Ignoring the Cross?

Yesterday, the Easter service we attended featured a drama involving a family gathering for Easter dinner. All the usual prepartory activities were there -- setting the table, decorating eggs, worrying about visitors, busying about the meal preparation. Everything was normal, in the ditsy idiosyncratic way that many families are normal. And everyone was carrying on as normal studiously ignoring the fact that a huge cross had crashed through the roof and lay splayed across the dining room and the dinner table.

In the closing chapter of A Sacred Sorrow, Michael Card writes:

At every major turning point of His ministry, Jesus pours out His heart in lament -- when He enters Jerusalem for the last time, when He experiences his final meal with the disciples, when He struggles with the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane, and most importantly, when He endures the suffering of thhe cross. Jesus understood the honesty represented in the life that knows how to lament. His life reveals that those who are truly intimate with the Father know they can pour out any hurt, disappointment, temptation, or even anger with which they struggle. Jesus spoke fluently the lost language of lament.

Each time we refuse Him entrance to our holy place, every time we doggedly deny our sacred right of lament, we tell the world in effect that the cross has nothing to do with us. Without realizing it, we plug our ears so as not to hear Him lamenting for us to God, "Why have you forsaken me?" The "You" might then not be capitalized, refering to us, who have forsaken Jesus by our own inability to listen. (emphasis added)

Just how much have we in our churches been ignoring the cross, even though it intrudes time and time again into our lives like a thunderclap? Do we not ignore the cross when we instruct our people to leave all their troubles and laments outside the church door? Do we not ignore the cross when the church doors are guarded by "greeters" who shake hands and inquire, "Hi, how are you?" even while looking past us to the next person in line, seemingly not interested in our pain, but just in ensuring that only those who can put on a "happy face" are allowed in? Do we not ignore the cross when year after year we put on happy clappy Good Friday services that refuse to enter into Jesus' own sorrow and suffering and agonize with Him "for even one hour"?

Perhaps there is a reason that the cross in our churches has become such a beautifully polished piece, tastefully lighted and gilt inlaid. Maybe it isn't because the cross is central to our faith at all, but rather because it helps us ignore the cross, turning it into just a beautiful, abstract, metaphysical symbol of a rosy, over-realized eschatology, that has no real power to address the real hard core realities of our often painful day to day existence.

If that is so, no doubt Jesus does cry out again, "Why have you forsaken me?"