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Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, acted on the repeated urgings of his Augustinian confessor, Staupitz, to "Look to the wounds of Jesus." And soon after posting his 95 theses, he announced that the only man who deserved to be called a theologian was he "who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the Cross." All through his life, his sermons and hymns contained striking images of that event.

The German pietists and the Moravians who followed in Luther's steps in the centuries after his death also practiced the Reformer's near-mystical devotion to the cross. They wrote hymns filled with the most heart-rending depictions of the wounds and the sufferings of Christ. And British evangelicals like the Wesleys and William Cowper followed with hymns in a similar, if more refined, mold (think of Cowper's "There is a fountain fill'd with blood, / Drawn from Emmanuel's veins").

This comes as a surprise to many, because Protestants have usually followed the image-averse John Calvin. He, though equally focused on the Cross, worried that any imagining of the Crucifixion might become an idol, distracting the believer from God himself.

Thus the "gorier" pietist and Moravian hymns have now, with the almost solitary exception of Paul Gerhardt's (d. 1676) "O Sacred Head Now Wounded," been pushed from most current hymnals (even Moravian ones). And when we run across the sort of vivid portrayal of Christ's passion that Mel Gibson presents in his movie, something in us recoils: Is this not excessive and morbid? Why dwell on the horrific details? Surely Jesus would want us to turn quickly from Good Friday to Easter, placing our focus on his glorious resurrection!

We find it difficult to enter the world of another time—to understand its art, its jokes, its characteristic devotions and valued emotions. Never is this more true than with the vivid, bloody, even repellant portrayals of Christ's suffering embodied in the paintings, sculptures, preaching, poetry, and drama of the late medieval period. But this is where the whole subsequent history of Cross-centered devotion has its roots. And it is a tradition, for all its flaws, that has something to teach us still.

In the period of persecution before Constantine, such leaders as Ignatius of Antioch (who eventually went eagerly to martyrdom) counseled believers to imitate Christ in his passion, resigning themselves to the sufferings of persecution, as he had done. After Constantine, however, the church focused on a triumphant, resurrected Christ. The earliest depictions of Jesus' humanity, from the fourth century on, show him as a royal or imperial figure, and his cross, if shown at all, as jeweled or golden. The "Christus Victor" atonement theology of the day emphasized Christ's triumph over Satan.

Christianity became fashionable under later Christian emperors, and the church began to look too much like the world. So men and women began retreating from society into solitary cells and small communities. These earliest monastics sought the road to true discipleship. And they saw their master and model, Christ, as the sacrificial lamb, mocked and slaughtered to redeem sinful man. Earnest disciples, in the East and later in the West, immersed themselves in the Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion, which they read over and over again in a daily cycle whose very "hours" represented key moments in Christ's passion.

At the opening of the Middle Ages, however, church leaders such as Gregory the Great (590-604) still tended to highlight Christ's divine dignity. It was again the monks, especially the early Irish and British monks, who sustained a special devotion to the cross of Christ and tried to imitate Christ's sufferings with penitential disciplines, such as standing for long periods with arms outstretched.

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March 2004, Vol. 48, No. 3