Undying Love
by Doug Davidson

The author is editor of "The Other Side" magazine and is the spouse of Jennifer Davidson, President of the Seminary's student body. The article, appropriate for the season, originated in "The Other Side" and is published on our web site with the magazine's permission.

Doug, Jennifer, and Elliot Davidson

Last summer, my three-year-old son and I stopped off at the seminary library to return a book for a friend. Our family has lived on the campus of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia since Jennifer began classes here a year and a half ago. But this was our son's first time inside the old stone building that houses its library.

As we stepped through the bright red doors into the darkened vestibule, Elliot stopped in his tracks. There, on the wall to his right, hung a sculpted crucifix, about five feet tall. I watched his young eyes study Jesus' agonized face, the dying body nailed to a tree, the nails piercing his hands and feet.

I knew the image was a new one to him. Although he's been raised in the church, the crosses in our Baptist congregation are all clean and sanitized; their Jesuses all resurrected and ascended.

For a moment, I considered hustling him back out the door, trying to shield him from this holy horror in the same way that I "rewrite" the violent plots of his beloved Batman comic books when I read them aloud. But it was too late; he had already taken it all in.

I thought he might cry. Instead, without ever taking his eyes off the dying Jesus, he slowly spoke words filled with great sadness, mystery, and wonder: What happened?

I mumbled something like, "That's a really good question." Before long, he was back to quizzing me about Robin Hood and making up stories about Bob the Builder.

But this Lenten season, Elliot's question haunts me. It seems the perfect question when confronted with the cross. What happened that this gentle storyteller full of God's compassion would so threaten the powers that they would have him tortured and killed? What happened that God's own incarnation in our midst would be met with violence and murder? And what happened that this image of unthinkable terror would become so common that I needed a three-year-old to remind me of its sheer incomprehensibility?

These days, when I put Elliot to bed at night, I often sing him to sleep with songs from my own Sunday school years. As I sing, "Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world," I wonder what Jesus he sees. Is it the helpless infant from the nativity set? The gentle shepherd pictured in his Illustrated Children's Bible? Or does he see the dying man in the library, the one whose refusal to turn away from God's love is so unfathomable, so terrifying, so wonderful?