My fear of the cross

As a child I was afraid of the cross. Crosses with Jesus’ bloody body terrified me, but even the empty ones I saw in my father’s Lutheran church gave me shivers.

My father was a liberal Protestant, but my grandfather, who was also a minister, held a more traditional view of atonement theology. He believed that all the world’s sinful souls were responsible for Jesus’ suffering. In Sunday school I colored in Jesus’ crown of thorns, brown for brambles and red for dripping blood. On the wall of my bedroom hung a small white cross that glowed purple at night, reminding me—even in the sanctuary of my bed—that I had contributed to an innocent man’s murder. In one particularly scary sermon, my grandfather held up his pectoral cross and said it might as well be an electric chair.

In my teenage years I questioned, along with everything else, my grandfather’s interpretation of the cross. A neighbor who I’d watched fight cancer and lose had obviously suffered as much, if not more, than Jesus. And what about my classmate who’d been raped and murdered, left in the woods to die? Everyday people suffered as much as Jesus.