The Inukshuk of God

Why does the Christian cross have “icon-power”? Why does it automatically attract the gaze of the eyes to the place where it is displayed?

One explanation proposes that, as an instrument of execution, the cross emanates horror and danger. It taps into the elemental drive of fear in the human psyche, evoking the same primal fascination as a death’s head hidden among the ice cubes of a vodka advertisement. Dangling miniature nooses from one’s ears or mounting a giant electric chair on the side of a place of worship would simply be less subtle versions of the same procedure.

This explanation makes good sense. Three decades of financially solvent heavy metal rock bands corroborate it.

Someone might argue, however, that the cross hasn’t been used for its original purpose for millennia and that most people, therefore, don’t associate it with torture and execution anymore. That’s a good observation, one that pushes us to find an even more rudimentary explanation for the cross’s fearful iconicity.

Barring the way

Let’s face it: the cross is a cross. It is two sticks or arms or bones held perpendicular to each other at their centres, barring the way forward. It says, “Don’t come here. Don’t walk along this path.” It is the sign of the forbidden, the sign of a sacred No. Recall its use in the horror stories of our culture. What does one hold up in self-defense when threatened by a vampire or any other evil from the nether regions? With all due respect to garlic, the answer is clearly the cross.

Notice as well that only a small step is required to transfer the symbol’s No from evil to myself. As I drive down a city street past this church or that one, it is not altogether unlikely that the cross will appear to me as a kind of “x” in red ink, penned by an angry deity beside the sum of my life.

That being said, I’d like to share an experience I had recently in which an image of the cross communicated something entirely different to me.

I was walking in circles in an empty church building, and as I came down the main aisle of the sanctuary I found myself facing a Lenten cross about six feet high, constructed not of the usual square beams but of a flat, weather-beaten 2x6 and 2x4. The wider piece ran vertically, while the narrower piece extended significantly to the sides. In combination with the circle of barbed wire at the joint, the precise dimensions of the thing gave it a striking human proportionality. It looked like a friendly stick-man, frankly. And once I noticed the pile of large stones at its base, the image became unmistakable: I was standing before an Inukshuk!

The sign of Yes

For generations, the barren Arctic landscape has been adorned with these practical and beautiful artifacts of Inuit genius. You’ve seen them: human figures made of flat rocks stacked into legs, torso, open arms, and head. Inuit hunters constructed them to mark trails, point to settlements, and indicate locations for good fishing, among other things. An Inukshuk stands as a general welcome left behind by others, its open posture a sign as universal as the smile or the upraised open hand. “This is the way to go. Walk in it.”

So I wondered that morning, does the cross, too, mark a trail? Does it proclaim a welcome in an empty region?

But wait, I thought. The man hanging on it two thousand years ago was not lingering at the roadside like a mother pointing to an abundant lake or a father watching for a lost son, he was simply fastened in place on a makeshift execution-scaffold by cultural and political forces beyond his control.

Indeed, but consider another possibility: What if, underneath the wrists, shoulder blades, tailbone and heels of Jesus of Nazareth, the No of the cross has turned into a sacred Yes, directed precisely at us? Think of it. As the one called the Son of God hangs there declaring, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing,” what if the ultimate posture of victimization undergoes a sea change and comes to represent the ultimate posture of love: an unthinkable, suffering divine embrace of executioners, nations, worlds, galaxies?

That would change everything, wouldn’t it?

No, I don’t mean that we would be entirely through making errors in our existential mathematics. I mean that we would begin to respond to the horror of death in a different way. Jesus, the Inukshuk of God, would have marked that fearful trail and its fascinating Christian sign, for us, with the elemental wonder of hope.

Chris Friesen is assistant pastor at Lendrum MB Church, Edmonton.