Reading Mother Teresa--The Cross and the Crucifix

 

To this you were called, 

because Christ suffered for you, 

leaving you an example, 

you should follow in his steps. 1 Peter 2:21 

A handsome crucifix hangs on the wall just behind me, traditionally a Roman Catholic icon in that it includes, in molded pewter, the image of a suffering Jesus. I like it.

My sister gave it to me after it was given to her from one of the old folks she once visited weekly, a Roman Catholic woman who had an apartment full of traditional iconography, a woman who thought it would be nice if my sister had this one from her collection.

To refuse the gift would have been shameful, she said, so she took it; but she had some trouble knowing exactly what to do with it because she was convinced that it really wasn’t, well, for her, a lifelong Protestant. There’s nothing unbiblical about a suffering Jesus hanging from the cross, but somehow she had the uncomfortable feeling that a crucifix wasn’t exactly a part of her faith tradition. We worship a risen savior, she might have said – the doctrinal answer for why Protestants prefer a cross to a crucifix.

It’s not small, and somehow, understandably, its presence made her uncomfortable.

She thought about tossing it, she said, but she simply couldn’t. How do you drop a crucifix in a garbage can with banana peels and apple cores? An old flag you fold and give to the Boy Scouts. What on earth does someone do with a crucifix?

As an act of mercy, I told her I’d take it off her hands, and now it’s here up on my wall, even though it’s fair to say I’ve spent a good deal more time in Calvin’s Institutes than my sister has or cares to.

Christ’s suffering, celebrated here with my crucifix, isn’t a pleasant thought, nor should it be. If he hadn’t suffered, if he hadn’t been nailed to that cross, his side sliced open, if he hadn’t died there, in mockery – if all of that hadn’t gone on, he could not have buried our sins with him nor, come Sunday morn, could he have stepped from behind that monster stone as if it were a paper weight. Had he not died, he could not have risen triumphant.

I must admit that Mother Teresa’s desire to suffer – desire is the right word, by the way – is, at least to me, difficult for me both as a human being, and as a Protestant believer. For a time, when her new life in a sari on Calcutta’s streets began, she wondered aloud and to her superiors whether she was actually suffering enough.

“I want to become a real slave of Our Lady [Mary, the mother of Jesus] – to drink only from His chalice of pain and to give Mother Church real saints,” she once wrote to the archbishop (141); and then this: “. . . there is one part still left and that is that I would have to suffer much. – In spite of everything that has happened . . . there has always been perfect peace & joy in my heart” (142). For that she feels the strange need to repent.

Traditionally, I think, that true desire to suffer – actual physical suffering, self-denial – is far more a staple of Roman Catholic piety than it is a part of the Protestant Christian life. And it’s here, above me, in the crucifix. This isn’t an empty cross.

Am I envious of Mother Teresa’s penchant for suffering? Maybe. How can a Christian not be envious of her, really, of the way she envisioned her world and reality of Jesus Christ, the word made flesh.

I’m envious, even if somewhat uncomfortable.

Maybe that’s why that crucifix will stay with this old Calvinist wherever he goes.