An Easter like no other

Crystal Cross (Bergeron Image)

The cross depicted in the photo that accompanies this post sits on the meeting rail of a window before my writing desk.  It has rested there undisturbed for years, catching the rays of the sun as it rises above the eastern edge of the Second Watchung ridgeline in Bridgewater.

Each day, the morning light of the eastern sky casts a different hue on it, reflecting nature’s mood on any particular day.  In July, 2011, when I composed this shot, the sun beamed brightly upon it, framing it against a cloudlessly blue sky.  It left a penetrating burst of white light near the crystal crossbeam.

Sounds so serene and almost poetic, doesn’t it?  But there is a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree difference in meaning between a wooden crucifix and an innocent looking crystal cross – the former bears the body of Jesus crucified, while the other brings the hope of a Jesus resurrected:  Body gone.  Memory alive forever.

That wooden cross which stood on the hill of Golgotha centuries ago carried the body of Jesus nailed to its crossbar by the Romans, cast in the role of a common criminal, and left there to suffocate to death.

 

The penalty of crucifixion was so savagely brutal and tortuously slow that it was reserved only for non-Romans living within the Empire.  It was administered to people who dared to step out-of-line, or who were deemed to have breached or challenged the authoritarian rule of Rome.

Emperors had their own definition of torture and were not squeamish about it.

In the title of this post, I wrote that this year heralds “An Easter like to other.”  And so it is. 

 

Because today, as in the first three centuries of Christianity under Roman rule, when the savage killings and executions of Christians continued unabated until the Roman Emperor Constantine finally put an end to it, another similarly brutal attempt to obliterate the presence of all Christians in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe has raised its ugly head in this, the 21^st century – Islamist jihad.

The crystal cross of light and hope still stands on my window rail, but there is no such possibility of hope and light for the tens of thousands of Christians and those of other denominations who have been herded out of their own nations, brutalized, and massacred in the most vicious of ways by a Jihadist enemy determined to obliterate them all.

I find it difficult not to pose the following question to all right-thinking people today:  Where is the Constantine of the 21^st century?