On 4 November 1966 Florence, Italy suffered one of its devastating floods — I say ‘one’ because the city has been prone to flooding throughout its history. In this particular case, a low-pressure system had stalled over Italy for six weeks and on 3 November it began to rain… again. In twenty-four hours nearly 19 inches of rain fell on the already-sodden city. (Residents of CT, MA and RI can commiserate.)
At the height of the flooding, water moved at the rate of forty miles per hour at the height of twenty-four feet. At 7.26 a.m., all of Florence’s civic clocks stopped. The resulting 600.000 tons of sludge, muck, oil, sewage and debris, represented in 12 feet of mud, covered the precious art works of the famed city.
A fairly unknown, hitherto ignored piece of art, the 13th-century Cimabue’s Crocifisso, was one of the many victims. The cross hung high in a refectory of the monastery of Santa Croce. One of the priests of the order went into the monastery and saw the ‘Cimbue Crucifix, looming over the waters of the refectory like the creator spirit. Or rather like God reduced to shreds. It was… “in tatters, the flesh ripped off up to the face,” Christ crucified and then drowned.’ (1) Since none of the witnesses are still alive, no one knows really what happened — was the cross attached to the wall or found floating face down in the murky lagoon that now was the refectory? Most say it was still hanging and the moisture was causing the paint to flake off into the murk.
I remember seeing photos of that heavily damaged cross and then watching the progress of its restoration in reports in Life magazine. Somehow, the damage struck me even as a nine year-old. I can’t explain to you why it had that impact on me but it did. More than forty years later, I think one of the visceral reactions I had was that of the restorers taking the cross down from the wall, taking Christ’s body from where it hung and putting it into a tomb of sorts, the place where it would be restored.
Robert Clark in Dark Water, writes: When the restorers saw the cross, attached to the wall with corroded metal, they realised ‘the cross would have to be cut down like a tree.’ The ‘deposition’ ‘took fifteen men and yards of rope to bring the Crocifisso down. Sodden, it weighed over a thousand pounds)…. Cimabue had milled and joined the four-inch thick planks of poplar to be strong, but no one knew how strong….’ They were afraid the cross would collapse under its weight. Life magazine’s David ‘Lees photographed the straining, grimacing men bearing the weight of the cross — itself bearing the weight of the world, Francis would have said — as a fury of labor, of suffering posed against suffering.’ (2)
Perhaps it was the first time that nine-year old had thought about Christ’s death. It was a real-life event, enacted by living people. The cross was no longer an abstract thing but a central element of her Christian faith, even as only a nine-year old can articulate it. How much more understanding thereof has come over the decades? How much has your understanding of the cross increased over time?
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The crucifixion has long captured the attention of artists — trying to render visually what it means to worship a tortured man. However, it was not actually until the fifth century, a century after the Roman state had discontinued the practise of crucifixion and no one living had witnessed such a horror, that Christians had sufficiently forgotten the shame and horror of it to begin to make pictures of it. By the time they started making pictures, many of the gruesome details of crucifixion had been forgotten and, instead, Christ was depicted as already resurrected. Still, artists over time have struggled to portray an event that is so hard to grasp. But no matter how hard they and we try, how do we enter into the ‘night of the absolute’ (Kierkegaard)?
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Every year, Good Friday forces us to confront the question about suffering. A servant suffers on behalf of others. A psalmist despairs of being utterly and inexplicably abandoned by God. Jesus is crucified and buried. Such are the lessons for to-day, but underlying all of them is this one question:
Why was it necessary for Christ to suffer on the cross and die in the first place?
Kenneth Leech author of We Preach Christ Crucified, believes that proclamation of the crucified God, the suffering God, is essential to our belief and existence. The cross often speaks to people, even soothes them, and transforms them because they find in the crucified Christ a source of hope. Perhaps that hope comes from an interior knowledge that healing of pain is a process within the heart of God. ‘There must have been a Calvary in the heart of God before it was planted on the hill of Golgotha.’ Indeed, God could have only suffered on the cross because God was already that sort of God, a passionate, suffering God. (3)
The South African theologian, Manas Buthelezi states, ‘Oppressive suffering does not belong to the category of the suffering of Christ on the cross. Christ’s suffering on the cross was redemptive. It was for the sake of others beyond the self. It was suffering which was occasioned by love and the circumstances of the other.… On the cross God transformed the experience of suffering at the hands of unprovoked violence, vengeance and death into a vehicle of divine love and restoration to new life. […]
‘It is a misunderstanding to associate the sufferings of Christ only with Good Friday. His whole life was a life of suffering and bearing other people’s burdens. To care about other people’s problems in addition to your own can be a heavy burden indeed. To care only about yourself and your problems can make life very simple. But once you allow other people’s problems to worry you and to create an impact upon your life, then you end up suffering with them. That is redemptive suffering. When you allow even your own suffering to become a window through which you gain access to the suffering of others, that is vicarious living. This is the meaning of the cross. This is to take up one’s cross and follow Christ.’ (4)
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Suffering with others, walking with others bearing their burdens, understanding that God suffers, too, that the cross was God’s ultimate suffering — not that God chose to kill God’s only son — those are some of the messages of Good Friday.
We dare to come close to these truths because deep inside, we yearn to know that the cross is not the end of our story any more than the empty grave is. Even as this Good Friday liturgy moves us closer and closer to the grave, we have reminders of hope. And, so, as we come close to the cross, we also come close to that hope — God’s expression of love for us, God’s reconciliation, God’s mercy.
As we come nearer to Jesus’ cross and what it means as an expression of life-giving forgiveness and love, let us become free in this cross, in this dying and in this love. May we find in the cross not an end but a beginning, not something evil but something graceful. May we find there our brother, Jesus, who came to be amongst us, lived with us and died for us.
For on this day called Good, the cross is not the last word. The resurrection is. Even as we face the bleakness of this day, a day when things may be murky as those flood waters in Florence once were, may we hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering.
End Notes
1 Robert Clark, Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces (NY: Doubleday, 2008), 158-59.
2 Ibid., 169.
(3) Kenneth Leech, We Preach Christ Crucified (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1994), 27.
(4) Manas Buthelezi, ‘Violence and the Cross in South Africa Today,’ Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, no 29, December 1979, 51ff. Cited in John de Gtuchy, Cry Justice! (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986), 204, 206.

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