Most people know the apocryphal story of the person who goes into the jewellery store and asks for a Cross, to be questioned by the assistant, “one with the little man on it, or without?” An urban myth, perhaps, but remembering Tolkien’s point about myth and truth, it is highly likely that in the deeply secularised West, there are many who know nothing of the Cross, why this Friday is ‘Good,’ or who indeed the “little man” is, on that strange piece of body decoration. If you doubt that that level of cultural and religious ignorance exists—even amongst those expensively programmed into ignorance by our institutes of higher learning, a programming which is intentional—I will never forget, many years ago, attending a screening of the movie The Passion of the Christ and, while chatting with a friend before the film began, being tapped on the shoulder by a young woman and being reprimanded for “giving the story away.”
There are those who know the Cross; they know its symbolism, they know what Christianity claims, and they know who it is that Christians believe is hanging upon that Cross. Nine years ago, men clad in black marched twenty Egyptian Christians and one Ghanaian, onto a beach in Libya. Before they were martyred, by being beheaded, the spokesman for the followers of the ‘religion of peace’ pointed across the waters of the Mediterranean towards Rome and called the poor Coptic Christians they were about to murder, and all Christians, the ”servants of the Cross.” He claimed to be an enemy of the Cross, perhaps the only accurate statement he made. The Coptic martyrs, as is visible in the cruel video that ISIS recorded, died with the Holy Name of Jesus upon their lips, defeating with love the demonic hatred which appeared to be victorious. They were servants of the Cross, the Cross which brought peace and hope to men about to be executed; the Cross on which the Good Thief, St. Dismas, found redemption; the Roman centurion St. Longinus identified the Son of God; and the Cross on which Constantine saw the sign of victory.
What gives men, with an enviable simplicity worth more than a lifetime of academia, the courage to face death in visible peace, except the saving power of their belief in the Cross? Where is that power in the anaemic, therapeutic deism preached in the emptying churches of Western Europe and North America, and could there be, perhaps, some link between the failure of both faith in the power of the Cross and the preaching of that faith and those empty pews?
There are two lessons we can learn this Good Friday from the Coptic martyrs, saints of the Coptic Church, and acknowledged as martyrs now by the Catholic Church. The first is very simple, but possibly the most damaging and debilitating factor affecting the decline of Christianity in the West: the doctrine of universalism. In short, this is the belief that not only will all men be saved, but that all that we do on earth will not alter that fact. Despite being contradicted by the testimony of Christ and the unbroken tradition of the Church, this belief has penetrated deeply, not only into a vaguely deistic society, albeit secular, but, far more worryingly, into the fabric of the Church. The evidence is legion: post-Vatican II funeral ceremonies, preaching, the eulogy which has no place in a Catholic funeral but is now almost universal, and the dangerous work of heterodox theologians. The lie of universalism was best expressed by the words of the Polish Nobel laureate, Czeslaw Milosz: “The true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for all our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.” Universalism, of course, does not imply nothingness, but universal salvation most certainly denies the reality of what the Cross proclaims: the awful cost of sin.
Gazing upon the Cross and believing in it tells us a terrible truth: our rebellion, our rejection of God, has caused this. Universalism is a lie. Nothing we could do as humans, despite the centuries of Temple sacrifice, the offerings and placations made by cultures and civilisations across millennia, and the prayers and pleading of priests and shamans, could repair the damage of human sin and separation from God. “Jesus Christ is our high priest,” said St. John Fisher, “and His precious Body is our sacrifice.” Without the saving death of Christ on the Cross, there is no Resurrection, no liberation from the slavery of sin, and no hope of life eternal. This is the constant faith of the Church, the faith that has given courage and hope to men and women throughout the centuries, and it was the faith of the Coptic martyrs on that beach. Like the Good Thief, they acknowledged their sin and pleaded to be allowed to enter paradise; only the thief who acknowledged his sin was promised entry into the kingdom, the other was not.
Through the power of the Cross, its servants—for that is indeed the proud title of all who claim the name of Christian—receive, according to St. Leo the Great, “strength from weakness, glory from shame, life from death.” Who can doubt that that was the victorious inspiration of those twenty-one men?
So closely bound with that trust in Christ’s salvation shown in the Cross is the other reason for their courage, our lesson this day, and something so desperately needed in this bleak spiritual landscape: the fear of death.
The sign of victory witnessed by Constantine was not, ultimately, the victory of an earthly battle, but the eternal and ultimate battle for humanity: the defeat of death. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews declared that, “By His death, He could take away all the power of the devil, who had power over death, and set free all those who had been held in slavery all their lives by the fear of death.”
Among the many demonic aspects of the COVID drama was the revelation of how many were still held in slavery by their overwhelming fear of death.
At the very moment when the life-saving victory of the Cross needed to be proclaimed by the Church, the doors of the churches were locked, and online homilies lauded the virtues of handwashing, pew wiping, social distancing, and paper face masks. All around us now in the West, the culture of death is on the ascendant. Not just the murder of the innocent in the womb, but now, in country after country, the introduction of euthanasia. These laws are promised to deliver freedom, but they will only bring a slavery not seen even in the imagination of dystopian novelists.
“Your Cross,” said St. Leo, is “the source of all blessings, the cause of all graces.” Calmly, gently, and with dignity and faith, the lips of the Coptic martyrs speaking of Christ defeated the powers of death and the devil. With their firm conviction that their moment of martyrdom would be brief and the words of Jesus addressed to the Good Thief were spoken to them, they confirmed the words of Chesterton that the Cross “has a paradox at its centre … its heart is a collision and contradiction.”
The Cross is the most awful sign the world has ever known and the only sign that brings victory and hope: “In hoc signo vinces.”
