Window frames, door panels, fence posts - these are a few of the everyday furniture I notice cruciform intersections. But it turns up in other places, some of them surprising and even incongruous.
We were in John Lewis in Aberdeen (before it closed down!), in the furnishing department. As we walked round, I saw this and took a photo. Some health and safety conscious member of staff had taped down the corners of the tiles to avoid customers tripping, with perhaps litigious consequences!
This is one of my favourite images of the cross, despite the lack of artistic intent. Isaiah 53 is one of the most powerful poems in the entire range of literature that makes up our Bible. It has from the earliest beginnings of Christian thinking, been associated with the passion and death of Jesus. Phrases like " no beauty", "despised and rejected", along with emotions of shame, and dismissive scorn are woven into a poem about the sufferings of the Servant of God - for Christians, Jesus of Nazareth.
Try it. Read Isaiah 53, remembering the tied hands, the soldiers' mockery, the stripes, the thorns, the whole paraphernalia of interrogation, humiliation and dehumanising torture. The parallels between Isaiah and the Gospel passion stories are unmistakable. One of my favourite Holy Week hymns, sung to a tune in minor key, expresses the anguish of being the despicable one whose suffering is mere entertainment, and whose body is there to be violated, trampled - yes, despised and rejected.
A purple robe, a crown of thorn,
a reed in his right hand;
before the soldiers' spite and scorn
I see my Saviour stand.
He bears between the Roman guard
the weight of all our woe;
a stumbling figure bowed and scarred
I see my Saviour go.
On a Saturday morning in John Lewis's, I saw a cross made of tape, trampled by countless feet, mostly unnoticed, dirty and worn, an image not worth a second look. Until, following that first look the sign of the cross and its deeper significance is allowed to emerge. Trampled, dirty, worn, but the cruciform shape still unmistakable.
The cross has been an artefact throughout Christian history, and not always as a sign of reconciliation and peace. Manufactured crosses are strewn throughout history and place, from fabulous gold encrusted with jewels to plain wooden carvings, from wrought iron to paint and canvas, and from textiles to sculpture. But now and then there is the accidental, the incidental, when the cross is seen where it is least expected to be - on a shop floor for instance.
I look at this photo now and think of the Crucified Christ, that whole parody of justice in which a life of perfect love to God and others was besmirched, trampled on, by countless eyes unnoticed. Holy Week can easily become a form of domesticated spirituality, the cross seen through eyes that are familiar with the story, its anguish domesticated and diluted over decades of Holy Weeks
An image of soiled duck tape used as a temporary repair, might just help us to acknowledge how easily through familiarity and years of practice, we filter out the banality of evil, the lack of beauty, the scorn and cruelty and terrifying spectacle of indifference to human suffering.
There is a carelessness by which the cross of Christ doesn't always tower over the wrecks of time; instead it becomes invisible to hearts too preoccupied to realise what it is we trample.
Fast to the cross's spreading span,
high in the sunlit air,
all the unnumbered sins of man
I see my Saviour bear.
He hangs, by whom the world was made,
beneath the darkened sky;
the everlasting ransom paid,
I see my Saviour die.
(There is a good rendition of "A Purple Robe" available here. )
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