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 During
the reign of Constantine, first Roman Emperor to profess the Christian
faith, his mother Helena went to Israel and there undertook to find the
places especially significant to Christians. (She was helped in this by the
fact that in their destructions around 135, the Romans had built pagan
shrines over many of these sites.) Having located, close together, what she
believed to be the sites of the Crucifixion and of the Burial (at locations
that modern archaeologists think may be correct), she then had built over
them the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was dedicated on 14 September
335. It has become a day for recognizing the Cross (in a festal atmosphere
that would be inappropriate on Good Friday) as a symbol of triumph, as a
sign of Christ's victory over death, and a reminder of His promise, "And
when I am lifted up, I will draw all men unto me." (John 12:32)
Tertullian, in his De Corona (3:2), written around AD 211, says that
Christians seldom do anything significant without making the sign of the
cross. Certainly by his time the practice was well established. Justin
Martyr, in chapters 55 and 60 of his First Apology (Defence of the Christian
Faith, addressed to the Emperor Antoninus Pius and therefore written between
148 and 155 AD), refers to the cross as a standard Christian symbol, but not
explicitly to tracing the sign of the cross as a devotional gesture. In the
ruins of Pompeii (destroyed 79 AD), there is a room with an altar-like
structure against one wall, and over the altar the appearance of the plaster
shows that a cross-shaped object had been nailed to the wall, and forcibly
pulled loose, apparently shortly before the volcano buried the city. It is
suggested that this house may have belonged to a Christian family, and that
they took the cross and other objects of value to them when they fled the
city. This is not the only possible explanation, but I do not know of a
likelier one.
The Christian custom of tracing the sign of the cross on persons and things
as a sign of blessing is very old. Some think that it goes back to the very
origins of Christianity and earlier. In Ezekiel 9, we read that Ezekiel had
a vision of the throne-room of God, in which an angel was sent to go through
Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of the faithful few who mourned
for the sins of the city. Afterwards, other angels were sent through the
city to destroy all those who had not the mark. We find similar visionary
material in Revelation 7:2-4; 9:4; 14:1, where the mark on the forehead
again protects the faithful few in the day of wrath, and it is said to be
the name of the Lamb and of His Father. Now, the Hebrew word used for "mark"
in Ezekiel is TAU, which is the also the name of the last letter of the
Hebrew alphabet (the ancestor of the Greek letter TAU and our letter T), and
it refers to a mark like an X or a +, two short lines crossing at right
angles. When the Essenes (the Dead Sea Scrolls people) received converts
into their community, they baptized them and then signed them on their
foreheads with a TAU, in token that they were part of the faithful remnant
who mourned the sins of Israel, and that they would be spared in the day of
God's wrath. It seems probable that John the Baptist and his followers were
in some measure influenced by the Essenes, and they had certainly read
Ezekiel. Accordingly, the tracing of a TAU on the forehead may have been a
part of John's method of baptism, and may have been adopted by the earliest
Christians. (We remember that some of the Twelve disciples had previously
been disciples of John the Baptist -- see John 1:35-37,40.) Very possibly
they began by tracing the TAU without asking what it meant -- it was simply
a mark, the mark mentioned by Ezekiel. Later, they may have identified it
with the Name of God. The Essenes, in some of their documents, used four
dots in place of the four letters of the Name of God, and sometimes arranged
them in a square. It would be easy to interpret the four ends of the TAU as
representing the four letters of the Name of God. Later, Christians,
especially Greek-speaking Christians, might interpret the sign as a CHI, an
X-shaped letter, the first letter of the word XPICTOC, or Christos, meaning
the Annointed One, the Messiah, the Christ. Again, Christians might
understand it to be the sign of the Cross of Christ, and it is this
interpretation that has prevailed. Today, in many Christian churches, when
someone is baptized, the baptizer afterwards traces the sign of the cross on
the forehead of the newly baptized person. Often, some of the water that has
been used for baptism is saved and placed in small bowls near the entrance
to the church. Worshippers entering the church touch the surface of the
water and then cross themselves as a way of reaffirming their baptismal
covenant. (A few years ago, a Jewish friend asked me, "May I go to the
Easter Midnight service with you?" I said: "Certainly, if you like. However,
I must warn you that there will be baptisms, and that afterwards the priest
will take a bowl of baptismal water and a sprig of hyssop, and walk up and
down the aisle sprinkling the congregation with the water, and if a single
drop touches you, you will instantly turn into a goy." He answered, "I will
bring an umbrella and open it at the appropriate time.") As we have seen,
the practice of using the sign of the cross in connection with Baptism may
very well go back to the Apostles themselves, and back before them into
their Essene and other Jewish roots, having its origin in the vision of
Ezekiel. In fact, the concept may go back further than that. We read in
Genesis 4 that, when Cain had killed his brother and was sent into exile,
God set a mark (TAU) on Cain, so that no one would slay him. Thus, from the
start, the Sign of the Cross has been the protection of the penitent and
justified sinner.
Italian Reliquary for the Holy CrossWhat is the significance of the sign of
the cross? Well, in the first place, we often place our initials or other
personal mark on something to show that it belongs to us. The Cross is the
personal mark of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and we mark it on ourselves as a
sign that we belong to Him, just as in the book of Revelation, as noted
above, the servants of God are sealed or marked on their foreheads as a sign
that they are His.
Again, as one preacher has said, if you were telling someone how to make a
cross, you might say (at least to an English speaker), "Draw an I and then
cross it out." As we make the sign, we first draw a vertical stroke, as if
to say to God, "Lord, here am I." Then we cancel it with a horizontal
stroke, as if to say, "Help me, Lord, to abandon my self-centeredness and
self-will, and to make you the center of my life instead. Fix all my
attention and all my desire on you, Lord, that I may forget my self, cancel
my self, abandon myself completely to your love and service."
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