The sign by which we are marked as belonging
Ordinary Sunday 32, 10th November, 2002
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
1642 was the year in which civil war broke out in England, with a line up on opposite sides that was partly religious. On one side were a number of Anglicans as well as Presbyterians, Congregationalists and others who were convinced that the Anglicanism of the court and the bench of bishops had at best a misplaced emphasis on ceremonies and elaborate liturgical acts, not on pure doctrine – if it wasn't deeply tainted by doctrinal error. One of the ceremonies in the Anglican rite that was deeply criticised from a variety of different directions was the sign of the cross at baptism. The issues filtered down to the lives and situations of the rank and file. In a parish church at Radwinter on 8 April, at the baptism of a baby girl, one of the congregation, John Traps, confronted the curate "by coming up close and standing in a daring manner by him, told him that he should not have her out of the godmother's arms, nor sign her with the sign of the cross; and to that end flung the cloth over the face of the child, keeping his hand upon it, and saying, 'It is the mark of the Beast'." (Somehow I think he had his symbolism slightly confused here). At Holy Trinity, Colchester, the rector, forced by threats to give up making the sign of the cross in baptism, deftly announced: 'We do not receive this child into the congregation of Christ's flock, neither do we sign it ... in token that it shall hereafter be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified.'
Given that this morning's gospel is the Matthean parable of the wise and foolish virgins, it might seem at first an act of deliberate avoidance to concentrate instead on the sign of the cross. What common ground might there be between the gospel and an action which is performed both in public liturgy and as a matter of private piety? While my purpose is partly to give some teaching that has been asked for from some corners, there is a connection, admittedly of a very basic kind. The parable of this morning's gospel concerns the ultimate end, something we can only speak of in metaphorical language. In the parable, the appearance of the bride – traditionally equated with Jesus – is a point at which some people are identified as belonging to Him, while others are excluded from His presence. Now the link. Despite the passion with which different positions about it have been sincerely held, the Christian world overall has maintained a strong sense of the sign of the cross as a sign of belonging. Major Christian traditions, including our own, have it as a deliberate, significant act in baptism, accompanied by special words; confirmation rites often, though not always, include it.
Behind the words used in quite different traditions at this point, there is a deeper shared view of the meaning – it is the sign by which we are marked as belonging, with the implication (often spelt out in the words) that through Jesus, we are meant to belong to God for ever, as well as being in this world. Great fourth and fifth century preachers like John Chrysostom in Constantinople, Cyril of Jerusalem, or Ambrose in Milan, likened it to other kinds of signs of permanent ownership – the branding of sheep, or the marking (a tattoo?) that was worn or stamped on every imperial soldier to show that he was the emperor's – one or two Roman sculptures even suggest that soldiers were branded on the forehead at times with a St Andrew's cross shaped sign. And sixteen centuries later, when we make the sign, even if it is private devotion, it still has that sense of identification: it is a statement about belonging, one we should feel confident to make as a sign of our ultimate loyalty.
But the Christian communities of the first hundred and fifty years linked the cross very clearly, not just with our identity throughout our lives in this world, but at the end of history, the mark that would distinguish those who were to enjoy the vision of God in eternity. In the Jewish tradition, the prophet Ezekiel had already conceived of God's people as being marked on the forehead with the cross-shaped letter tau, the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet; it was easy for early Christians, such as the writer of Revelation, to think of those who belong to God for ever as likewise marked with a similar sign; but as Christianity enters a Greek world, the X shaped mark of belonging to God from the Jewish world is reinterpreted as the sign of the Anointed, the Christos, whose first letter is the cross-shaped X (Chi). Not only was the Cross thought of as invisibly and mysteriously marked on the foreheads of the faithful, the end of history was thought of as being preceded by the appearance of a cross that would dominate the skyline – the 'sign of the Son of Man in heaven (Mt 24:30)' – and early Christians were certain that it would make its appearance in the east. A piece of early Christian pious fiction (the Acts of Hipparchus and Philotheus) tells us that one of its main figures had in his home 'a well ordered room, on the Eastern wall of which he had painted a cross. There, before the image of the Cross, with his face towards the east, he would pray 7 times a day'. The cross is here to ensure that prayer took place facing east, rather than just facing the cross itself, because of an expectation that the whole Christian experience would be brought to a climax from this direction.
