Mark 14-15
Jeremy Richards
In the northern part of Spain, about 70 miles west of the city of Bilbao is a cave called the Cave of El Castillo, and in this cave are what are thought to be the oldest known human cave paintings. The oldest of which is a simple red disk. This disk is thought to be 40,000 years old. So old, in fact, that there is some debate over whether or not this red disk was created by homo sapiens or Neanderthals.
When we see pictures of this red disk, or the other paintings in the Cave of El Castillo, or other paintings or petroglyphs found around the world (like the much more recent Ute Indian Petroglyphs found in Arches National Park near the trail to Delicate Arch, petroglyphs I’ve seen numerous times), we can’t help but think of the hands that drew the paintings or etched the petroglyphs. We wonder who these people were. Was it a lone person, a couple of friends, a whole community? How much thought went into this art? Where did they go after they finished it, back to a lone campsite? A town? What language did they speak? What food did they eat? Did they have a family? What was their greatest source of joy? What was their greatest source of anxiety?
These simple drawings and carvings, a red disk for example, represent so much. They are symbols that point to a much larger story: a life, maybe a community’s life, maybe even a whole “people” like the Neanderthals or the early homo sapiens.
For humans – and I guess maybe Neanderthals too – there is no escaping symbolism. From the ways we dress and the letters we write with to the road signs that direct us to the still fairly new world of computers, the internet, and social media, symbols are everywhere. They are often small, simple, unassuming, and yet they convey a great deal of information. Three horizontal lines on a website unlock, with the click of a mouse, a website’s menu, which may hold pages upon pages of information. We see symbols in the form of stickers, stuck to the back of the car in front of us as we drive – a sports team’s emblem, a political campaign’s logo, maybe it’s just words written in a certain color with a certain font – and we instantly know not only what the symbols represent, but often even, to some extent, who the person is who’s driving the car based on those symbols – what they care about, who they root for, where they stand politically, what religion they belong to.
In fact, nowhere is symbolism more common and more necessary than in the world of religion. It’s been said that we can only talk about God – about the Divine – in metaphor. In other words, all we have are symbols when it comes to God. Because God, properly understood, can’t be understood. God is too vast, too mysterious to be comprehended. Though most religions, Christianity among them, claim that God can be known, that knowledge is relational, not intellectual.
So religion depends on symbols, because it’s always pointing to a mystery that is beyond us, toward that which can be known more fully, but never completely. I’ve heard Richard Rohr say that mystery is not that which can’t be known, but that which can be infinitely known. Symbols point us toward that which can’t be fully depicted but can only be alluded to. Religious symbols act as a kind of doorway into experience, or at least they’re supposed to. They lead us out of intellectual knowledge and into relational knowledge.
For Christians, no symbol is more common than the cross, which adorns our churches, our jewelry, often the walls of our homes as well. I’m sure it’s one of the most common tattoos people get. Crosses are everywhere. And I don’t just mean the physical symbol of the cross that we see around town or hanging from a delicate chain around the neck of a friend, I mean even the cross in scripture. The New Testament writers, especially Paul, often refer to the cross as well. It’s all through the New Testament. Sometimes it comes with an explanation, but often it doesn’t.
But when symbols become too common-place, too familiar, they often start to lose their meaning. We forget what they represent, or worse, we assume they mean something they don’t. Imagine there were red disks everywhere, on every block, in every store, on our jewelry, and in our homes. If they became so much a part of our day to day life, we would inevitably stop wondering about them. Who drew the first one – a Neanderthal? A human? What were their lives like? And on and on. Instead, we would ignore them entirely. We would become desensitized to them, and they would no longer hold any power.
For many, the cross has become just such a symbol. It means nothing. Or maybe it means something, but it’s something we don’t like or agree with. Maybe it makes us think of certain kinds of Christians we’d rather not associate ourselves with. Or maybe it represents an understanding of God that we cannot believe in – a violent God who for some reason finds satisfaction in the brutal death of God’s innocent son.
I believe the cross continues to be an important symbol, one that has power, though it’s meaning isn’t singular or straightforward. Like all religious symbols, the cross points to a mystery. It’s not something easily explained, or even fully comprehended. For the early church, the cross was a conundrum. How was it that the instrument of Christ’s death became the key to Creation’s salvation? Why did Jesus have to die, put more simply. I think that’s why Paul talks about it so much, because he was still working out what it meant.
