The Overtakelessness of the Cross

Shanti Daffern

1.

 I don’t like talking or thinking or writing or praying about the Crucifixion. I find it awkward, alarming, affronting. But I keep coming back, insistently, to the foot of the Cross.

 I find it hard to keep my gaze here: on Christ crucified. My thoughts – if I try to grapple with the theology – tangle and overstretch and confuse themselves. My speaking turns to platitude. The emotion – if I feel it – is unbearable. More often, though, I want to ask with Christina Rossetti:

            Am I a stone, and not a sheep,

            That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,

            To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,

            And yet not weep?

 Much of the time, a sort of gentle evasion of the Crucifixion is possible – and I don’t think I’m alone in that. It’s less possible on Good Friday.  The Cross stands stark before us.

 I don’t like talking about the Crucifixion, I said, but the Holy Spirit likes to confront me – and knows I need my signs in billboard-huge, neon letters - so last year I found myself asked to preach at a parish in Oxford on Good Friday, my first Good Friday as a baptised Christian. An overlong, hour-long draft, some books, even a virtually delivered sermon later – and I was still stuck, even while I had spoken; fastened, even while I had fed. I was not just gazing on the Cross, or averting my eyes, but held in the gaze of the crucified and risen Christ.

 Writing this reflection, I found myself wanting to adapt last year’s meditation into five hundred coherent, reflective words, because those words, at least, were fixed on paper. It didn’t work. Something else came instead.  

 ‘Overtakelessness’ is a word the poet Anne Carson uses about grief is her elegy-thesaurus-artefact Nox. ‘Overtakelessness: from Das unumgängliche – that which cannot be got round. Cannot be avoided or seen to the back of. And about which one collects facts [or words] – it remains beyond them’.

 I have been a long time in collecting things at the foot of the Cross. I email out, daily, a collected painting, a poem and a piece of music for Lent and Holy Week. I walked down the Via Dolorosa with a group of Roman Catholics, singing and praying. I sought out art made for the fourteen stations of the Cross across fourteen churches in Piran, Slovenia. For a long time I wasn’t a Christian: I still collected poems and arguments about the Cross. The only crucial thing – to take the word’s older meaning, literally ‘cross-shaped’ – to say is that when I became a Christian, it was Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection that did it.

 The overtakelessness is all: that which cannot be got round.

 We cannot go from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday except via Good Friday. The Cross cannot be evaded – or seen to the back of. You can stop reading now, five hundred words end with this sentence: stay with that which cannot be got round.

2.

 ‘about which one collects [words] – it remains beyond them’*

 The overtakelessness is all: that which cannot be got round. We cannot go from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday except via Good Friday. Via Crucis. Crux probat omnia. What God did about human sin is extremely surprising. Christ’s death on the Cross is death’s undoing; Christ’s shame on the Cross is shame’s undoing. Meanwhile a silence on the cross as dead as we shall ever be. At the still centre of Good Friday, nothing is easy, nothing is sentimental, our faith is hard as nails. This death is huge and it is human-sized. Christ’s death shakes the cosmos and it is the size of a death. To live in the Mercy of God. The complete sentence too adequate, has no give. We do not single this agony out, from all, but God singles Himself out, to bear all. My life was the size of my life. Its rooms were room-sized, its soul was the size of a soul. We do not need to say that God suffers as God to affirm that He stands with us in suffering: because this is what He does, through the incarnation, in Jesus Christ on the Cross. Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long. But I did not understand why Christians would single out this one death among so many, or how a religion with a God who became man at its centre was anything other than patriarchal, anthropocentric wish fulfilment. Still falls the Rain. At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross. Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us. Anne Carson uses the word overtakelessness of any – of every? – grief. And yet not weep? God can be God without us, but he chooses to be God with us. God is love within His own three-personed self and He is love toward us as we see His action in the Son’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. The Cross is scandalous, offensive, un-aesthetic. What may I say? Here might I stay and sing. We still look up at this God, who became Man for us; this Cross, where Christ died for us; this God, who is never changing in His love for us, which is overflowing, which is endless, which is mercy. Because this is what the mercy of God looks like: the Passion of Jesus Christ: and this is simply too giving of itself to be adequate to our words. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Oh sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.               

*Most of these words are mine, no longer strung together but left to scatter. Many aren’t mine: you might recognise some. I can give you the sources if you wish. Perhaps something gets stuck or sticks for you: for I cannot say in five hundred words something that gets around, that gets to the back of the Crucifixion.