Images of Christ shift over centuries. This sculpture echoed many historic images while offering what felt like a new intuition. Here are some images that prefigured this new rendering of one holy man’s last breath.

Poetry of the Passion by J.A. W. Bennett is dry and scholarly. But throughout he plants lines of poetry like nuggets of gold from twelves centuries of English verse. The history of Christian poetry in England begins with the eighth century A Vision of a Rood. It depicts Jesus as a warrior king. That image has done untold damage over the centuries as “Christianity” became an imperial religion. But the twentieth century revealed the power of non-violent “warring” against injustice. And liberation theologians propose an anti-imperial kingship, a Jesus who rules by accompanying and liberating the poor in a world where, as his mother put it, love casts down the mighty and sends the rich away empty (Luke 1:53). Not as punishment, but as a humanizing liberation from the hell of oppressing and extorting. The Christ-King who overcomes the world doesn’t arrive as a victor in a chariot. He rides a donkey and plunges into apparent failure.

In the Vision, the poet falls into sleep and sees a cross shining with silver, gold and jewels. It reaches to the four corners of the universe. But at other times, the cross appears drenched with sweat and blood. “So I lay there a long time, / Gazing sad at heart on a healer’s tree.” Then the cross speaks. It describes the events of Good Friday and the approach of that astonishing young man:

Then the young warrior—it was God Almighty—
stalwart, resolute, stripped himself; climbed the high gallows,
Gallantly before the throng, resolved to loose Man’s bonds. Trembled I
when this warrior embraced me …

But Jesus is not a strong, stoic master of the situation. His friends and the universe mourn:

Many the despitous wrongs
I have suffered on that hill, where I saw the Lord of hosts
Grievously suffer. Clouds had masked
The ruler’s corpse,
The bright radiance a shadow covered,
Wan ‘neath the welkin. All creation wept,
Lamenting a king’s fall. It was Christ who hung there on a cross …

Limb-weary as he was, the men put him down, taking their posts at the corpse’s head,
Keeping guard over the Lord of heaven. And he rested there a while,
Exhausted by his great battle …

The corpse grew cold.
Fair house of life. Then we were all leveled to the ground—a fearful fate—
In deep pit buried.

Grief and awe extend to the universe. And the cross’s voice doesn’t describe the limb-weary corpse as corrupt flesh that imprisoned Jesus’ immortal soul, but as a fair house of life, like a beautiful home blown to bits by a storm.

This imagery fits the spirit of the Sangre de Cristo crucifix. Jesus’ body is muscled like a young laborer’s frame. He doesn’t look like a passive victim. He may have chosen to be there, and reminds me of a long-distance runner, exhausted and exhilarated at the finish line. In an old Latin hymn, Vexilla Regis, by Fortunatus, “God reigns from a tree,” as from a throne. Crazy.

Bennett notes that personifying the Rood allows the wood to take the role of Christ’s humanity: the Cross speaks of being wounded:

With dark nails they pierced me, leaving scars yet visible,
Open strokes of malice.

It Is Finished

The Sangre de Cristo crucifix depicts the participation of the wood itself through the arms, stomach and abdomen of Jesus’ body. They are not bronze, as is most of the sculpture, but carved wood. Christ’s body is immersed in and emerges out of the cross-wood, the cosmos, taking it with him. He isn’t descending with the weight of a corpse but already rising, his amazed eyes fixed on some wondrous Horizon.

For me, the crucifix captures a moment of transition from battle to rest, from struggle to surrender. Not the surrender of defeat. More like a lover’s surrender. “Consummatum est,” cries Jesus in a Latin translation of John 19:30. “Finished,” not as defeated, but as completed, made whole, ripened, pregnant with new Life. As if the Resurrection is beginning here, in what Rome meant as intimidation, humiliation, annihilation.

In the crucifix, Jesus’ right shoulder presses forward; the right hand grapples in pain. The left hand of mercy and abandonment turns up in a gesture of offering. Dying flesh is already giving way to a glorified body; Jesus thirsts, but as anti-King he is already drinking glory and extending his liberating reign to the universe.

