Lenny Bruce joked that had
Jesus lived in modern times (what was modern in the 1960s, when Bruce spoke), Christians would be dangling little
gold electric chairs around their necks. That was indeed a sign of the times; forty years earlier it would have been
bullets and forty years before that,
nooses. Today, likely the
syringe of
lethal injection. But in any event,
symbolism of
pain and
suffering and
death, not of
life.
Modern
Christianity tends towards presenting precisely the proposition regurgitated above, that Jesus, minus the
Resurrection, is meaningless. No wonder this message has been taken in many quarters to "Jesus lived
and spoke of some stuff and then
died and came back to life!! The takeaway being that the important thing Jesus did was to die and come back from it -- and so, so long as you believe that last bit, you've fulfilled your duty to your fellowmen, no matter what words might have flowed from Jesus' mouth. This
schizophrenic split has allowed
Crusaders and
Inquisitors,
witch-burners and
Klansman and
Nazis,
ethnic cleansers and
bigots and
homophobes of every stripe, down to the most deceitful of
Creationist saboteurs of the value of knowledge, and all of them all down the lines of history, to be so cooly self-assured that theirs was a path to eternal reward. For all of these types have believed, after all, in the Resurrection. And the remainder fares not much better, given the deafening silence of greater
Christendom against the bloodlust and homophobia and bigotry and anti-scientism of those who would more vocally claim to be their peers. It is difficult, I am sometimes told, to stand up to one's loudly ignorant "fellow Christian" -- and it must be difficult indeed if one weighs the opinions of troglodytes over the words ascribed to their supposed savior.
Now, as to the cross as pure symbol, history teaches us that its current occupation is temporary, transitory, and unnecessary. The cross and variations of it existed symbologically millennia before the advent of Christianity. For hundreds of years at least -- perhaps a thousand years, even -- after the death of Jesus, Christianity got along without the use of the cross as anything more than a rarely seen processional symbol, appearing only in one chapter of the story, considered poignant, but not of ultimate value. The primary symbols of Jesus in that era were simply the image of Jesus, and the
ichthys, a
fish-shaped device with no especial connection to the resurrection, but more immediately related to one of the reported miracles, and to anagrammatic gamesmanship. And, though the ichthys has recently been reclaimed to a degree for
SUV back bumpers, its long abandonment has opened it to
other interpretations altogether.
And why, for most of the life of Christianity, has the Cross
not held symbolic primacy? Well, it must be remembered that Jesus lived in an era thick with resurrections, where every culture and mythos recorded successful round trips to the
netherworld and even battles with their gods, as well as all manner of miracles and prophecies and visitations from spirit-beings. Such reports have all but vanished with the relentless progress of modern science and technology, and the concordant development of means of either accounting for, or debunking, claims of the miraculous and metaphysical. Instead, 'miracles' in the modern age are reduced to the appearance of Jesus on a grilled cheese sandwich, the footprints of
Muhammad appearing in some remote
Pakistani village, or
Hindu statutuary appearing to drink
milk. So perhaps it may be that the preceding generations hewed more observantly to the message of taking care of one another (even of those who would be enemies to us) and acting peacefully and respectfully. Or, given history, maybe that message didn't last very long at all.
History teaches us as well that symbolic meanings are lost over time, and may even be wrenched away. The
swastika has been rent from its peaceful original uses. The
eye no longer bespeaks the gaze of
Horus. The
caternary arch now brings to mind not great gateways, but
greasy hamburgers and chicken nuggets. At some future point, in hundreds of years or thousands, the Christian significance of the cross
will be forgotten. But physics will remain, and will for an inestimably longer time be discoverable and rediscoverable if lost or fogotten. And so, it is advisable that if the maintenance of this pair of perpendicular lines is of some psychological value, find something more relevant for it to stand for; some expression of it and purpose for it in the natural order of our Universe, rather than the supernatural.