A clerk in a gift shop in California was responding to an inquiry from a customer about purchasing a gold cross.  The clerk said, “Yes, madam, we do have gold crosses.  Do you want a plain one or one with a little man on it?”

To an outsider, the cross must seem like a very strange thing to have at the center of our worship.  It was a particularly gruesome instrument of torture and death.  It is sort of like having an electric chair or a hangman’s noose at the center of our attention.  Outsiders may wonder at the Church’s almost ghoulish pre-occupation with one single atrocity committed twenty centuries ago.  We now know that Christ’s cross was only one of thousands on which enemies of the Romans were hanged.  When Jesus was a lad about six years of age, the revolt of Judas of Galilee was …