In the crucifix Christ’s hair and loincloth blow in the wind. It can mean bad weather. Or it may mean Spirit. It reminds us that the crucifixion was not a solemn liturgical act conducted in a church. It was a public execution. He was exposed to the elements. In the English tradition of spiritual writing, Richard Rolle and Juliana of Norwich referred to the cold wind that blew on Good Friday. Two later carols conveyed it, too:

Blow the wind still and blow not so chill;
My blood, man, I shed for thee all at will.
Blow the wind still and blow not so chill;
This pain to suffer is my Father’s will.

•

There blows a cold wind today, today
The wind blows cold today.
Christ suffered his passion for man’s salvation,
To keep the cold wind away.

As I’ve grown older, I resist the notion that the Father wills Jesus to suffer to pay for our sins. Rather, he strikes me as a Friend in love with us who enters fully, in solidarity with us, into the poverty of human mortality. No dark corner of our human brokenness and cruelty escapes the possibility of an alchemical transfiguration. No cold wind or memory can snuff out Hope.

Much later in English literature, the warrior king appears in Francis Thompson’s “The Veteran of heaven”:

O CAPTAIN of the wars, whence won Ye so great scars?
— In what fight did Ye smite, and what manner was the foe?
Was it on a day of rout they compassed Thee about,
— Or gat Ye these adornings when Ye wrought their overthrow?

” ‘Twas on a day of rout they girded Me about,
— They wounded all My brow, and they smote Me through the side:
My hand held no sword when I met their armed horde,
— And the conqueror fell down, and the conquered bruised his pride. “

What is this, unheard before, that the unarmed make war,
— And the slain hath the gain, and the victor hath the rout?
What wars, then, are these, and what the enemies,
— Strange Chief, with the scars of Thy conquest trenched about?

The horrors of World War I, which broke out just after Thompson’s death, ended the image of Jesus as a warrior. But is it possible to recover the symbol? Can it be purified? Having worked with Viet Nam veterans, writer, poet and psychotherapist Edward Tick believes it can. We struggle in life. And when we fail to face our wounds, we engage in destructive behaviors against ourselves or others.

The early desert monks and the prophet Muhammad acknowledge that inner warfare against injustice and hatred enhances life. It is athletic. It strengthens the image of God that animates us. This struggle can move us into contemplative life, and contemplation may be the moral equivalent of war. This war is completely creative. In it, we corral our demons and allow grace to transform them into the energies of love.

Twentieth-century poems by Ezra Pound and David Jones also speak to the spirit of the Sangre de Cristo crucifix. They describe two images of Christ: one a common man, one a king. In “Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” Pound celebrates a roguish Jesus. (Fere is an archaic term for “fellow,” or “mate.”) He’s “no capon priest … but a man o’ men was he.” The ballad sounds like a seamen’s drinking song.

Aye lover he was of brawny men,
O’ ships and the open sea.

He’s tough. He can’t stand religious hypocrisy and Rome’s occupying police force cannot intimidate him. When arrested, “his smile was good to see.”

I ha’ seen him drive a hundred men
Wi’ a bundle o’ cords swung free,
That they took the high and holy house
For their pawn and treasury.

Scripture gives no indication that Jesus was merely meek and gentle. In Pound’s poem, Jesus’ strength and vital charisma make it possible for him to “cow a thousand men / On the hills o’ Galilee” and walk through their midst, calmly eluding their “righteous” indignation (Luke 4:29-30). His enemies seem feckless. He is a force of nature:

A master of men was the Goodly Fere,
A mate of the wind and sea,
If they think they ha’ slain our Goodly Fere
They are fools eternally.

It may not be particularly Christlike to gloat over our enemy’s folly, but the disciples also understood that may be called on to lay down their lives for that enemy. Pound’s Jesus is not only a comforter. He doesn’t seem to heal us so that we can live comfortably in this world, but in order to incite us to hazard an exploration into God.

