PART FOUR

The Cross

Christian community is based on the mutual support we as Church give to one another through prayer, donations, worship, fellowship, study, the sacraments and service.  This is the lifelong process of loving one another in Christ.  Those last two words “in Christ”   sum up the mystery of the Church very concisely, and need more explanation. For me, the symbol that best explains our identity as Christ’s Church is the Cross.

The horizontal beam of the Cross represents Christ reaching out to embrace all humanity in endless self gift. The vertical beam stands for his offering of himself to the Father to save us.  When we sign ourselves with the Cross, or when a priest blesses us with the Cross and we in turn bless ourselves, we 1) express our faith in Christ’s saving death; 2) call upon its power to save us; 3) commit to live out its saving  power in the oblation we make through our Christian lives. Without the Cross, our suffering is wasted. With the Cross, our suffering is redemptive. The Church is the Family of God taking up the Cross because it is first taken up by it.

The power of the Cross enables us to grow from codependence to interdependence.  It is helpful for us believers to use those two terms, which are not religious, even though our growth is religious activity and a spiritual reality.  The reason why is that “codependence” and “interdependence” are not yet overly loaded words nor empty clichés. (Religious terms have a way of becoming both, probably the latter as a result of being the former.) As somewhat neutral words, codependence and interdependence can help us to see our religious beliefs in a fresh way. We thereby avoid the pitfall of thinking we understand beforehand everything we are talking about, or thinking we are talking about a lot of nothing. Thus “codependence” and “interdependence” become a means of applying to ourselves what Christ accomplishes for us by his dying and rising.  While Christ on the Cross catches us up in himself and brings us to his Father in his gift of himself, the dynamic of the Cross does not reoccur in us unless we freely embrace Him. Christ’s humble, self sacrificing love is freely given, and has to be received in the same manner.  This does not mean merely that we thank Him for his generosity, but that we enter into his sacrificial self giving.  We cannot receive what He has to give unless we are prepared to continue handing on what He offers us by our own self sacrifice.

God is self-giving love. He is incapable of not giving Himself away.  Christ’s Cross contains the Father’s self-gift as well as his own outpouring of self as the Father’s Son. Thus the Cross communicates to us their Spirit of Oneness who makes us capable of union with one another by giving ourselves away. Husband and wife live out of this love by their sacrifice of themselves for each other, and for their children. Their self-gift results in their growth into a deeper realization of their own identities.  Through his self-gift the man becomes a father and therefore more of a man; the woman, a mother and therefore more of a woman. The new being of each demonstrates to us the fruitfulness of self-giving love, and is the pattern we follow in the Church as the Family of God, as we father, mother, brother and sister one another in the Christian Life. The self-gift of the Triune God through the Cross of Christ makes us into the Family of God. The Cross calls us continually grow into who we are by continuously giving away the Love we are receiving, The only way to receive the gift is to keep giving it. The only way to give it is in our self giving which opens us to keep receiving more and more of God’s endless outpouring. This is the dynamic of Life in Christ as the Family of God through the power of the Cross.