The Beauty of the Crucifixion
Power is made perfect in weakness.
Unfortunately, much of American Christianity (Catholicism included) has evolved into something of an upper-middle-class, bourgeois religion, nearly synonymous with “Live, Laugh, Love” posters and essential oils. In many ways it’s become an abstraction, an extra identity we can pick up, rather than something that transforms our lived experience. We’ve lost sight of what really makes Christianity beautiful, choosing to focus instead on what’s “nice,” or “pretty.”
Frankly, Christianity is not pretty, or at least it should not be, because at its core is the bloody corpse of the Crucified Christ. The Resurrection does not erase — and certainly cannot take place without — the spectacle of the Crucifixion. Alternatively, if we allow it to happen, we can be desensitized by the ubiquity of the Crucifix, and so misread it as something pretty, also missing the point. Msgr. John Strynkowski remarks briefly in a recent piece about the irony of Easter advertisements for gilded crucifix jewelry. There is nothing pretty about nail marks, lacerations, bruises, and spear wounds. However, there is something profoundly beautiful here — the love of God, revealed precisely in the torture and death of God in the person of Jesus Christ.
Though the Crucifixion may seem something thoroughly repugnant in the eyes of the world — and to be clear, it is something repugnant to every available human sense — it is also frighteningly beautiful, if only we see it through the eyes of faith. As we learn from Paul in 2 Corinthians, “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). It takes an act of faith, made available only through the before-all love of God, to see the gruesome for what it is and yet to recognize that it is exclusively through this abandonment and God-forsakenness on the Cross that the Resurrection is possible. And not only is this gruesome death of Christ a revealing act of love made in the wisdom of God, but it is beautiful in itself. The revelation of God’s love to us is as gift; we cannot control it or change it, but only receive it in encounter as beauty, something which grips our minds and ensnares our hearts.
Nothing else of this world — capitalism, materialism, modernism, egoism, etc. — has the lens through which to see this beauty. It can only be seen through faith, a gift through the grace of God. Paul writes, “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18). Perhaps even more misguided, the bourgeois Christianity notices the Cross and the Crucified Christ and seeks to ignore its reality, choosing to focus instead on the prettiness of the Resurrection, and often ignoring those in most desperate need of Christ’s love. However, as Roberto Goizueta makes clear, “The resurrection will indeed ensure that our hope is not in vain, but not even the resurrection can erase the wounds.”¹ The Resurrection, when understood correctly, cannot be vaguely pretty, because it can never be separated from Christ’s death. It is not “proof” of the teaching of Jesus, nor is it something isolated and entirely separate, but is the confirmation of the life and death of Jesus, given in perfect love — a sacrifice in the truest sense of the word, and witness to the reality that love is stronger even than death.
Like beauty in any work of art, the Crucifixion captures us with its “there-ness.” It carries and conveys the reality it represents — the total, self-giving love of God. It is something real, present, and in front of us, and it provokes something within us. But this does not mean that our encounter with the beauty of the Crucifixion is a wholly pleasant experience. Rather, it can be quite the opposite, as it confronts us with our own sinful reality, and our own inability to offer ourselves an adequate response to God’s love. God’s Light illuminates, but in doing so, it shines on what is hidden, purifying it in an often-excruciating manner. Hans Urs von Balthasar writes, “When man encounters the love of God in Christ, not only does he experience what genuine love is, but he is also confronted with the undeniable fact that he, a selfish sinner, does not himself possess true love. He experiences two things at once: the finitude of the creature’s love and its sinful fragility.”² The only adequate response to God’s love is God’s love itself, and that is something as creatures we cannot offer alone. We, as in St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, are faced with our own deserved condemnation for our participation in the death of Christ — we are those who killed him.
However, there remains hope for us, but only in our acceptance of what we have done, and this is only possible in God’s beautiful decision to love us first, before all else, manifest most clearly in the Cross of Christ. Von Balthasar continues, “God does not ask the sinner to agree to the Cross; he seeks consent to the most terrible death of the beloved only from those that love.”³ We cannot ourselves earn forgiveness, redemption, or reconciliation, but can only receive mercy as the gift of God. It is beauty — undeserved, unmerited, but freely given in this once-for-all act of God. While we cannot respond to God’s love by our own merit, we can do so in the love of Christ which elevates us to participation in this same love. If we accept this love as we accept gift, even as we also accept our participation in the gruesome wound of Christ, then, as Goizueta writes, true reconciliation is possible in radical love of the poor as Christ. Herein lies the beauty of the Cross, which, exactly through its evident non-prettiness, conveys a love that transforms our own thoroughly imperfect love into a fitting reply to God’s priceless and unfathomable love, in solidarity with those who most embody Christ with us.
Now, this vision of Christianity is something quite different than the mainstream. It is not one that separates soul from body, nor theory from practice, and it is decidedly not pretty. Quite candidly, it’s something that I have difficulty living myself; modernism and post-modernism are the water we swim (or drown) in. As much as I can criticize this bourgeois Christianity, I can’t help but notice my frequent participation in it. Additionally, being a student of theology, I often experience a cognitive dissonance in preaching something other than that I practice — the love of God and the demands of sainthood are matched only by my own deep personal sense of sin and inadequacy. But this latter disparity is precisely the fruit of encounter with the Christ who demands we look at his wounds and touch his hands and his side. Only by perceiving the revealed beauty of the Cross and the Crucified can we hope to know the true depths of the love and forgiveness of the One Who Loved Us First.
References
¹Roberto S. Goizueta, Christ Our Companion: Toward a Theological Aesthetics of Liberation, 12.
²Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible, 61.
³Ibid., 66.
