Let’s Start At The Very Beginning…
January.
Time to turn off the carols and return to interacting with our difficult, pagan society on its own tricksy terms. If December felt like a month when we could piggyback on seasonal conviviality and score easy evangelistic hits. Then January is the grey morning after when it’s tempting to hide away and feel irrelevant as the world resumes its not-so-merry go round.
We can forget that this is normal.
Britain wasn’t always churched. Carols weren’t always traditional. Christ-Mass wasn’t always a thing. Once, Britain was pioneer missionary territory, with every image and structure geared against Christ.
So can our forebears in Christ teach us anything as we wearily enter the New Year?
We don’t know exactly when the gospel first reached this country. There are late-Roman mosaics showing Jesus and the Chi-Rho (X-P) motif, and Britain sent three bishops to the Synod of Arles in 314 so clearly some knew of Jesus by then. But after the Roman legions withdrew, England, at least, became thoroughly backslidden.
Invasions by polytheistic Saxons meant that by the late 6th and early 7th Century, the pope saw this island as a ripe mission field. The early missionaries faced a land fragmented into small kingdoms headed by pagan kings, and rife with every kind of peril from plague to physical persecution.
The remaining Romano-British bishops refused to evangelise their invaders, who in any case saw them as conquered, second-class citizens and would have refused to listen. It was, all in all, a dangerous, divided and disease-ridden society.
Ringing any bells here?
It’s easy to empathise with the first evangelists, who were so daunted by the task that they sent to Rome asking to return! Wonderfully for us, they did not receive permission.
Having arrived, the evidence they left shows that they made full use of all the creative arts to bear witness to Christ. From their monumental art, their poetry, and music: the confidence of these beleaguered witnesses rings out through the generations.
As we think about what we can learn from our older brothers and sisters in Christ, I want to focus in on just one ancient text – the Dream of the Rood.
Written by an author or authors unknown, this strikingly beautiful poem of 156 lines was composed in Old English, the language spoken in England until 1066.
Fragments of the story are carved on the 8 th Century Ruthwell Cross making them contenders for the oldest known English poetry.
It tells the story of an unknown poet who dreams of a tree. The tree becomes the “rood” or cross, on which Christ was crucified. Although it is gloriously decorated with gold and gems, the poet discerns ancient wounds.
The rood tells how it was forced to be the instrument of Christ’s death, describing how it, too, experienced the nails and spear thrusts along with the Saviour.
In brutally vivid language it explains that the cross was once an instrument of torture and death, and is now the dazzling sign of mankind’s redemption. It charges the poet to tell of his vision to all men so that they, too, might be saved.
“They forced me through
with darkness, with nails —
Witness in me their woundcraft
the gashings of gnashing spite.
Hardly dare to savage that lot
making us shame, us two together.
I’m all ooze, bedrooled with blood,
sluiced from, juiced from his side.”
(lines 46-49, trans. Hofstetter)
This sort of extended metaphor comes as quite a shock to those of us familiar with exegetical preaching. But before we recoil, we need to humbly consider how poetry helped those early evangelists commend Jesus to their audience.
By starting with the image of a tree, they reused a concept familiar to those brought up revering Yggdrasil and other sacred trees in Germanic mythology. And presenting Christ as a heroic warrior, eagerly leaping onto the cross to do battle with death, made him accessible to the early Saxon mindset.
We see your tree, and we raise you; we have a better story, it says. We will reframe your hero-gods so you can more clearly see Jesus, the one true hero, the one true light for all nations.
What are the hero-stories our pagan world tells itself today? Perhaps the myth of self-realisation, that you are capable of fulfilling your potential? Or the myth that you were born containing the seeds of perfection – if only external evil forces hadn’t stifled and held you back?
How can we use our creativity to articulate our confidence that our story – the story of His mighty strength made perfect in our depraved weakness – is a better story?
What too does it say about our forebears that they carved this story onto a pillar or cross to stand as a monument for passers-by? It seems they took seriously the injunction of Deuteronomy 11:20, “You shall write them [these words of the Lord] on the doorposts of your house and on your gates”.
Where are the gateposts on which we boldly monumentalise the tale of our redeemer? Perhaps in our advent window-trails; perhaps in our cross-blazoned pumpkins. You will be able to think of others.
Unusually for a Christian text, the poem is carved in runes, where some of the very letters are named after Norse gods, and which were thought to have magical properties.
It is also in the local language not Latin. We might see this as an example of the earliest missionaries becoming ‘all things to all people,’ in order to save some (1 Cor. 9:22). We will use your language and even your pagan alphabet, it says; we are not scared of their putative power. Let us, too, not be afraid to co-opt the language of our pagan world and turn it on itself.
It is my conviction that the inspired word of God is sufficient for salvation. Yet we know that the Bible itself contains many different types of writing, including the psalms and apocalyptic literature which use powerful and even shocking imagery to drum home their point.
Our forefathers in Christ were not afraid to emulate this.
Shouldn’t we?
By Elizabeth Price
Inspired by the Dream of the Rood Elizabeth also wrote her own poem, A Sandal’s Tale, which relates the journey to the cross from the viewpoint of Christ’s sandals. Find it at the link below.