We are entering the last several days of Holy Week. These culminate in Jesus’s ministry and the beginning of his Passion and Death. Christians worldwide are getting ready to celebrate the Resurrection and the glory of Jesus Christ. These events occur during the Jewish Passover commemoration this year. Easter Sunday is the last day of Passover. Remember, Jesus was a Jew, and Christianity is built on Jewish tradition. Jesus ate the Passover meal with his apostles on Thursday evening. Christians call this The Last Supper. Here, Jesus would institute communion as a gift to all of us. He leaves himself, coming as food into our very bodies and lives.

The Cross, which has become the symbol of Christianity, will be the place where Jesus will be hung as a common thief. Executed under the orders of Pontius Pilate. The cross is an interesting symbol; even today, it is used to denote care, as the red cross is used on uniforms to denote the chaplain and ambulances. Perhaps the most common use of the cross is marking the grave or memorializing one who has died. If you go past a cemetery, you will repeatedly see this symbol of the cross in rows.

What does the cross represent? The cross itself, on which Jesus would die, was a symbol of Roman terror and terrible suffering. It was used to speak to people as a warning to onlookers of Roman Justice and what would happen to those who violated Roman rule. (Recall that Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, was quizzical about why Jesus was brought before him. He will bow to political convenience and grant the execution, although Jesus did not violate any Roman laws.)

The crossing of the vertical and the horizontal bars of the cross has been interpreted in many ways; for some, it is a spiritual interpretation of an intersection of Heaven and Earth, time and eternity, community and the individual. It has been depicted where the human being holds out his arms and makes a cross of their body, as in the famous statue of Jesus overlooking Rio de Janeiro. I have been driving and have seen roadside crosses, often the cross will commemorate a place where an accident occurred, and a loved one was killed. The cross announces their passing and the concern of their loved ones for the person. The cross has become a universal symbol of care for others. This is the cross that Jesus died on.

What is interesting is that the cross was not seen in early Christian iconography due to the gruesome and ordinariness of a public execution. The Early Church rejected this symbol of the crucifixion as a symbol of a death sentence under the Romans. It was not until about three hundred years after Jesus that the first scenes of the Crucifixion were seen in

Christian art. Remember, the Christian faith grows out of the Jewish tradition. According to Jewish law, there was to be no representation of a human or angel; they were considered part of the prohibition of graven images. The early Christians had many models of human form in Greek and Roman art to copy from. It was Emperor Constantine (Died 337 AD) who would stop using Crucifixion as a form of punishment, and it was at this time, the Cross was seen more as a symbol of sacrifice than of execution.

I was asked the other day, “Why did Jesus choose this awful death?”. As a Chaplain, I had to think hard; it was a harsh and visually painful death, this is true. What I think Jesus wanted to say with this death, and this is only my thought, is to show visually the suffering he was willing to endure. He wanted us to know how much he loved each one of us. Jesus would suffer for each of us down to the last drop of blood in His body. He wanted to show all of us how much we were worth to Him. On the cross, he took all our selfishness, pride, lust, envy, greed, anger, lack of respect for others, all our human failings. He endured this horrible death for you and me to the last drop of blood. He, after this horrific suffering, rises from the dead with the gift of immortality for all of us on the third day. Oh, see and rejoice this Easter Sunday in this celebration of the Resurrection.

We are loved; we are loved, Alleluia Alleluia, we are loved.

“Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).