Blessed Are You Among Trees

A Reflection on the Tree Which Bore Our Lord

It is common for us on all days, but especially on this day, to speak of the cross simply as a “weapon of torture.” It is, I’ve heard it said, like the electric chair in our own time. ‘How strange,’ some muse, ‘that we would wear such a thing around our necks.’ And while I understand why we come to such conclusions, perhaps we come to them too quickly. After all, we rightly praise Simon of Cyrene for carrying the cross for our Lord. Blessed are you, Simon! Yet perhaps the tree is the greater Simon, for while Simon carried the tree, the tree carried our Lord. Perhaps the tree’s desire was not to torture, but to hold our Lord in the hour of his greatest need even as Jesus held us as he “stretched out [his]…arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of…[his] saving embrace.”

From which tree was this wood hewn? Perhaps it was from one of the ancient trees like the Allon Bakuth, the Oak of Weeping.^⁠¹ Or maybe it was from the Oak at Shechem where we buried our idols.^⁠² Could it have been from the Great Tree of Moreh,^⁠³ or one of the Great Trees of Mamre?^⁠⁴ The Willows were used to carrying the weight of harps,⁵ so perhaps it was one of them, already prepared for such a terrible task. But alas, my imagination is running wild now, and probably too wild. I am looking hard for significance, and probably too hard. I should know better. David had to be fetched after all the obvious choices had run dry. And, to use a far more worthy example, who was Mary? Not a queen, but a two-pigeon-poor girl.^⁠⁶ Yet it was precisely she who accepted the greatest and strangest task, to bear the one who would bear us all. “Blessed are you among women,”^⁠ Mary!⁷ Blessed are you, indeed! This tree, of course, did not bear Jesus as he was pinched with pain into the world,⁸ but it did bear Jesus as he was pierced with the pain of the world as he breathed his last. Perhaps we have cursed where we should have blessed. Perhaps your desire, tree, was not to torture – that was our desire! – but to hold. If so, blessed are you among trees!

Maybe I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe I’m in dangerous territory here. Maybe the old images stand and you are the villain we’ve claimed you to be all along. Surely you splintered our Lord. But even if this is true, “that which is not assumed is not healed,” as Gregory said. So even if you, like we, had the worst intentions, you too have been assumed by our Lord and, like us, will be brought up with him.

1. Gen. 35:8.

2. Gen. 35:4.

3. Gen. 12:6.

4. Gen. 18:1.

5. Ps. 137.

6. Lev. 14:22; Lk 2:24.

7. Lk. 1:42.

8. See John Davies, “Death as Birth,” quoted in Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness: A Poem a Day for Lent and Easter (Norwich, Norfolk: Canterbury Press Norwich, 2014), 118.