Thank you and welcome for visiting our Church website. I hope you can find something to interest you here this week. If you would like to contribute anything to the site please let me have it. Book and record reviews, Hymn requests, prayers, stories and photographs would all be gratefully received.
If you need a visit from the Church or you have anyone or anything you need mentioning during next Sundays prayers then please let me know.

God Bless. John.

Sunday Club picnic. Full story on the Club page.

A Prayer for this week.

Choosing God,
you chose to give up everything
and make yourself tiny and vulnerable.
You chose to challenge injustice
and overturn the tables in the Temple.
You chose to heal and to comfort,
and to cry over the city of Jerusalem.
You chose to feast and to celebrate
to share bread and wine.
You chose to follow a path
that led to the foot of a cross.
You chose women to witness
the dawning of an Easter morning.

Guide us in the decisions we make,
both bold and life-changing,
and small and everyday.
Help us to choose life for ourselves,
for those around us, for humanity and for the earth. Amen.

A Meditation Moment.

The most ubiquitous symbol of Christianity is the cross. It is almost the trademark of Christianity. It is to be found around people's necks, on the top of their buildings and on the flags of nations. Images of Christ on the cross are a major theme in Christian art. But it wasn't always so. The history of the depiction of the cross in the Church reflects how it was viewed by the faithful of their age.

As a symbol of torture and execution it is not surprising that early Christians did not naturally choose the cross as their symbol. (It would be surprising if, in this modern age, a hangman's noose or an electric chair would be chosen as a symbol to represent even one person who died that way.) For the early Christians, what was important about Jesus was his victory over death and the life that he brought.

The cross only began to appear in Christian art when crucifixion ceased to be a common form of capital punishment in the Roman Empire. The symbol can be found in fourth-century art and was given an enormous boost when Constantine became emperor in 312.

On his journey from York to Rome to claim the empire, his most decisive battle was at the Milvian bridge. The night before the battle he is said to have seen a vision of the cross and been told that in this sign he would conquer. The particular cross he chose was the ankh, a cross sacred to both Christians and the followers of Mithras. Perhaps he was hedging his bets, since there were more followers of Mithras in the Roman army than there were Christians. Whatever his motives, Constantine's victory marked a new era for the Church in the Roman Empire – the previously banned religion became the official religion of the empire within the century.

Constantine's mother, Helen, staked her place in the history of the cross when she found what was believed to be the cross on which Christ died in Jerusalem. All this added to the importance of the cross as a Christian symbol, which grew from then on to become the central symbol of the faith.
From the fifth century there are examples of crosses on which a figure of Christ is attached by four nails (rather than the three which would later become the standard in the West). Christ on these crosses is a serene figure, the victor over death.

It is not until the twelfth century and the time of the Black Death (that wiped out a third of the population of Europe) that we begin to find images of the cross on which Christ is suffering. It is easy to see this suffering Christ as the Church's answer to the appalling events that swept through, largely Christian, Europe. Where was God in all this? The answer was that he was suffering with his people on the cross.

Christians have used this most adaptable symbol of their faith in many different ways through the centuries. The history of its adaptation is far from over. In these gentler times, it is not surprising that images of the glorified Lord begin to be found once again on our crosses. And it is not surprising that the simple form of the cross should find uses in places where the worship of Christ is not found.

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John Hewitt
ampmjonny@aol.com
01463 871930

This site was last updated on Monday 30th August 2010.