In Solitude and Dialogue: Contemporary Franciscans Theologize

The Cross and Death of Jesus: A Franciscan Interpretation

155 The Cross and Death of Jesus: A Franciscan Interpretation Xavier John Seubert, O.F.M. Introduction As you leave the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, on the right hand side of the exit is the Giotto fresco of St. Francis preaching to the birds. Shortly before that on the side wall is the fresco of his receiving the stigmata—the wounds of the crucified Jesus.1 These diverse images are fully understandable only when they are read together. The one without the other respectively produces either a sentimental portrait of a nature mystic or an inhumanity obsessed with penance and death. Taken together, however, they announce an insight that seems to have guided the life of Francis: to be at the center of life—every life—one must be at the center of death. One must be in the death of Jesus and this will not be complete until one is in one’s own death.2 Francis’s obvious instinct for the goodness and beauty of life does not seem to have been able to be realized without his cultivation of the pattern of death. Why is this? In a recent work by Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies and the Levant,3 the author traces the transition in the West from imaging the crucified Christ as triumphans (victorious) to picturing him as patiens (suffering). She attributes this transition to developments in the Franciscan Order, which were based on Francis’s emphasis on the cross of Christ and on the way of life he evolved as a result of that emphasis. Both of these were seen to be affirmed by Francis’s receiving the 1 See Giuseppe Basile, Giotto: Le Storie Francescane (Milan: Electa, 1996), 11415 . 2 With the aid of apocalyptic imagery in his Legenda maior, Bonaventure advances this emphasis in Francis’s life. See Richard Emmerson and Ronald Herzman, “The Legenda Maior: Bonaventure’s Apocalyptic Francis” in The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 36-75. 3 Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy (Cambridge: University Press, 1996). 156 Xavier J. Seubert, O.F.M. stigmata—his body being sealed, as it were, with the marks of Christ. He was the alter Christus and the Order was intent on programmatically preserving this recognition in art and writing. Like the Christus Patiens, the new images attest to a willingness to depict Christ’s’ humanity with an unsparing directness . In so doing the painters appear to follow the instructions that would be issued later in the century by the author of the Meditationes: “Turn your eyes away from His divinity for a little while and consider Him purely as a man.” At times the new images that depict Christ “purely as a man” depart so sharply from the versions sanctioned earlier that they must have shocked the first viewers with their immediacy.4 The Christus triumphans, when it was an image of the crucified Jesus, depicted Jesus on the cross, but in the power of the resurrection—beyond death, suffering, vulnerability. This is a Jesus who has conquered death, the only sign of which is the shape of the cross. He is otherwise vibrant with resurrection life. The Christus patiens also depicts Jesus on the cross, but in the very midst of the pain and humiliation of the death struggle. The programmatic development of this image of Jesus in the West is Franciscan, as Derbes stunningly demonstrates. But the question must be asked: What is the point? And more specifically: What is the theological point? Is not the concentration on the Christus patiens a maudlin regression in Western piety? The victory over death has been accomplished. Why concentrate on the pain of death rather than rejoice in the victory? Francis certainly does not deny the victory, nor does he deny the divinity of Jesus. Derbes indicates the motive in the previously quoted passage: “to depict Christ’s humanity with unsparing directness.” Jesus’ humanity is his irrevocable connection to us and is our access to redemptive transformation. To depict that humanity with unsparing directness opens for us the dynamics of how and where we are connected to resurrection life. The cross and death of Jesus mark the threshold of the crossing of Godlife with our own. In 4 Derbes, 158-9. The Cross and Death of Jesus 157 the cross is inscribed...