The Giant Cross

On the very last day of my summer trip, described in preceding entries, I stopped along the interstate in Groom, Texas to see the world’s largest cross. It was built by the Catholic Church and is a frame covered with what appears to be fiberglass siding. It was big, all right, but the surrounding prairie, and the mass of air in the fierce wind, was much larger.

This is not the Precious Moments Chapel in Missouri. This is a courtyard with metal statues that depict the last moments of Jesus in graphic detail. Whatever else may or may not be true about Christianity, Jesus was certainly a lover of humankind and certainly suffered intensely for it. Even an atheist would be moved by it. And the statues depicted some defiantly altruistic things that Jesus did. In one statue, he is encouraging his female followers to remain courageous, even as he is dying—women whom he may have considered his equals. In another statue an obviously black Simon of Cyrene (also known in scripture as Niger) helps him carry his cross. You cannot sanitize or trivialize a story like this. If you cannot handle brutal human reality, don’t stop here—go on to the Precious Moments Chapel instead.

Inside the gift shop, it was a different story. It wasn’t quite Precious Moments, but it told quite a different story than the statues outside. Decorations were for sale that celebrated patriotism (implying the United States is God’s nation). You can buy a reproduction of the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware. The connection with Jesus is not immediately evident. So while the gift shop has the same flag-waving consumerism as does most of conservative Christianity today, the statues outside confront us with the story of a man so good that history has been unable to explain him.

The photographs show Simon Niger helping Jesus with his cross, and Pontius Pilate trying to evade his role in the messy and religion-drenched political history of the ancient Near East.