The Tamworth Cross

Ian Knowles • 12 August 2019

New Icon of the Holy Cross for the sanctuary of Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Tamworth

The Tamworth Cross

The Mystery of our salvation is deeper than any ocean, and now words or images can even begin to exhaust its meaning. No symbol embodies this Mystery more than the Cross, already a symbol when Christ mounted it and made it the place of the ultimate sacrifice that would bring about the reconciliation between humanity and the God from whom humanity had wandered so far.

The Tamworth Cross has been designed to hang above the altar in the Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart, and so the emphasis in the design has been the Mercy of God. There are two explicit references to the Mystery of the Sacred Heart, at the top and the bottom panels, and to the celebration of the heavenly liturgy which is echoed on the celebration at the altar below, in the side panels.

Above Christ is the Blessed Virgin who presents to us the Sacred Heart (please note note this is not the Mary’s Immaculate Heart). With a sorrowful demeanour, the Mother of Sorrows invites us to see the ultimate manifestation of Divine Love for us in the self-offering as Christ who has, through her, become one with us and so able to be the High Priest who can offer himself truly on our behalf and yet as true God can stand before the Father as the Perfect Offering, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Either side of the Sacred Heart of Jesus are two seraphim, mystic beings that worship ceaselessly before the Throne of the Most High. According to Teilhard de Chardin these fiery beings waft the boundless energies of God’s Divine Love to the furthest corners of the Creation. Thus what is offered to God on the Cross is shared back to us in the form of God’s Divine Mercy that brings forgiveness and peace.

In the readings for the Mass of the Sacred Heart the Gospel tells the parable of the lost sheep. And so the skull of Adam, our first ancestor and who’s sin led to humanity being banished from Paradise and lost in the wilderness, is replaced by the Lost Sheep with his injured leg, who looks longingly at the Lord hanging above him.

According to an ancient homily for Holy Saturday Jesus “goes to seek out our first parent like a lost sheep; he wishes to visit those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. He goes to free the prisoner Adam and his fellow-prisoner Eve from their pains, he who is God, and Adam's son.” Thus the link has been there since the earliest times between Adam, his death, and the parable of the Lost Sheep. Christ’s death is the work of a loving and merciful God who seeks out the lost and brings them new life.

Traditionally Golgotha, literally the ‘place of the skull’, is associated with the tomb of Adam, and St Jerome attests to the early belief that Adam was buried close to the place of Crucifixion. Adam is our ‘first parent’ and thus represents all his descendants, who like him have found their way to the grave where death has swallowed them up. Thus in this icon of the Cross the reference to the Lost Sheep is made explicit, the image of the sheep placed beneath the Cross in the place usually reserved for Adam’s skull. Here, in death, all of us wait as lost sheep to be rescued and delivered from the clutches of hell.

Meanwhile on the extremities of the arms of the Cross we see two angels, both clothed in heavenly blues and greens. They carry things used during the Liturgy - a thurible and a candle, just as the altar servers do during a solemn Mass. The worship we offer on earth around the altar is merely a shadow of what is being offered in heaven continually. The altar servers and the priest are shadowing the heavenly realities and enabling the worshippers who gather with then to enter into its Mystery. Before the Cross angels and archangels, cherubim and seraphim bow down in awe at the sheer Beauty if Christ’s offering of pure Love, at the dignity which he brings to all human beings as the highest of created beings made in God’s image and likeness, as the priests of creation. Before the Cross all heaven and earth must bow down and worship, overwhelmed by the sheer height and depth of God’s love.

In the midst of all of this stands Christ on the Cross. He is almost walking off the Cross. He offers Himself freely. He is bowed with sorrow but not defeated by death. His face is peaceful and not deranged, agonised but not blood-spattered. We are being shown Christ reigning from the tree, his deeper peace at giving himself completely over to the will of His Father even as his body is twisted and tormented. We are being invited to look deeper, to see beyond the blood and gore, beyond the ravings of the guards and the torment of the crowd and to gaze into the Heart of Christ as He who is without sins hangs in self-offering for us.

He bears the wounds made by the nails and the lance but is not reduced to a tortured corpse. Rather he is the King of Kings, the King of Glory. His royal status is proclaimed as King of the Jews by the notice pinned to the top of the Cross by order of the Roman governor, and his status as King of Kings by the golden and bejewelled girdle that holds his loincloth in place. This is found on many Anglo-Saxon and early English crucifixes and is especially appropriate as Tamworth was the capital of one of the kingdoms of that period. The loincloth is arranged as though torn and pouring out, just as the curtain in the Temple was torn in two as Christ poured out His life in death.

Psalm 80 is an excellent exposition of this depiction of the Cross, with many of its themes being represented within it. This makes a neat Biblical commentary on what is shown here on the Tamworth Cross.

The psalm is a cry from the lost: ‘God of hosts bring us back’. It is a plea for salvation, ‘let your face shine on us and we shall be saved’. What more fitting set of words for anyone who comes before the Cross and gazes up at the face of the Saviour?

If we set lines of the psalm alongside verses from the Passion, we see that the psalm describes how the One on the Cross has taken on himself the condition of the lost:

‘How long will you from on your people’s plea?’

‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mk. 15:34)

‘You have fed them with tears for their bread , and abundance of tears for their drink’.

‘This cup is the new covenant of my blood which will be poured out for you’. (Lk22:20)

‘You have made us the taunt of our neighbours’.

‘As for the leaders they jeered at him… the soldiers mocked him too… one of the criminals hanging there abused him.” (Lk 23:35f)

In the psalm reference is made to God’s People being like a vine which has ‘stretched out its shoots’ just as Christ here stretches out his arms on arms of the Cross which is here budding into life, only to be ravaged, being ‘plucked by all who pass by’. The Cross is here shown as a vine bursting into foliage, as the Tree of Life which stands in the heart of the New Jerusalem and which once stood at the heart of the Garden of Eden (Rev.22:1-2), whose leaves are medicinal and for healing (Ez.47:1ff). The place of the fall becomes the place of healing and redemption.

The psalmist then returns to his theme of the Face of God, but this time he laments, ‘may they perish at the frown of your face’. In the Tamworth Cross Christ is shown with a deep frown, but not of judgement but suffering with and on behalf of his tormentors. For in the Cross Christ shows God’s love even for His enemies. He comes not to condemn but to have mercy and his frown is as he takes the place of his enemies out of love for them who ‘do not know what they are doing’. His wrath is not shown to them, but to the real enemy - death itself.

The psalmist concludes: ‘May your hand be on the man you have chosen, the man you have given your strength.” Here he seems to acknowledge that the Chosen People are to be redeemed by the Chosen One, and that He will achieve their deliverance by the strength which the Lord will give Him. Here on the Tamworth Cross Jesus is shown with a certain strength, seeming to almost walk from the Cross as He seeks to ‘trample on death by death’. It is the strength of the meek and lowly, the One who has totally embraced His Father’s will and purpose even at the total cost to Himself.

And the psalmist concludes, ‘And we shall never forsake you again: give us life that we may call upon your name’ a fitting refrain for the response of those who await deliverance as the sons and daughters of Adam from the desolation of death.

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