THE CROSS AND THE CRISIS
By CANON ROGER LLOYD
THE existing circumstances of Europe have made despair the supremely dangerous temptation of the demo- cratic Powers. To yield to it involves the adoption df a policy based on either apathy or desperation, and both are suicidal. It follows, therefore, that the great need of today is to find a rational basis for hope. But it must be a truly rational basis. Empty optimism, based on insubstantial wish-fulfilments, is likely to be at least as disastrous in its results as a more honest yielding to the temptation to despair. The only hope that is any use is one which faces the facts and wrings from them the ground of its being, for this alone " is the hope that maketh not ashamed " which St. Paul struggled to find.
Those who so brood over the events of the first Holy Week and Good Friday as to make them a part of their own imaginative experience, and then go on to interpret the events of recent European history in the light of the Cross, will find that they are rewarded in wholly unsuspected ways. For the contemplation of the Cross is not only one of the necessary conditions of Christian devotion : it is also the primary road to that very rationalising of hope which is the vital condition of the delivery of Europe from passing through the gloomy corridor of a new dark age of cruel anarchy. For the Cross reveals in a stark and unmis- takable form the ethical rhythm which runs through history, from which there is no exemption for the mighty and the strong.
Calvary is a compressed drama of all the meaning of human history, and history is at bottom the record of the immemorial effort of Right to overcome Might. Mere power, wielded for its own sake, is always and everywhere evil ; and the only politics and economics which have any virtue about them are those under which it is made more possible for the meek to inherit the earth. On Calvary these two forces come into conflict, each in a form so absolute and unmixed as history nowhere else affords. There absolute goodness comes into direct conflict with absolute evil, and right faces might as Jesus stands before the crafty jealousy of the Jewish rulers and the unprincipled repre- sentative of the great totalitarian State of the ancient world, The immediate result is the success of evil. Jesus is condemned and crucified. Here then is seen the first ethical principle of interpretation : When evil meets good, evil will always win—at first. The feet of. those who run to shed blood are always swifter than the feet of those who would save it. Modern history for the last ten years is perhaps the most vivid illustration of this which has been given us for five hundred years past. The forces of evil, which are the several dictatorships of Europe, have so far won hands down. That is the fact which we have to face ; and that, too, is the fact which the Cross faces ; and on Calvary there is no running away from it. At first, evil will always win.
But this is not the only ethical principle which Good I riday illuminates. If it reveals the initial triumph of evil, it reveals also the crippling self-limitation which its very t:iumph sets up. For evil, like good, is spiritual in its T. iture, and subject to the spiritual law of growth and decay. he moment that evil is placed in a position where it cannot, for all its striving, create yet more evil, its decay has set in. On the Cross that moment plainly came. The real victory of evil was won when the sentence of Pilate was spoken. Soon there came the nailing to the Cross. Was there any further field for evil to win ? It had so far failed to break the spirit of Jesus Himself, and only this would be its final victory. Now came the moment of real decision. Defeat for Jesus would come if He was false to His own teaching, and cursed His enemies. Instead, He prayed for them, and pleaded for their forgiveness. Evil had had every chance, and in the end its very triumph had only proved the occasion of the creation of still further good. Easter symbolically completes and vindicates a process begun on Good Friday—the demonstration that the victory of evil is followed by its increasing impotence.
Thus the second principle emerges. Evil wins the first victory, and in its very triumph sets in motion the law of diminishing returns, which in the end engulfs it. In hoc sign vines is not sentimentally but realistically a statement of truth. For, quite apart from its more purely theological and religious aspects, the Cross does provide the ground of a rational hope in the midst of circumstances which tend to despair. It faces facts at their grimmest ; it burkes no whit of evil's mastery and power ; and from these facts it wrings a hope which is seen to be the inevitable outcome of the facts themselves.
The application of such principles to the existing inter- national situation is clear, and the Cross does provide the basis of a rational hope for democracy today. But we must not claim that this ethical interpretation can now be seen in both its phases, or we abandon realism. The fact is that as things stand on the day these words are written no one can say that the end of the first phase has come. Evil, in the shape of Mussolini and Hitler, is still in process of claiming its initial victory. But those who learn both their ethics and their• interpretation of history from the Cross know that sooner or later the law of diminishing returns must inevitably be set in motion by evil's very success.
It is no doubt possible for us to hasten the day, provided we believe it is coming. But we can only believe it on condition that we can find grounds for a realistic hope. That is why every citizen who despairs constitutes one more victory for the dictators, while each of us who can find and keep a sure hope represents one more fortress they have failed to conquer. Good Friday is a good day to set out on the search for such a hope, and it is he who gives himself most to the spirit of the first Good Friday who stands the best chance of finding it, for he will be looking in the right place.
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