And really this remains an ongoing question for all Christians. What is the cross all about? How does it speak to us today, in our own unique circumstances? The cross doesn’t mean one simple thing for everyone all the time. Instead, it speaks to different individuals and groups in different ways. Like all healthy religious symbols, it’s dynamic, not static.
So I can’t simply tell you all that the cross stands for, all that it means, but I would like to focus this morning on one possible meaning: the way that “the cross” is a stand in for a very complex, multifaceted story with a lot of different actors, and the way it represents God’s presence in the midst of our own complex, multifaceted lives today.
The crucifixion of Jesus wasn’t an isolated event. It didn’t occur in a vacuum. Instead, the crucifixion took place in the midst of messy lives caught up in a messy world, at the intersection of personal relationships, political oppression, religious tension, and maybe even Divine providence. The context of the crucifixion is as untidy, unstable, and anxiety-inducing as our own context today, maybe even more so, though in different ways.
Just as that red disk in a random cave in the north of Spain represents a whole unknown people and the lives they lived, so the cross represents a rich story, full of people and unexpected circumstances and suffering and betrayal and, ultimately, also, surprisingly, hope, victory, and life…though we have to wait until Easter to get all that.
This is what I took away from our long, dramatic reading of 2 chapters of Mark this morning. There were a lot of different people and places involved in this story. I had to find 10 volunteers, to do the speaking parts. And there were other characters in the story who didn’t have speaking parts! And some of the volunteers, like Katie, represented multiple different people. In this short story, we have the generous woman with the alabaster jar of ointment, the disciples, religious leaders, bystanders, naked men running off in the dark, a servant girls, Roman rulers, soldiers, and others. We also travel from the home of a leper to the upper room of a stranger’s house to the Garden of Gethsemane to the courtyard of the high priest to Pilate’s court to Golgotha where the crucifixion takes place and finally to the tomb as Mary Magdalen and Mary the mother of Joses watch the stone being rolled over the opening.
The cross represents all that and more. The cross symbolizes not a moment, not a specific doctrine or belief, but a story, a story that certainly centers on the person of Jesus Christ – his life, death, and resurrection – but also on the many people and places along the way. It’s a complex story – a story full of love and discipleship and hope and healing, but also, especially in today’s reading, a story of betrayal and abandonment and suffering and shame and weeping.
The cross is a rich symbol, meaning it’s full of meaning, it’s brimming, overflowing with all that it represents, just as that red disk in the Cave of El Castillo surely represents a people whose lives consisted of so much more than one colored circle on a stone wall could ever convey by itself.
This past year has been an extremely complex one for us. We’ve endured a great deal of suffering, suffering that will likely take years for us to fully come to grips with. We are tired and exhausted. That’s not to say that there hasn’t also been some silver lining, but it’s been complicated and confusing, and at times heartbreaking and infuriating. Like the last few weeks that have been full of more mass shootings, specifically the ones near Atlanta and in Boulder, Colorado. What does the cross have to say to that? What do faith and religion have to say to that?
I said earlier that religious symbols are doorways into experience, an experience that can’t be intellectually comprehended but can be relationally known. When we understand the cross to be the rich symbol that it is, we walk through a door and find that we are not alone. We find people and places and circumstances that are as complex and mystifying as our own. We find that the cross isn’t an easy answer to life’s difficult questions, but a kind of bridge between our lives and the life of Christ, and along that bridge walk all the saints who came before us, who themselves had their good moments and their bad, who at their best dropped everything to follow Christ, and who at their worst ran away in his time of greatest need. We find others who suffered and grieved in ways surprisingly similar to the ways we have suffered and grieved, despite the years and cultures that separate us, but who also found joy and laughter in unexpected places, just as we have found joy and laughter unexpectedly over the course of the last year, and over the course of our lives in general.
But what unites us is not just those shared life experiences that we have with other people. It’s the fact that we share those life experiences with the God of the universe. God, through the life and death of Jesus, entered into real life with us – life with all its complexities and fears and heartbreaks (but also with all its beauty and joy and love and friendship, let’s not forget those).
The cross is not God’s judgment on some abstract idea of sin, as if God just needed to punish someone and Jesus just happened to be nearby. The cross is God’s judgment on anyone and anything that says that swords or guns or hate or injustice or any form of violence or evil could ever separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. Christ on the cross is the symbol, the living and dying embodiment of Paul’s famous words from Romans, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Paradoxically, Christ’s death on the cross means that there is no separating our life from the life of God. We are not alone and never will be.
Thanks be to God. Amen.