Wood Friday

Good Friday. Before the service, a cross waits in the narthex of the church (next to the windows of shattered stained glass recovered from the church after the fire of 1990). Once the service is finished, it rests on the stripped altar of a darkened church for silent veneration. In between we twice sang these words of Venantius Fortunatus (560?-600?), once in English to the melody of "Pange Lingua" and once in the Latin in a setting attributed to John IV of Portugal (1604-56):

Crux fidelis, inter omnes

arbor una nobilis:

nulla silva talem profert,

fronde, flore, germine.

Dulce lignum, dulces clavos,

dulce pondus sustinet.

Faithful cross, above all other,

One and only noble tree:

None in foliage, none in blossom,

None in fruit thy peer may be.

Sweetest wood and sweetest iron,

Sweetest weight is hung on thee!

Pressing my hand to it after the service I felt the life of the particular tree from which it was cut (strange Hans Christian Andersenian fate to wait in a dark closet all year for one solemn moment of celebration as an instrument of and witness to torture) but also somehow that of its forebear, who bore - after being borne by - Jesus. Many an ancient legend told that this was no ordinary tree but descended from a tree in the Garden of Eden (maybe that with the forbidden fruit), hewn perhaps already for Solomon's Temple or a bridge crossed by the Queen of Sheba on her way to Solomon. But, if any of the story is true, it's far more likely to have been a tree quite like many others, and one that had been conscripted for many a crucifixion before. (One thinks of James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree.)

And the tree? In the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Dream of the Rood," the tree (this one new to the task but cut from the edge of an ordinary forest) tells its story. As a lovely recent essay recounts,

They suffer together, the Warrior and the Cross. It’s a profoundly intimate bond. Both are driven through with cruel nails; they are pinned together, and their bodies mingle sap and sweat, water and blood. Christ bears it all without a word, but in this poem the Cross can give voice to the pain of both, the agony, the fear. Unlike Christ, the Cross has not chosen this death, and the pain is almost too much for it to bear; it is, after all, only an ordinary tree. But it holds firm to its position, as its Lord has commanded, and stands fast until the end. 

When the battle is over and the young warrior dead, the Cross feels Christ’s body being lifted from its arms and carried away for burial. It doesn’t see what happens next, because its part in the story is over. We have to fill in those details for ourselves: the garden, the stone rolled away, the empty tomb. The Cross knows none of this. Its knowledge ends on the evening of Christ’s burial, as the grieving disciples depart, singing a song of mourning, their voices dying away. The Cross itself is buried in a deep pit and forgotten, its purpose completed in the eyes of the executioners. Centuries later, though, it tells us, it was rediscovered [by Constantine's mother Helena, not without antisemitism]; like its Lord, it rose from the grave to be exalted and honored across the world.

But on Good Friday, neither of these resurrections has happened.