Arma Christi V: Good Friday

Reredos, St Thomas' Church New York

The cross was not immediately a symbol of Christian faith and devotion. For the first few hundred years of the existence of the Christian Church, crosses were still in active use as means of torture and death, typically for the poor and enslaved or for rebels, and not infrequently on a large scale. The Romans used the spectacle of mass execution by impalement as a spectacle and for social control, not unlike the way we are now seeing images of prisoners in El Salvador used both for entertainment and for scapegoating.

Visually a cross was thus not initially legible as something specific to the Gospel rather than as a symbol of state violence. It would be like offering the image of a weapon, or some modern bespoke apparatus for judicial murder like an electric chair, and imagining that others would immediately see the significance of some individual's suffering and death in it.

Nevertheless the Cross of Jesus was, if not initially pictured, then of course immediately remembered and proclaimed as something essential to the Gospel, long before its visual distinctiveness could be established. St Paul thus writes to the Galatians "May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world" (6:14).

The cross was from the beginning a paradox. Christians claimed that the death of Jesus was not what it appeared. Yes, his death had been swallowed up in victory with his resurrection, but it was not just death as an abstraction, it was death on a cross in particular, death as the victim of imperial violence; not only was death itself overcome, but the claim that imperial Rome had swatted aside one of its enemies was being rendered more and more ironic as the Gospel of the Cross spread across the Empire that had sought and was still seeking to suppress it.

To offer the Cross even verbally as the content of the Christian proclamation was to claim that the power of Empire had been subverted by the power of God, and that the prince of peace was mightier than the gods of war.

We are not sure when exactly the Cross became something more recognizable as a symbol, but over the first few centuries it was increasingly spoken of in visual and concrete terms. The second century Christian philosopher Justin speaks of the Cross as something found throughout human life, even in the shape of the body itself, and as holding things together, in tools - and when he compares the cross to the mast of a ship he says that a sail is borne on it like an item of spoil on a trophy (1 Apol 55.3).

This is perhaps the first time we explicitly find the idea that the Cross resembles a trophy. Originally a trophy was a monument set up on the battlefield, where arms and armor of the defeated were arranged, typically on a tree trunk or logs arranged for the purpose, in a more or less humanoid form, the weapons of the vanquished hung on or piled around the upright so as effectively to form a cross, as Justin observed.

A few decades later the African Christian writer Tertullian notes this similarity more directly, and goads the pagans by suggesting that their military trophies, which were central to the pagan religious rites of the army, were effectively just dressed-up versions of the Cross:

"The frames on which you hang up your trophies must be crosses: these are, as it were, the very core of your ceremonies. Thus, in your victories, the religion of your camp makes even crosses objects of worship" (Ad Nat 12; cf. ). "All those hangings on your standards and banners are robes for crosses" (Apol 16)  he says. Tertullian thus mocked the Roman legions for dressing up their crosses - as trophies would be - with the pointless decorations derived from their victories when the real truth worth worshipping was the unadorned Cross.

Eventually of course the growth of the Christian movement led to the adoption of the Cross by that Empire.  According to the historian Eusebius, the biographer of the Emperor Constantine, "he saw with his own eyes the sign of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, 'By this symbol you will conquer'."

Constantine arguably misunderstood his vision, or at least many of his successors have done; because Tertullian would have told him that the bare cross he saw, without arms and armor decorating it, was a kind of anti-trophy, a sign that force of arms was not how true victory is won.

The subsequent adoption of the Cross as symbol has been, to put it mildly, a mixed blessing for the Gospel; it has been the burden of Christianity ever since to have been drafted into the military and colonial projects of the West, and weaponized despite the fact that the Cross in its very nature proclaims the pointlessness of violence and of coercion. 

That Jesus died as the object of judicial murder should have made such a confusion impossible; but it is the nature of God's entering into human life that we are free to abuse him again and again, even to claim Christian faith as a decoration we can hang on the projects of national chauvinism and dehumanization of others; for this is what they did to Jesus too. There is no such thing as Christian nationalism, but the fact that Christ is re-crucified attests, however ironically, to the fact that God will not use force to make us good.

Here at St Thomas', as in many Churches, this unadorned cross speaks volumes standing at the center of the reredos. Yet here, and not uncommonly, it also has its own decorations. On the frame around the cross are the Arma Christi or instruments of the passion, the objects that feature in the stories of this Holy Week, and whose name reflects the idea that these are now his spoil. 

Ambrose of Milan, writing a few decades after Constantine, puts it thus:

"it is time now for the victor to erect his trophy: the cross...we have seen the conquering hero mount his chariot. He hangs the spoils that he has captured from this world - the plunder taken from the enemy - not on tree trunks or on chariots and wagons but on his triumphal cross." (Expl. Luc. 10.107-109).

So like the arms of ancient captives, these Arma Christi are presented here not as means of suffering to bemoan, but as the signs of victory, the adornments of his trophy, the whole story now not one of the degradation of violence but of the triumph of love.

Following this victor, we know the true power is not that of the ancient emperor or any modern tyrant but of the Galilean. This trophy laden with instruments of suffering turned into signs of hope is a beacon for life lived for love as his was, and for the hope of God's vindication of peace and justice over wealth and power. Here then is our trophy; here is the true leader; let us follow him.