The apse mosaic of the 12th century church of San Clemente in Rome depicts a magnificent crucifix. But what appears most striking—and what mystified the English apologist G.K. Chesterton on his first visit to Rome—is the hand of God above the crucifix. “The hand of God,” Chesterton wrote, “seems to take the Cross as if by its hilt and thrust it like a sword into the earth below.” What Chesterton sensed pertains to a central mystery of the Christian faith: God goes to battle with sin and death by means of his most powerful weapon, which is the Cross.
In many ways, weapons portend strength and stability. The bellicose countries of the world regularly showcase their armaments as harbingers of national victory. China, North Korea, and Russia consistently hold military parades. A recent exposé by the New York Times on the allegedly diminishing stockpile of U.S. munitions infuriated the Pentagon so heatedly, that the President accused the editors of treason. National landmarks often display canons or even tanks as an ode to the valiant battles fought for freedom. But in this era of increased military campaigns, intercontinental disputes, and, most shockingly, warnings of world catastrophe by rogue artificial intelligence, the Church offers a different response to life’s most confounding crises.
In a terrified world, the Church recalls God’s most powerful weapon, which has already struck a fatal blow. Beneath these outward conflicts lies an older war: the division within man himself, estranged from his true homeland and held under the yoke of sin and death. From his Cross, Christ battled the devil and crushed his head through the obedience and love he offered to the Father. God’s weapon—the oblation of sacrificial love given by Jesus—is the strength and stability for which our world yearns, and which it so desperately needs. The Carthusian monks have understood something of this since the eleventh century. Their ancient motto expresses it succinctly: Stat crux dum volvitur orbis—The Cross stands while the world turns. A world without the Cross envelops man in endless caprice, searching for something to fill him, and yet enmeshed in conflict when nothing in this world can or does. But the Cross gives meaning to man’s seemingly endless struggle with drudgery. It centers man, and, if he properly receives it, becomes his way home. True peace arrives when man lives by the Cross. He becomes his fullest self, confoundingly, when he divests himself of himself—when he leaves enough room for the other. The weapon of God, wielded in love and truth, yields harmony in a world desperate for stability. Indeed, when Chesterton contemplated the crucifix in the apse of San Clemente, he recognized the paradox of this strange weapon of God: “its touch,” he wrote, “is not death but life, life springing and sporting and shooting into the air, that the world may have life, and that it may have it more abundantly!”
