divine promises.
Wisdom, life and liberation – God’s redeeming gifts! Let us rejoice this Good Friday.
Frances Young is emerita professor of theology at the University of Birmingham and a Methodist minister. Her most recent book is Constructing the Cross (SPCK).
The rough lettering below it reads when translated, “Alexamenos worships his god”. It is a striking reminder of the shame and ridicule the Cross would evoke, and perhaps the reason why no early Christian depictions of Christ on the Cross have been found: it was a symbol of disgrace and defeat.
Or was it? To my amazement, reflection on early Christian material suggests that from the beginning the Cross, celebrated in cryptic signs and symbols, signified not suffering and death, but wisdom, life and liberation. And it was symbolic meanings that mattered, not the literal depiction of that most cruel form of public execution.
Many years ago on a cycling holiday in France, I wandered into an old church, partly tumbledown, and there I saw an extraordinary modern crucifix: a couple of flat pieces of wood, one a cross shape, the other forming a distinctly sinuous figure – a sort of “serpent-Christ”, I thought. And few days later I nearly ran over a snake basking on the tarmac in the sun. It set me thinking about John 3:14-15: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” The allusion is to Numbers 21:4-9, recalling the Israelites in the desert, who, bitten by snakes, poisoned and dying, received healing and life by gazing at the bronze serpent that Moses was told to set up on a pole.
That, I realised, is a highly symbolic story. For across the ancient Near East the snake, or serpent, symbolised wisdom – in the Greek world it was the sign of Asclepius, the god of healing; in Egypt a magician’s staff had a serpent’s shape; the Cretan goddess of wisdom had snakes in her hands. So the snakes who bit the Israelites were the snakes of human wisdom: “Why continue struggling and starving in the wilderness?” they seemed to say. “Let’s go back to the stewpots of Egypt – it’s only commonsense!” And how were the Israelites healed? By the antidote, the sign of divine wisdom: the serpent-sign that anticipated the Cross.
Very occasionally, the serpent-Christ is found in Christian art, but it is rare. For the ambiguity of the image of the serpent meant embarrassment soon set in. The serpent in Genesis is, after all, the tempter. To make it worse, some early groups, now described as “Gnostics”, read Genesis upside down: they venerated the serpent, the bringer of knowledge and wisdom, for this serpent enabled escape from the clutches of the Creator-God who had trapped their true spiritual selves, sparks of the divine world, in material flesh. In response the serpent was firmly put in its place as the embodiment of the Devil.
But opposing the Gnostics meant that the Genesis-story became the “type” in light of which the meaning of the Cross was discerned. Paul had described Adam as a “type of the one to come” (Romans 5:14), and had written, “as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:22). By the end of the second century this had become the key, and at the heart of this re-reading of Genesis 1-3 was the symbol of the tree. In Genesis there are two trees, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life – knowledge and life being divine prerogatives, both ultimately intended for God’s representative on Earth. But, as a fifth-century bishop would put it: “Adam was set a trial with regard to the tree of knowledge of good and evil, whereas the tree of life was proposed as his prize for keeping the commandment.”
Adam failed, of course; but according to the second-century anti-Gnostic writer, Irenaeus, in hiding himself he showed repentance, and so he was driven out of paradise and removed far from the tree of life because God pitied him – otherwise he would be a sinner for ever and evil would be irremediable. Exclusion from paradise was an act of God’s mercy. But, explains Irenaeus, “by means of the obedience by which he obeyed unto death hanging on a tree, Christ undid the old disobedience occasioned by the tree”. Irenaeus explains that he did this by becoming obedient unto death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2:8) – that is, by obedience shown on a tree. Our debts were fastened to the Cross (Colossians 2:14) so that “as we were debtors to God by a tree, by a tree we might receive the remission of our debt”.
Later writers soon identify the Cross, not just as the tree of obedience, but also as the tree of life, to which there is now access because the disobedience of Adam has been reversed. That the Cross could be assimilated to the trees of paradise was facilitated by the Greek word, xylon, used for the trees in paradise in the Greek translation of Genesis, and also in general use for a gallows-tree or Roman cross. Through this association the Cross was understood symbolically: the Cross imparted both the knowledge and the life originally meant for humankind but forfeited by Adam.
Why does all this old stuff excite me? No doubt partly because I have learned to gaze at trees with my profoundly disabled son, for whom trees have an endless fascination. But also because attending to symbols provides a salutary contrast to thinking and writing about the Cross as if it represents a kind of transaction – in other words, it is something of a reaction against so-called “theories of atonement” that tend to characterise Christ as somehow mercifully making up to the God of judgement for our faults and taking the punishment in our place.
Exploring the symbolism of early Christian reflection on the Cross makes one thing very clear. God’s mercy is fundamental. It was God who took the initiative to heal and restore what was lost, to make good the ultimate divine purpose. It surely is Good Friday if the Cross is itself the tree of life – there is not just lament, but joy … especially as trees burst with new life in the spring.
Yet in this day and age how on earth do we make sense of this overarching story of Fall and Redemption, given both our individualism and our evolutionary understanding of human origins? These are huge questions, but if we do not learn from the Christian past about becoming part of something bigger than ourselves, about human solidarity in sin and redemption, about being incorporated into Christ so that we are freed from self-obsession to love God and others, then our version of Christianity is surely too much conformed to current cultural norms.
And if we do not relearn the importance of symbol for discerning fundamental truths, then our literalising take on language will eventually destroy all possibility of religious thought or expression. For no language is adequate to the transcendent God, and it is symbol, even myth in the technical sense of a transcendent, symbolic, unverifiable story, that gives meaning to existence, which allows us to speak of the inexpressible.
So the Cross becomes a symbol of wisdom, life and liberation. The earliest way of understanding the Cross, one that surely goes back to Jesus himself, was through the Passover. The slain lamb set up the Israelites for their escape from Egypt, its blood protected them from the angel of death, and the rescue was commemorated in the Passover meal year by year. Thus it prophetically anticipated the Eucharist, a meal commemorating liberation from sin and death through the Cross. Again the emphasis is on community, not discrete individual, salvation and also on God’s initiative to save, and so fulfil the divine promises.
Wisdom, life and liberation – God’s redeeming gifts! Let us rejoice this Good Friday.
Frances Young is emerita professor of theology at the University of Birmingham and a Methodist minister. Her most recent book is Constructing the Cross (SPCK).
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