AND ANOTHER THING
The cross has nothing to do with the GNP
PAUL JOHNSON
Cnicifixion was an oriental punish- ment, intended to inflict the maximum pain and humiliation. Herodotus tells us it came from the Medes and Persians. It sent a chill even through the tough-minded Roman ruling class, so that Cicero called it crudelis- simum teterrimumque supplicium. The verb Cognate to crux or cross was cruciare, to tor- ture (hence our word excruciating). The Condemned man had to shoulder the tran- som of his cross himself, driven by whips through the busiest streets of the city, to the place of execution, so that all could see his ignominy. A board signifying his crime was carried by a herald and later fixed to the top of the cross. In Jesus's case the cus- tomary procedures were followed. He was stripped naked, then nailed to the cross by his hands and feet, though some authorities hold that his feet were merely tied, which tended to prolong the agony.
Those who endured this frightful punish- ment customarily shrieked with terror and pain and cursed their executioners. Jesus endured it in stoical silence for the most part, but found the strength to pray to God to forgive his tormentors, commended his mother to the care of his disciples, and Spoke comforting words to the penitent thief.
A society of charitable Jerusalem matrons provided draughts of medicated Wine to be given to those on the cross, to deaden their sufferings. Jesus tasted it but refused to drink, preferring to retain con- sciousness, rather as Freud, dying of cancer In Hampstead in 1939, declined morphia, and Dr Johnson resolved: 'I will take no more physic, not even my opiates, for I have prayed that I may render up my soul to God unclouded.' Even Jesus, however, once 'cried with a loud voice', for he was human, man as well as God. There is no doubt, and we must never forget it, that his death was horrific, sickening to watch and ignominious in the eyes of the world. His Mission had ended in utter disaster and he seemed doomed to oblivion, while Pilate went on to comfortable retirement and Annas and Caiaphas died in their rich men's beds.
Christianity, then, is about suffering and failure, and the Church, even in its most tri- umphalist moods, has continued to make the cross its principal symbol — rightly so. For Christianity inverts the values of the World. As St Paul says, 'God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.' Early Christians were taught to make the sign of the cross on their breasts to advertise their faith and risk persecution but also to remind themselves that the world had rejected their founder and tortured him to death. Every mediaeval peasant at his Sunday mass lifted his eyes to the huge crucifix, or rood, above the high altar, both in terror at the fear of pun- ishment for his sins and in comfort that the worldly order, which bore so hardly on him and had crucified Christ, was emphatically not the order of eternity. The worst thing the Protestants ever did at the Reformation was to downgrade the crucifix and cast the ancient roods on to the bonfire. For the cross signifies not only sacrifice and redemption but also revolt against the philosophies of the 'wise' — materialism, liberalism, the pursuit of wealth and all forms of political correctness. In this sense not only the Forbidden City in Peking and the old Kremlin, but the White House, 10 Downing Street and the Elysee Palace are no better than the house of the High Priest.
Because Christianity is an anti-success creed, I am not really in sympathy with attempts, however well-meaning, to identify its aims with those of political philosophies. John Smith and other Labour people have just put their names to a paperback, Reclaiming the Ground: Christianity and Socialism (Hodder & Stoughton), which, as Tony Blair says in a foreword, is an attempt to 'reunite the ethical code of Christianity with the basic values of democratic social- ism'. This little book is dedicated to the memory of R.H. Tawney and is well worth a glance: in places it is both illuminating and moving. Tawney's Christianity was the best thing about him, and it is good to know that Smith and Blair, now Labour's two most significant leaders, share the Christianity which poor Neil Kinnock and his regime rejected. But the exercise is doomed to futility. You can, in fact, make out a more plausible case for the identifica- tion of Christianity with democratic capital- ism. Indeed, it has recently been done, both by Pastor John Neuhaus, in Doing Well and Doing Good: the Challenge to the Christian Capitalist (Doubleday) and by Michael Novak, in The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Free Press), two confident and spirited books which I also commend.
Obviously, a good Christian — or a pious Jew for that matter — will make a morally better capitalist than an atheist or an agnostic. And he or she will make a morally better socialist, too. But that is as far as the argument will take you. Good Christians make better tramps, for that matter; and, difficult though it is to imagine, I dare say there were good Christians among the SS and the KGB, and that their crimes were less atrocious in consequence. Christianity is the great restraining factor on human evil. The history of mankind has been a gruesome story for the last 2,000 years even with Christianity; how much more depraved would it have been if Christ had never died on the cross! That, of course, is why socialists, capitalists and everyone else needs the cross as a visible reminder of evil and redemption.
I knew a publisher who kept a big crucifix in a prominent place on his desk, to recall to him, as he worked, what life was really about. I have one looking down at me now, as I write this. The more realistic and shocking the crucifix is, the better. We have a splendid one hanging over our bed, and for some time I have been searching for another, a big one, preferably Spanish — they are skilled at depicting horrific sanctity — to hang in the hall of the house, to frighten Protestant and atheist guests, as well as myself. We need to keep the image of the cross in our daily lives, so that we think about it not just in Holy Week and on Good Friday in particular, but habitually, and remind ourselves that the road to hap- piness lies through humiliation, failure and pain, not success.
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