I personally LOVE the new statue of Christ carrying the cross at temple square in Salt Lake City, as seen above and set against the backdrop of a temple (and a church) that is still under renovation.
I’ve seen comments by members baffled by this choice. The knee-jerk aversion. What is the church doing putting that awful statue opposite our iconic temple? Haven’t we spent years distancing ourselves from what we called “the instrument of His torture?” Shouldn’t we have another monument of a God smoothed out and clothed in eternal glory?
It's a fact that you won’t see many crosses on top of churches or featured in very much LDS art. For many years, the messaging was on the resurrected Christ. The resurrected Christus statue is still the church’s logo. In most church meetings we talk a lot about Jesus in Gethsemane, but I've noticed we often skip to the resurrection, glossing over the moment when the institutional church and political powers of the day partnered together to crucify their Lord.
We skip the cross.
President Hinckley in 2005 beautifully explained here why we don’t emphasize the cross in our religion. He said the true symbol of the church is “the lives of our people.” I don’t disagree with this at all. There is hope and healing in knowing there is a resurrected Christ who overcomes all that is wrong in our lives. Don't get me wrong. This is a central tenet of our faith.
But there is something that feels restorative in re-emphasizing the cross as a key symbol of Christianity. If we want to make the lives of our members the symbol of the church, then we need to talk about the crosses carried by millions of our members every day.
Here’s what my experience tells me as a gay latter-day saint who often feels the weight of the cross on Sundays, and I don't think I am the only one who feels the heaviness of discipleship this way:
Before I am ready to give my full heart over to a resurrected God who has overcome it all, I need to witness a God who suffers in all the ways that I suffer. Call it selfish. Call it hubris. But it’s my stubbornly human heart that hungers for a God who knows intimately the pain of my limitations because He has also experienced them. I am not interested in a Zeus on Mount Olympus that plays games with lightning bolts, administering justice to the people from on high. I am interested in a God who bleeds. I am interested in a God who struggles beneath a cross the way I struggle beneath mine.
Jesus did not come to earth to show us His cosmic power. He came to earth to show us His love. He condescended to suffer, to be "acquainted with grief," and He wants us to behold him in His suffering before we behold anything else. Before He burns up the sunrise with His glory, He manifests Himself to us stumbling up that hill as the light that shines in the darkness, the light on the hill that can't ever be hid.
This is the ultimate subversion of our expectations. The first that was made last. The Son of Man that comes to earth “that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.” (Alma 7:12)
We cannot accuse God any more of sitting comfortable on his throne in heaven while we toil below. His love was enough to bring Him down here. To this godforsaken place. The idolatry of power that haunts religious institutions everywhere is jolted back to reality by the sight of their own God on a cross. “Our God is an awesome God” only because He is a relatable God.
It is kind of a weird thing that we worship the God who was conquered. On the cross was written “Behold the King of the Jews.” And that mockery still follows us. Behold the God who was destroyed by the Roman Empire. What a wimp, they scoff. What a silly willy God who asks you to put your faith in Him when He can’t even save himself. Not even His own people like Him. Why should you?
But the Roman Empire fell, and two thousand years later Christianity has stayed. Though many misuse Christianity as a tool to consolidate power in all the ways Christ condemned by word and example, the heart of true Christianity is still love. The kind of love that gets you nailed to a cross by those who can’t stand the idea that true power is an act of submission. By those who froth at the mouth with rage at the thought of a vulnerable, woundable, reachable God who cares more about the marginalized than about a leader's bruised ego or an institution's PR campaign.
Before I can believe in a resurrection, I have to believe in a God who was crucified. Only then is my heart ready to follow His example by “taking up my cross” and sacrificing my will to make my life a symbol of my worship, as President Hinckley asks me to. Until my own personal resurrection morning comes, it will be my cross that connects me to Christ more than any sort of religious triumph.
This is what I think when I see the statue of Jesus carrying the cross at temple square. Hallelujah for a God who loved me enough to show it, and hallelujah for a church that brings me each Sunday to the sacrament table where is still laid out the broken body and blood of Christ, presented like a slain lamb on the altar. The victory over death is won, and I can overcome a thousand deaths by submitting to the God who suffers. This is the way to an abundant life.
My testimony on this forty year so far journey climbing up this hill on which I (and all of us) will inevitably die is that, believe it or not, binding myself by covenant to Christ and dragging my cross with me willingly to this place has brought me a joyful, abundant life.
No comments:
Post a Comment