This icon of the Crucifixion focuses on the hours that Christ hung on the Cross, with all the pain, grief, and suffering the event entailed. The faces of Mary, his mother, and John, known as the “disciple whom Jesus loved,” are downcast and weeping. Despair is evident. A soldier mocks. Blood and water flow from Christ’s pierced side.
And yet, the grief and violence as depicted by the iconographer are gentle, fluid, and softened. The city of Jerusalem in the background is curved; the arms of Christ are also curved, open to all the world in a living gesture of invitation and unification. In this brutal, unjust event, the cosmos is given a new path, and even the angels bow in silence to the mystery of the Cross.
Every year, the Christian Church prepares to honor Christ’s death and resurrection with a forty-day fast known as Great Lent. Saint Maximus the Confessor says, “All visible realities need the cross, that is, the state in which they are cut off from things acting upon them through the senses.”* The Church understands that people need a method to reawaken and recognize their own soul: the communal fasting and repentance of Great Lent prepare believers to encounter and embrace the Crucifixion deeply within their own selves. In so doing, the cross, an instrument of torture, is transfigured into the Tree of Life. This paradox can be experienced in the icon’s repeating colors and shapes. The red raspberry of the angel’s robe is the same color as the disciple John’s robe; Christ’s vertical cross is echoed in and juxtaposed against the off-kilter architectural background and the jagged dark cave below. The odd shape in the cave represents a skull, identifying the place as Golgotha, the “place of the skull,” where non-canonical sources locate Adam’s grave. Here is the nexus of the paradox: the first Adam, whose disobedience denied humanity access to the Garden of Eden’s Tree of Life, lies in the dark earth below while the second Adam, Christ, hangs upon a green and life-giving “tree,” the cross. The first Adam, in his life, brought death into the world. This second Adam, in his death, offers life. We see that the power of the self-emptying Cross reaches to all creatures and all dimensions.
“By Thy Passion, Thou givest dispassion to all, O Lover of Mankind. Having mortified the passions of my flesh by Thy Divine Cross, enable me also to behold Thy Holy Resurrection. O Lord, Thou hast willed to be crucified upon the place of the skull, O Holy Immortal One, granting immortality and transfiguring humanity.”
From the Iconwriters Daily Prayer (Whitney Point, NY: Prosopon School of Iconology, 2002), 23–24.