I suspect that if members of all our present major Christian bodies had the capacity to travel back in time in some sort of time machine, they might find the church of the first four centuries a rather disconcerting experience, not justifying any particular stream completely – in some areas being far more Catholic than many reformed Christians would be comfortable with, and in other areas, being more rigid than most today who descend from the Reformation churches. Even pious conservative Catholics would probably feel uncomfortable with the frequency with which Christians by the beginning of the third century used the sign of the cross, if we are to believe contemporary documents from North Africa, and feel something in common with some of their reformed brethren. Prudentius, a poet who wrote just as Christianity became a lawful religion in the empire, writes powerfully of the sign of the cross as a kind of exorcism, of victory over evil (See EH 80).
We are familiar with a codified usage in public liturgy. We make the sign of the cross at the blessing and the absolution as an expression of our appropriation of God's blessing, or the gift of forgiveness and renewal (Yes, me too, we say). At the end of the creed, the sign is made as an assertion that through Christ's saving power, we too will join in the life of the resurrection in the world to come. As the Trinity is invoked, the sign of the cross is made – the sermon declares that complex person, whose name has been invoked over all of us – to proclaim his calling to us, and our response to him. We make the sign over the gifts at the altar, and over the offertory, as we do at baptism, as a declaration of belonging, of setting aside. And we may use the sign as we choose as part of our private devotion.
The Puritans who, among other things, objected to the sign in baptism actually had a valid and important point to make in a general sense – signs and ceremonies do not themselves constitute faith or belief. Signs can be made, ceremonies performed, without understanding or commitment. On the other hand, they rarely took seriously the option of faith and understanding subsisting together with a deliberate and regular use of signs and symbols.
But another point of theirs is one we well understand. Signs and ceremonies could be so piled up one on top of the other as to become a distraction, something in which the primary issues were at risk of being lost. We live in a culture in which people are bombarded with visual symbols of all kinds through the media, whether the TV screen or the internet, to an extent that people, instead of being influenced by symbols and signs designed to manipulate their responses, become indifferent, anaethsetised. Minimalism with symbols and signs, less being more, can have a real point as an alternative to overload.
There are two reasons why sign, symbol and bodily ceremonies have a basic place in our religious practice. The first is the condition in which we find ourselves. In this world, we are not disembodied spirits with a direct line to another dimension; we are our bodies as well as our inner life; our responses to God, if they are to be full ones, include our bodies as well as what is within. Lancelot Andrewes, one of the translating team of the Authorised Version, claimed that we kneel to say some of our prayers, because God 'will not have humans worship him like elephants, as if they have no joints in their knees'. (Wrong, Bishop Andrewes, in detail – you can't have looked at the elephant in the Tower of London Zoo too carefully – but right in general principle, that there is a place for the posture of the whole person and expression through the body.) More accurately, he wrote that worship was not all just inward, 'with our hearts and not our hats'. Symbols and outward ceremonies are part of a holistic view of what we are. Our outward gestures are part of us, not totally divorced, though the relationship can be quite complex.
Lastly, while there needs to be understanding and deliberation behind our bodily acts, our signs and ceremonies, including the sign of the cross, there is a dimension of us that is deeper than our consciousness, that is also responsive to God and from which responses well up – and the body, in one way or another, becomes their outlet and means of expression. I can give a historical explanation in some detail of the origins of the ceremonies at the altar such as the censing at the introit and the offertory, those slow circular dances. But by and large, I don't have those origins in mind as I take part. They express in all their oddness, inadequacy, cultural and historical conditioning, something we have to express, and which it is to our peril NOT to express – that we have been created by God to worship and respond with the whole of our beings. If we didn't have those particular actions, sanctified by history, time and association, we would have evolved others that would still essentially express our calling to be worshipping, responding lives, souls and bodies. Those who are familiar with Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited will recall that at the end of his erratic and wilful life, Lord Marchmain is unable to make any verbal communication in his last hours. Having alienated himself from family, and in addition, by living abroad, from the society he has formerly known, and thirdly, from the church through his marital status, he gives one sign that expresses the cancellation of his defiance of all these things and at the same time, expresses something more from deep within – the sign of the cross. We can ask of his action – is it just a ceremonial act, a taught response to a formula? Is it a deliberate conscious acknowledgement? Or possibly both these things, as well as the expression of something deeper beyond consciousness, welling up from within? If we ask that question of ourselves, I suspect that the answer will not be just one of these alternatives, but possibly all three, as I imagine Waugh intended us to conclude in the case of Marchmain.
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