by Dr. Jay Richard Akkerman, Assistant to the President for Congregational Engagement
Nearly every church I’ve ever visited has an empty cross in the sanctuary. I suspect your church is like mine.
How did we Christians get here?
Because crucifixion was viewed as shameful in ancient times, most church historians believe the early church may have actually been hesitant about displaying a crucified Jesus on the cross until the late fourth or fifth century. But the staurogram, which is an overlapping combination of the two Greek letters tau (which looks very similar to our capital T) and rho (which is written like our capital P) seems to be the oldest Christian pictographic representation of a crucified figure, looking something like this:
In Biblical Archaeological Review, Larry Hurtado notes that in Greek, “the verb to ‘crucify’ is stauroō; [and] a ‘cross’ is a stauros.” This combination of letters is believed to be a simplified, visual representation of the crucified Christ, and is found in ancient manuscripts estimated from about AD 150-200, roughly two centuries earlier than previously thought.
Over time, the early Church incorporated more religious imagery in their worship and architecture. Today a T-shaped cross containing a depiction of Jesus is called a crucifix and is prevalent in Roman Catholic churches worldwide. By the 13th century, Pope Innocent III required either a crucifix or plain cross to stand on the altar of Roman Catholic churches.
By the time of the Protestant reformers, many pushed against any visual religious representations in the Church. A good example of this is the stark white-clapboarded colonial churches of New England. Those who followed this perspective were called iconoclasts for their literal stance against any religious imagery, stripping their churches of all things visual. Ironically, their stark resistance to visual religious representations ended up being, in fact, a visual statement in itself!
Both Protestants and Roman Catholics see Christ’s crucifixion as a sacrificial act of atonement for all of humanity’s sins. Together, we recognize that Jesus’ crucifixion is God’s pathway to forgiveness. In choosing to exhibit a crucifix, Roman Catholics underscore Jesus’ sacrifice and forgiveness as seen in I Corinthians 1:23, where Paul teaches, “…we preach Christ crucified.”
Protestants, on the other hand, typically emphasize the hope of eternal life found in the resurrection of Jesus. An empty cross, therefore, symbolizes Christ’s defeat of death through God’s act of raising Jesus from the dead. Technically, an empty cross is known as a resurrectix.
Together, both Protestants and Roman Catholics teach that the resurrection offers all of us the opportunity for everlasting life. However, a distinction may be made in that Protestants tend to stress God’s gift of eternal life over the ongoing, sacrificial gift of forgiveness offered by Jesus on the cross. We tend to find support for this emphasis in various New Testament texts, including John 10:28, where Jesus teaches, “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.”
Whether resurrection is stressed or crucifixion is accentuated, each group believes both events are vital to basic Christian doctrine. Like the overlapping T and P of the staurogram, crucifixion and resurrection are forever melded together theologically.
Long ago, I once had a professor who commented in class one day about our Protestant penchant for the display of an empty cross in our worship spaces. While teaching about the resurrection, he wondered if a resurrectix, or empty cross, fully conveys the Christian message.
Instead, he wondered aloud if an empty tomb told a fuller story of God’s redemption story. “Why don’t we have empty tombs in our churches today?” he asked us all.
I must admit, I’ve asked myself this question for decades now.
While fully recognizing the significance of the redeeming message offered by the crucified Christ, I have wondered at times if an empty cross conveys everything we want to say. And without advocating that we all take sledgehammers to the back wall of our sanctuaries, I am intrigued by the visual message of an empty tomb at the forefront of our worship, where we could be reminded week in and week out of the way God triumphantly raised Jesus from death, hell, and the grave, and that our loving God alone is able to snatch life even from the cruel clutches of a cold, hard, tomb.
Friends, I pray that our collective message this Easter season will compel those we lead to embrace the sometimes seemingly impossible notion that the same loving God who raised Jesus from the tomb also offers abundant, renewing life to marriages gasping for hope on the verge of death, restoration to people locked in years-long opposition to one another; freedom from imprisoning thoughts and actions that bind us, and shared confidence that God will raise our loved ones—and even us!—as we place our trust in Jesus’ sacrificial gift, ultimately culminating in our own resurrections from death itself.
Together this season, may we point others to the heart of the gospel that God would rather die than live without us—and that is precisely what God did! That through Jesus’ loving, sacrificial death, God offers us a “hole in the wall,” even breaking through what we often think of as the end of life’s road—even death itself.
