Warning – Contains Cruelty to Religious Images

 I killed a crucifix today.

It isn’t that I am anti-crucifix, or anti-religious images generally.  I don’t venerate them, as though images of the sacred were themselves part of God (except to the extent that God is everywhere), but if they help people in praying, I’ve got nothing against that.

This crucifix, however, wasn’t calculated to inspire devotion to Jesus’s love, or grief at his suffering, or anything much else.  It was a tiny, battered old pendant which PDB11 and I found in a box of bits and pieces of costume jewellery.  Its face and features were worn away to nothing, if it had ever had any.

 On the other hand – well, it was a symbol of something important: a reminder that Jesus loved us enough to die to save us.  We didn’t particularly want to keep it, but letting it be melted down as scrap metal seemed disrespectful.  PDB11 suggested that it might be best to cremate it on the Easter bonfire.  That way, a depiction of death died as we celebrated Jesus’s victory over death.

Christians vary widely in their views on religious imagery.  One book I read argued that the Bible’s commandment against idolatry means that not only paintings or sculptures of Jesus, but even mental images of God (for example, thinking of Him as a father or as a shepherd) are idolatrous and should be avoided.

To me, this is neither Biblical nor logical.  The Bible, particularly Jesus’s parables, is full of figurative language comparing God to all kinds of things and people.  Since the reality of God must be more complex than anything the human brain can understand fully, analogies drawn from human experience are an attempt to help us understand a little of some things about God.  The important thing is to remember that they are only metaphors – and to think about which aspects of them we are supposed to take to apply to God. 

Of course, most mainstream Christians believe that Jesus is literally God born in human form.  So it looks as though the simplest answer should be to say: ‘Never mind the metaphors; look at Jesus himself.  He is the one who shows us what God is really like.’

The problem is that we can’t.  We can read what the Bible reports of his sayings and actions, but we can only guess what tone of voice he was speaking in, and which bits of what he said he intended to be taken literally.  We fill in our interpretation depending on what preconceived ideas of Jesus we already have.  It is as if the Bible gives us a line drawing which we colour in for ourselves.

Sensible people take their cue from the way people responded to Jesus, and conclude, ‘Of course Peter knew Jesus didn’t literally see him as the devil, or he wouldn’t have gone on being friends with Jesus.  Of course the Canaanite woman who asked Jesus to heal her daughter knew that he didn’t really despise Gentiles as vermin, or she wouldn’t have bothered arguing with him.’

I, unfortunately, am not very sensible, so I base my idea of Jesus on the most extreme interpretation possible of the harshest things the Bible records him as having said.  From this I conclude that he condemns all humans as evil and wants us to hate ourselves and those who love us, and to love only our enemies.

The trouble is that when I assume this, everything else the Bible says about Jesus fails to make sense.  Even the best-known stories, like Jesus, as he was dying, asking his mother and his friend John to take care of each other, leave me asking, ‘Why would he bother?  Didn’t he hate his mother?  He commanded his disciples to hate their families!’

So when my prejudices about Jesus get in the way of any chance of actually understanding Jesus, I need to put them to death.  I decided to use the crucifix as a symbol of that, attaching it to a note about the ideas I wanted to discard: ‘Jesus, most of the assumptions I have about you are the opposite of what the gospel teaches: I picture you as cruel, prejudiced, condemning, hate-filled and death-dealing.  I want to kill off these ideas and trust in the love of Jesus the saviour.  Amen.’  Then I would burn them on the bonfire.

And yet – I felt reluctant.  Not because I wanted to go on believing things I knew weren’t true, but because it felt like an empty promise.  I suspect that my old anxieties will still come back, and that sometimes, especially when I’m tired or depressed, or in the middle of the night, they will feel true.  I am like an addict who keeps on vowing to give up drugs or alcohol, and keeps coming back to them. 

I have conditioned myself to associate Jesus with hatred and condemnation, and it takes time and practice to retrain myself to feel differently. When I play Easter hymns, sometimes I cry because I am convinced that the hymn-writers got it wrong and Jesus didn’t really come to save everyone.  But other times, I rejoice at the thought that he did.

At any rate, it was time for the Easter service.  We lit the bonfire, and it quickly blazed up.  While we sang hymns, listened to a sermon, and repeated afresh the vows we made when baptised, the fire burned on, reducing all the rubbish on it (including my worries) to ash.

As the fire burned down, we lit candles from it.  The roaring, destructive fire of the bonfire gave way to tentative flames symbolising faith.  They flickered uneasily in the brisk wind of a spring morning, and needed shielding to protect them from the worst buffeting.

Even with our service sheets to protect them, many of them soon blew out.

It didn’t matter.  A candle can always be re-lit.