In the summer of 1979, I spent a day at the ecumenical community of Taizé in France. The weather was perfect—cloudless sky, pleasantly warm—and the lawns were lush green. Scattered across them were clusters of white-robed monks sitting with young people, Bibles in hand, engaged in visibly serious discussion.

I was 40 then, a little older than the rest, but the highlight of the day, still memorable for me after all this time, was our coming together as a community for evening prayer around the cross. We were seated in a semi-circle with the monks in front of us. The chants, moments of silence, readings and prayers created a mesmerizing focus on the cross. What did the cross mean to the young people? I suspect the meanings were infinite, but I suggest one in particular, one that has drawn believers almost from the moment of the crucifixion itself—the horizontal bar, the arms of Jesus stretched out in a welcoming embrace to all who come near.

In Athens, 2,000 years ago, the Apostle Paul praised the Athenians because “I see that in every respect you are very religious.” He proclaimed God who created the order of the world “so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:22, 27-28). He concluded by proclaiming the risen Lord. The “Unknown God” of the Athenians has revealed himself most concretely in Jesus Christ.

Every human being is within the horizon of the living God. Like the horizon at the edge of the ocean, which irresistibly draws our eyes to itself, so God also and unendingly draws our conscience to himself. But because we find ourselves within the infinite horizon that is God, we have the freedom to make choices for idols that we construct to satisfy our yearnings in a more immediate and less authentically human way. As Paul points out, however, God has appointed a man for the purpose of our righteousness (cf. Acts 17:30-31). That man is Jesus Christ, his Son.

Jesus makes visible God’s unrelenting will to bring us closer to himself. Individuals can be drawn to Jesus and the Father by any one of the countless moments of his compassionate ministry or of the words by which he reveals himself and the one who sent him. For doubting Thomas, it was the moment when Jesus extended his arms and showed him his pierced hands. Jesus drew Thomas into the community of believers.  

Arms outstretched for a welcoming embrace are a universal gesture, generally transcending cultures and in no need even of words. It can mark the homecoming of family and friends, the ecstatic happiness of a winning team, the consolation of those grieving the loss of a loved one, the greeting of peace at a liturgy and, perhaps in its most tender moment, a mother welcoming and embracing her newborn child.

We can imagine Jesus throughout his life extending his arms to others in affection, compassion, healing, forgiveness, feeding the multitudes, bidding farewell. But never was this action more poignant, more painful, more significant than “when he stretched out his hands as he endured his Passion,” as we remember in Eucharistic Prayer II. Or as we proclaim in the First Eucharistic Prayer for Reconciliation: “But before his arms were outstretched between heaven and earth, to become the lasting sign of your covenant, he desired to celebrate the Passover with his disciples.”

What remains for all time and eternity, then, are those outstretched arms; not only hovering over altars, but also resting atop cathedrals and churches dominating cityscapes and villages, or affixed to the walls of palaces and fragile huts or attached to a gold chain or a frail cord around the necks of saints and sinners. 

Jesus’ outstretched hands on the cross continue to inspire the compassionate embrace of others by his followers, although the endurance of that inspiration is being tested by some obstacles in today’s world.

Obstacles to embracing Jesus

The first obstacle is the din of the marketplace. There is the incessant advertising of products that are superior to last year’s and that end up being outdated by the following year. There is the unlimited availability of amenities that become symbols of superiority. All in all, there is the phenomenon of “obscene consumption.” People are overwhelmed by things. 

In his 1954 novel A Fable, William Faulkner describes the almost total extinction of the human race by weaponry gone amok. But a few survive, “planning still to build something bigger and faster and louder; more efficient and louder and faster than ever before.” In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, Faulkner had offered a more hopeful vision: Humanity is immortal because it “has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” 

I do believe that there is an instinct for compassion within every human being, and that we are called to help one another in fostering that compassion. But when the acquisition of material goods becomes a central preoccupation and a principle of economic development, is that possible? And does the ruthless despoiling of the resources of other nations suppress the instinct for compassion in individuals? The state is not necessarily the best teacher of compassion, but if the state does not exhibit compassion in policies and programs, can a people flourish?  

The second obstacle is the din of social media, godlike in being omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. Its power lies in its potential to become the voice of those clever enough to exploit gullibility or the passivity of populations not wanting to act upon the provocations of conscience to actively seek greater truth and compassion.

In 1990, on the first centenary of the death of St. John Henry Newman, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger addressed the significance of Newman’s teaching on conscience. Recalling the years immediately following World War II, Ratzinger wrote:

We had experienced the claim of a totalitarian party, which understood itself as the fulfilment of history and which negated the conscience of the individual. One of its leaders had said: “I have no conscience. My conscience is Adolf Hitler.” The appalling devastation of humanity that followed was before our eyes.

When social media becomes a forum for voices totalizing human consciousness, the persuasiveness of the outstretched hands of Christ on the cross is severely diminished even for those who profess to be his followers. Bavaria was intensely Catholic in the 1920s and ’30s. That did not prevent many of the faithful from capitulating to the vile rhetoric of a malicious ideology.

The third obstacle is the din within the church. There has always been noise in the church. Cardinal Newman described the church thus:

[A] vast assemblage of human beings with willful intellects and wild passions…brought together as if into some moral factory, for the melting, refining, and molding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes.

 I do wonder whether today the noise has become excessive because of the ease with which opinions and contrary opinions can be expressed on social media.  

What has been neglected is what the Second Vatican Council called “the hierarchy of truths.” Some of the truths of the Christian tradition are foundational for other truths. That does not make the latter less true, but they need to be seen and taught in relation to the former. If we follow the witness of the Apostle Paul, Christ crucified is the foundational truth. The reality of who he is as fully divine and fully human, the expanse of his words and deeds, his ongoing presence as risen Lord, are all encapsulated on the cross—and from the cross flows all that God wants to reveal to us about the triune divine personhood and the kenotic nature of the divine relations, of the divine intervention in human history and therefore also of human interrelationships. 

This self-emptying leads to a church that is one, holy, catholic, apostolic—and humble! The self-emptying humility of servanthood and compassionate service can be a fifth mark of the church that gives energy to the other marks and should underlie moral life. This humility stands over against the sometimes angry self-assertiveness in debate on sensitive issues and as a corrective to an exaggerated self-assurance or certitude in such debate.

Can today’s courageous dedication of the church to immigrants and refugees show to the larger world—and even to many within the church—the compassionate embrace of the outstretched arms of Christ? Can the proclamation of the crucified Christ be renewed by this witness and action? 

Just as the hands of Christ stretch out to embrace us in compassionate welcome, so too they stretch out to us in the sick, hungry, thirsty, naked, homeless, imprisoned, the immigrant. Jesus tells us that our eternal salvation hinges on our response to him present in them. According to what we read in Matthew 25, it is how we stretch out our hands to the vulnerable that will lead to the definitive decision regarding our ultimate destiny.

There has been today a renewal of Eucharistic adoration, a comforting resting in the presence of the Lord. But perhaps there needs to be also more prayer around the cross, both comforting and discomforting because from the outstretched hands of Christ come three questions that we need to answer as individuals and as a people: How much do we really need? What kind of people do we want to be? How much must we give? 

The outstretched hands of Christ should be a shock to conscience, both individual and communal.

Msgr. John Strynkowski. a retired priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn, served in the Congregation for Bishops for six and a half years and at the USCCB for five years.