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Trivializing the Cross

© Blake Atwood

Just yesterday, Palm Sunday of the year of our Lord 2002, I had the opportunity to be a part of a musical production as put on by the local Baptist church. All of the people involved with the production did their respective duties to the utmost of their abilities. In other words, it was an excellent representation of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

But I had a problem with it, a problem that others in my cohort seemed to perceive as well.

One scene in particular calls to mind what I call the trivialization of the Cross. This scene had Jesus (well...the guy that was playing Jesus) on the cross where all could see him, bathed in streaks of blood, crown of thorns around his brow, hands outstretched, "nailed" to the cross.

What makes this so bad?

It's an act. Not an act of worship, but an act. As in acting. As in not real.

In other articles I've been an advocate for the reinstatement of visual imagery to the church. Now it must appear that I'm contradicting myself. I don't think I am; I think I'm simply refining what I've said before.

We are most definitely a society that associates more meaning with images than words. Take the swoosh or the golden arches. Thus, efforts like the Jesus video and the musical production I speak of seem like grand ideas for they would appear to speak the most clearly to this video saturated generation.

But in some ways, this proliferation of images that pervades our minds trivializes the meaning of the Cross, the meaning of what was personally done for you and for me. It cheapens the grace that was bought on that hill so long ago.

It's the same argument, to me, as violence on television and the movies. We see so much of it that hardly anything about the violence in these mediums shocks us. We become desensitized.

Have we become desensitized to the Cross? Further, have we become desensitized to the One who died on that cross?

Is it too much of a reach to say that too many images or representations of the story of Christ can do the same? On the other hand, one could argue that sharing the story of Christ through any means possible (i.e. Paul becoming a Greek to the Greeks or a Jew to the Jews) is exactly what we're doing when we use so many different images, or musicals, or whatever.

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