Let’s be real: I don’t love that we have a feast day about a torture device.

Let’s be real: I don’t love that we have a feast day about a torture device.

You, too, have probably heard the arguments about whether we’d choose to wear electric chair necklaces if that had been the method of Jesus’s death. Or perhaps you know, too, that the cross didn’t come into vogue as a symbol in churches for centuries because it remained in use as a method of torture and death by the state. It reminded people of the Roman Empire, not Jesus. No wonder the image of the Good Shepherd was far more common in the early church.

And look, I understand that the death of God in self-giving surrender provides a crucial (pun intended) element in the love of God expressed in the entire being of Jesus. When Paul describes the cross as a stumbling block, or the importance of preaching Christ crucified, this is what he means. Something becomes transparent about the nature of God’s love for this world in that death, and that revelation changes everything about how we understand God and ourselves. If we leave that part out, we haven’t really understood Jesus.

But a feast day about the torture device? I don’t know. It feels to me like putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable, falling in love with the dress rather than the person.

For me, this inevitably means that the Feast of the Holy Cross is about accepting parts of my tradition that I understand but with which I don’t resonate. Others, people I love and respect, resonate strongly with it. I see how much it means to people to kiss a cross on Good Friday. I see the passion that theologians I deeply respect have for the power of what is revealed on the cross, and how deeply the cross itself symbolizes that moment for them. I have seen many people kneeling before a crucifix, seeing their own hearts and experiences nailed there. I think this all matters, even if it’s not for me. I do not, to use the practical and crass language preferred in my family, want to yuck on their yum.

My sense is that, as a Christian, our call isn’t to ensure that we all practice the same piety, with the same symbols, using the same words. Our call in response to God’s love is to echo that love, in all the diversity of creation and in one another. That means I will sometimes celebrate feast days that I don’t particularly like because I can see how much they mean to others. Imagine a world where we accepted something, rather than mocking it or opposing it, for the simple reason that we could see why it would matter to others. Social media would halve in size.

If we are (as the readings for this day suggest) going to have the same mind as Christ, we will have to have a mind big enough to hold all of creation, and courageous enough to empty ourselves of our illusions about what unity looks like. I continue to wonder whether the future of our faith is largely tied up in our ability to accept that our brothers and sisters are more different from us than makes us comfortable. I wonder whether, on Holy Cross Day or on the many others, we will need to learn to celebrate another person’s feast.