The Sangre de Cristo crucifix conveyed this spirit to me through Jesus’ face: he does not look down at us in pity. His head is raised, he looks into Mystery. Awe and desire transcend his pain and exhaustion. He challenges me to face the real battle within and share my new freedom with him as my leader and friend. Will I follow?

Hunting Down Death

He has the passion of a hunter pursuing his prey. Not a trophy hunter, but a parent with a hungry family. Or a householder protecting his kin and livestock from predators. This is the image David Jones uses in his poem “The Hunt.” Jones’ poetry is archaeological: it contains layers of historical references and transcultural echoes. In “The Hunt,” for example, he uses Welsh and Arthurian legends to give a portrait of Christ. Arthur leads a hunt for a wild boar, death itself.

Arthur/Christ pursues Death relentlessly, mounted on a horse that carries him recklessly through the forest. Some ancient poetry even describes Jesus riding the Cross like a horse.

… and from his lifted cranium where the priced tresses,
dragged
with sweat stray his straight brow-furrows under the twisted diadem
to the numbered bones
of his scarred feet
and from the saturated forelock
of his maned mare
to her streaming flanks
and in broken festoons for her quivering fetlocks
he was caparison’d in the flora
of the woodlands of Britain
and like a stricken numen of the woods
he rode
with the trophies of the woods
upon him
who rode
for the healing of the woods
and because of the hog.

This passage, full of scriptural references, speeds toward its goal. A crucifix doesn’t depict a man on a horse, but the Sangre de Cristo Christ seems master of the Cross. The wood of the cross is his body. He doesn’t carry trophies of the woods upon him; he is the wood; he is the flora of the cosmos. And its healer.

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Aragorn appears as a Christ figure. He carries a sword named Andúril, and it is his Cross. Aragorn emerges from years of obscurity to become a major historical force. His heirloom sword is broken and useless until his time comes. Then, reforged, the sword accompanies Aragorn in the final stage of his quest. 

The Gospels make the point that Jesus, too, was a royal “son of David,” but he couldn’t make this claim until John baptized him. At that moment, the Spirit reforges David’s line and Christ draws himself out of his merely human scabbard, wars with Satan in the desert, and then again, later, in Jerusalem.

Neither man wielded worldly power. Humble human nature at the service of love was their weapon. And it met fierce opposition. Jesus’ cross pierces the earth’s crust like a sword and and harrows hell. Death dies. Earth, lanced by this blade, breaks free. Worldly power is no use to Aragorn or Jesus. They tap another kind of power. Their suffering is not only passive. They act, they take up their humility. Jesus proclaims that no man takes his life from him, and in his most difficult moment, Aragorn agrees to a quixotic quest to storm Mordor, the seat of oppression, with an inadequate army:

“… it is the last move in a great jeopardy, and for one side or the other it will bring the end of the game.” Then he drew Andúril and held it up glittering in the sun. “You shall not be sheathed again until the last battle is fought,” he said.

Throughout these tales of the Cross, the same pattern and lesson appear: when we face the truth of our lives, it frees us. The truth is that we were made for love. The only way into love is through “a great jeopardy,” through an eros that implies thanatos, death. The chapel crucifix helped me understand this death as an active life-giving love-death, not a resignation to a tragic fate. This warrior Jesus took up his destiny, climbed the gallows in the cold wind and revealed that the slain hath the gain and the stricken numen bears an inextinguishable light: Andúril, “the flame of the west,” the fiery life of the Risen Friend.

Physicists surmise that the universe is centerless. All is in motion, and a “still point” is a fiction. Mystics suggest that Love’s circumference is nowhere and its center is everywhere. In this sense, you are at the center, and can be an axis mundi, a still point, an axle, a cross, a healer’s tree around which the world revolves. And you are not centripetal, pulling everything to yourself, but centrifugal, radiating love to the wounded world. I am an old man now, still trying to take up this tree-sword-cross that harrows the hell in me and sends me out to be a fool, declare love, and hope that my frail creatureliness may help us all find the wild joy of freedom. This is my vision of a rood.

Photos by Betty Brown, Skreen, Co. Sligo, Ireland