Luke 24:36b-48
One of my favorite Easter traditions from my childhood was the flowering of the cross. On Easter Sunday, all the children were given flowers in a beautiful rainbow of colors, and at the start of the service we processed with our flowers toward a cross that had been riddled with holes. One by one, we placed our flowers in the holes until the cross was bursting with color and fragrance. A parent or children’s minister would come behind and make some small adjustments, filling in gaps and removing blooms that had been damaged by tiny eager hands. For the rest of the service, my eyes would be drawn back again and again to the cross of flowers, and I beamed with pride to know that I had been a part of making something beautiful for Jesus. The cacophony of color against the white altar hangings is still my mental image of Easter joy to this day.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen this tradition in many different places, done many different ways. At Grace, members bring flowers from their own gardens, a blend of daffodils and tulips and early-blooming branches, and after the service it is placed outside so that passersby can enjoy it. At some churches, the flowers come from a florist, or are arranged meticulously by the flower guild. Not every church has the practice, and it isn’t a formal part of the liturgy, but the image of the flowered cross has been on my mind the last two weeks.
It is an incredible thing, when you think about it. The cross was a tool of death, a method of execution wielded by the Empire to keep occupied peoples in line. Crosses stood outside the entrances of major cities all over the Roman Empire, gruesome warnings to travelers of what might befall them if they forgot their place. The crosses were not usually empty. More than one of Jesus’s disciples died on them. The shape of the cross represented violence and oppression and fear for the people of the ancient world. I wonder what they would think if they could see one adorned with flowers.
We have taken this thing that was wielded against us, and we have made it beautiful. We have taken the Empire’s greatest weapon and turned it into necklaces and earrings and tattoos and wall art. We make the sign of it on the foreheads of our children in baptism and on the foreheads of the dying in a final act of blessing. We cast the shape of the cross in our most precious metals and we place crosses over the resting places of our loved ones as a sign of hope. What death intended for our destruction, we have claimed as the symbol of life’s victory.
When the resurrected Jesus appeared among his friends, he was not a ghost or a vision or a hallucination, but he had a hard time convincing them of that. He understood the disciples’ skepticism, and I think he anticipated ours. So the body that had been broken, that had gone down to death and returned victorious, did what bodies do. Look, touch, see. He showed them his hands and his feet, still marred by the nails of the cross. Jesus invited them to touch him, to feel his skin and bones. It must have been quite the scene, a scrum of shocked men and women weeping and shouting and reaching out for the person they loved and thought they would never see again. I have to imagine that someone pinched him, that perhaps one of them ran a hand through Jesus’s hair and marveled. Even still, they struggled to believe. So Jesus did something no ghost or apparition would do. He asked for a snack, sat down, and ate. Only after this impromptu seafood lunch are they able to really believe, to listen and understand.
When Jesus visits Thomas, he shows him wounded hands and a wounded side. When Jesus visits these disciples, he shows them his wounded hands and feet and a hungry belly. When Jesus is resurrected, he does not cease to be a body, his past is not erased. The wounds that Christ bears have been transformed from instruments of pain and torment to evidence of life and truth. What disables him has become a pathway to belief. What the Empire intended to cause him pain and destroy him, Jesus offers up to the doubters and the disbelievers. Touch and see what love has done for you. You are witnesses of these things.
What had been claimed by death is made beautiful in the resurrected life. As John writes in his letter, Beloved we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. We see glimpses of it in the Gospels- perhaps like Jesus our scars will remain, perhaps we will still hunger and thirst and get tired. Perhaps we will be able to enter locked rooms and appear suddenly wherever we please. We do not know what exactly our resurrected life will hold, what we will be has not yet been revealed. But God transformed a weapon of destruction into an instrument of salvation and transformed signs of pain into proof of life. God has inspired flowers to bloom on the hard wood of a cross. This is our faith, that nothing, not even death itself, is beyond God’s transforming love. Isn’t that beautiful?
Mother A Writes 