The Cross and the Cellar

Bread and Wine Reading: "The Cross and the Cellar", Morton T. Kelsey
Scripture Reading: John 19: 1-7
Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. And the soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they dressed him in a purple robe. They kept coming up to him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ and striking him on the face. 4Pilate went out again and said to them, ‘Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no case against him.’ So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, ‘Here is the man!’ When the chief priests and the police saw him, they shouted, ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ Pilate said to them, ‘Take him yourselves and crucify him; I find no case against him.’ The Jews answered him, ‘We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has claimed to be the Son of God.’

Morton Kelsey says that “each of us has underneath our ordinary personality, which we show to the public, a cellar, in which we hide the refuse and rubbish which we would rather not see ourselves or let others see.” He goes on to say that beneath even that sort of shadow side is a darker self. It is the self that most of us do not usually encounter, a self “full of violence and hatred and viciousness…the lowest level of humans that public executions appeal.” We all have parts of our self that we hide from the rest of the world, that we hide even from ourselves. But Kelsey also contends that it is “in the cross [that] this level of our being has thrust itself up out of its deepest underground cellar so that we humans may see what is in all of us and take heed.”

That Cross of Good Friday is indeed difficult for us to grasp. How can something so horrible, something so undeserved, something so criminal happen? And so we try desperately to search for answers, settling our blame upon either the ones of us that we think are not like us—Pilates or Romans or those who worship differently from us—or accepting instead the image of a God who would plan the whole brutal thing as payment of some debt. The truth is, though, as Kelsey puts it, “whenever we look upon the cross,…we see what humankind can do, has done, and still does to some human beings.” We see ourselves at our worst.

The depiction of this shadow self as the “cellar” is a good one. If, like me, you live in an area where cellars are rare, think of a disorganized closet, a garage that no longer is capable of housing an automobile, or that stash of things that you crammed in that box hidden away the last time the doorbell rang unexpectedly. We all have things that we hide from the world—those “little chinks” in our façade. Perhaps, then, it is when our shadow gains control over ourselves that we lose perspective and see it possibly manifest in something worse—that “deeper hold” of which Kelsey speaks. He claims that “they were not wild viciousness or sadistic brutality or naked hate, but the civilized vices of cowardice, bigotry, impatience, timidity, falsehood, indifference—vices all of us share, the very vices which crucify human beings today.”

But the Cross is something that we are called to bear, to take on, an image through which we cannot help but expose our deepest selves. The Cross is the way that we deal with that hidden self, the way that we lift it high for all the world to see, the way that we surrender it to God. And God takes all of Creation--even the shadows in our lives-- and breathes new life into it, recreating it anew.

Discussion Questions:
1.) What is in that “cellar” of yourself? What are those things about yourself that you hide from others?
2.) What is it about that Cross that is uncomfortable for you?
3.) What would be the first shadow in your life that you would surrender to God?

So go forth toward the Cross that every part of you might be recreated!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli