,Here’s a picture, taken around 1960, of the entire Kansas City Philharmonic Orchestra. I can name three of the five string bass players off to your right, because the one in the middle is my father; the two to each side of him were family friends. In the middle, to the left a bit in the viola section, was my first ever violin teacher, Jim Hammond. The principal conductor, standing in the middle there, was Maestro Hans Schwieger.
One day at the beginning of a rehearsal, Maestro Schwieger, pointed his baton at my father and said, “Please don’t ever wear that sweater again in my presence; it reminds me of the “Hakenkreuz.” I hope he said that whole sentence in his native German, so as not to embarrass my father in front of everyone, and because he would have known that my Dad spoke German, too. But conductors of the time tended to be more like Marine drill instructors than Fred Rogers. Still, he used the more informal word, “Hakenkreuz,” in place of the more official German word, “Swastika.”
Far be it from my father to ever intentionally wear anything remotely resembling Nazi symbolism. As I shared last week, my father experienced the Nazi terror in Hitler’s Germany during his youth, and he is deeply disturbed by neo-Nazism in this country today. My father was probably just wearing something that had stripes or angles or shapes in the colors red, black and white. I don’t remember such a sweater, because he probably pitched it out once he knew how some people might take it.
But Maestro Schwieger would have been very sensitive to anything even remotely resembling the Swastika, or Das Hakenkreuz, because of the pain and trauma it had caused in his life. While he was still living in his native Germany, sometime in the mid-to-late 1930’s, some Nazi party Ministry of Culture official told Maestro Schwieger that he was so talented a conductor he could probably write his own ticket to the principal conductorship of any major metropolitan symphony orchestra anywhere in Germany, but on only one condition: that he divorce his Jewish wife.
Instead, Schwieger and his wife, Elsbeth, fled to America. From a humble community orchestra in Michigan, Schwieger worked his way up to principal conductor of a major metropolitan orchestra. From my childhood I remember there were other European emigres and refugees in the Kansas City Philharmonic, like another Hans, who played bass next to my Dad. They all sounded like Dr. Schringck.
The last I saw of that other Hans, the bass player, I was thirteen or so, out fishing with my Dad, when Hans came by rowing a johnboat, dragging a bass lure behind it. That was his dream retirement. He had some nice bass on a stringer, which he offered to us, because we weren’t doing as well as he had. A few years later, well into his ‘80’s, Hans’ boat was found drifting on the lake, with himself inside, dead of a heart attack. It was the way he wanted to go. Had he not fled to America from Nazi Germany, he may well have died 35 years earlier in a gas chamber.
I tell their stories because they come to mind for me as we see, again, of late, the Swastika, or “Das Hakenkeuz,” in places like Charlottesville, Virginia. God forbid that we should forget or deny the millions of others who were effectively crucified on a broken, twisted, crooked Cross. That was the meaning of the word Maestro Schwieger used, “das Hakenkreuz,” instead of the “Swastika.” In German, the adjective, “Haken,” means “bent,” “crooked,” or “twisted. “Kreuz” is the cross. So, “das Hakenkreuz” literally means “the crooked cross,” or, “The Twisted Cross.” There’s also a German verb, “Hacken” with a –c-, which means “to break up” or “chop up.” It came into English as our word, “Hack,” as in “hacking something up with an axe.” Today we also use the word “hack” to mean breaking into and hijacking the contents of a website or your email account, ransacking it of information, and using it against you, for theft, extortion, intimidation, or misrepresentation.
All those meanings of the word, “Haken,” with or without the letter –c-, could apply to the Nazi “Hakenkreuz.” Those who wear white sheets and burn the cross on people’s lawns are saying nothing any different. This is not by accident. The ideology for which the Hakenkreuz stands is nothing less than the deliberate twisting, breaking, hijacking, hacking, misrepresentation, reversal, perversion and parody of the Cross of Jesus Christ and everything that it stands for, knowingly, intentionally, willfully, even gleefully so. Let me say it again: Hitler and his kind knew what they were doing by breaking, twisting and hacking the Cross of Calvary into the Nazi Hakenkreuz, or “the twisted cross,” and calling it that. Nazi propaganda was plain and up-front about their contempt for the Cross of Calvary, and for the One crucified, and their intention to replace the Crucified One with a religion that celebrated raw strength, brutality and the will to power. The Cross and the Crucified One, they said, are a force for corruption, the symbols and seeds of a “slave mentality,” the evil effort by weaker, less worthy and inferior people to infect, weaken and destroy nature’s powerful, vigorous and superior races of people, by inculcating them with conscience, compassion and a sense of pity and restraint, when they supposedly had the right, by nature and genetics to dominate, exploit, and if necessary, destroy, their weaker underlings. So, Das Hakenkreuz legitimates, celebrates and symbolizes the dominance and destruction of the weak by the strong, the inferior, so-called, by the superior, so-called. I think the same could be said of the other symbols seen at Charlottesville recently, and elsewhere: the fascist ax in a bundle of clubs, and even the Confederate Stars and Bars. There’s another cross at a crooked angle. I think that I even see a twisted parody of the cross of Christ in the Marxist hammer and sickle flag.
Now that I have explained what those crooked crosses stand for, I feel the need to wash my mouth out with soap. Even in my angriest moments, I’ve never verbalized anything so foul as the power-worshiping ideology of the Bent and Twisted Cross. But I felt the need to make clear the meaning of those symbols seen of late, even when others are downplaying or denying it.
Though these bent and broken crosses have been defeated in war, or have crumbled from within, as in the case of Stalinist Marxism, everything they stand for is still on the march, worldwide. The only antidote to the world’s Crooked and Twisted Crosses is the original Cross of Calvary. Which is shocking and surprising to say, at first, because, as the Apostle Paul told his Corinthian friends, “The message of [Christ’s] cross is foolishness” and weakness. He was speaking tongue in cheek. But still, he said, “we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, [which means everybody] “…but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.”
But before I explain the surprising power and wisdom of the Cross and the One Crucified there, I must acknowledge the pain that even the simple Christian cross, displayed with the best intention, can carry for some people. Like that of my Muslim friends, who remember the crosses carried on the shields and banners of the Crusaders. Or Jewish friends, like old fisherman Hans, who might associate the Christian cross with the Inquisitions in Spain, or the persecutions in Eastern Europe, called the “pogroms.” Or the Native Americans who associate the cross with the Spanish Conquistadors, and with some church-run boarding schools where they were abused or got their mouths washed out with soap if they were overheard speaking their Native language. Perhaps the Nazis and the Marxists, when they broke and twisted the cross into their most hateful symbols, were finishing a job that some misguided Christians had inadvertently started, trying to do God’s job of running the world, and on the world’s terms.
Because of that scandal, a church in Minneapolis a few years back decided to take down all the crosses on its building and in its sanctuary, for fear of offending its Native, Muslim and secular neighbors, plus the community agencies which rent space in the building. I understand their decision, but I don’t agree with it. It’s one thing to be embarrassed by the ways in which some people have misused the cross of Jesus Christ; it’s another thing entirely to be embarrassed or ashamed of the Cross itself, and of the Crucified One. If anything, I say: Let the true cross and the Crucified One confront us all with their real, unavoidable and beautiful scandal of weakness and foolishness, so-called. Let’s own up to and hold forth the true and beautiful scandal of the Cross and of the Crucified One that those who twist and hack the cross find so foolish and weak.
For even the most horrendous heresy has at least a fig leaf of facts, just enough truth to make the lie appealing, like the bait that hides a fishhook. The un-broken Cross of Jesus Christ does indeed speak of weakness and foolishness, according to the ideology of the Twisted Cross. If anyone holds mercy in contempt, and confuses compassion for weakness, well, there on the Cross, God demonstrated most powerfully his mercy and compassion. The cross of Jesus Christ does indeed speak of slavery, as Nazi ideology said, for on it was crucified the One who, “though in very nature, God, took the form of a slave and was obedient unto death, even [a slave’s death], on a cross (Phil. 2:7).” The cross of Christ tells us that it is at the level of slaves, or even lower, that Almighty God has entered our world.
Before the Crusaders and the Conquistadors misused and abused the Cross, the Cross that Jesus took up, and which the apostles preached, stands as God’s emphatic No! to every twisted cross of racism, militarism or nationalism. Standing blood-stained on Mount Calvary, the Cross of Christ symbolizes the power of love, while the Crooked Cross symbolizes the love of power. The Twisted Cross speaks of terror; the Cross of Calvary speaks of God’s tenderness. The Broken Cross divides and categorizes people; the Cross of Christ unites heaven and earth, and the tribes, tongues and nations of humanity, as we heard in Ephesians 2: “[Christ] himself is our peace,” he has “reconciled both Jew and Gentile to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.”
The Crooked Cross speaks of ruthlessness; the Cross of Calvary speaks of mercy, for from it was declared the divine welcome to a dying thief, a welcome meant for all the penitent: “You shall be with me in Paradise.” The Broken, Twisted Cross celebrates vengeance and the holding of grudges, even grudges between nations and races. The Cross of Calvary speaks of pardon and reconciliation among offenders and the offended, and we are all plenty of both. Humanity’s twisted crosses stand for the cult of death. The Cross of Christ was God’s weapon for the conquest of death, through an innocent death on behalf of others. Humanity’s many crooked crosses celebrate power and predation over the weak, and those different from ourselves. But on the Cross of Calvary, a holy and Almighty God identified with the weak, the needy, the marginalized, and sinners, and there took his place among us. The broken, twisted Cross is a symbol of exclusion and extermination. The Cross of Christ is God’s demonstration of his power and purpose of Reconciliation. The legs of the Broken Cross are poised, like a spider’s legs, to inject the poison of hatred. The arms of Christ on the cross open wide in Embrace. The Crooked Cross speaks of the power to destroy enemies; the Cross of Christ is how God destroys enmity, by overcoming evil with good. The Bent and Twisted Cross calls for purity of blood, and the shedding of blood; on the Cross, blood was shed for our pardoning and purifying. The Crooked Cross boasted of a Thousand Year Reich; from the spear-riven side of the Crucified One broke the water and blood of the birth of a new Creation. The Bent and Crooked Cross is a banner of racial and ethnic pride; but we just heard Paul say, “Let me boast of nothing but the Cross of Christ.” The many bent and twisted crosses of our idolatries and ideologies celebrate human willfulness and pride; on the cross of Jesus Christ we are told to nail up our old willful, prideful selves, so that we might become willing children of God, rather than willful rebels against God.
Those are the true scandals that the Cross and the Crucified One were meant by God to confront us with. I would to God that they were the only scandals that the Cross, the Christ and we Christians carried. We may have to earn back those rightful, beautiful, scandals and offenses of the Cross by our own Cross-shaped patience, weakness and love.
So whenever we see the world’s many bent and crooked crosses, or the burning crosses of the KKK, God forbid, let them neither frighten nor oppress us. Nor must we fear nor hate those who wave them. They have simply been hoodwinked into fixing onto the wrong crosses the fear, the pain, the guilt, the shame, the weaknesses, and the needs for love, for meaning and worth and hope, which we all share. We are always being tempted by bogus, bent and broken crosses. Whenever we try to find security through strength, self-worth through distinction and domination, and meaning in life through idolatry and ideology, whenever we think that might makes right, and that nothing succeeds like success, whenever we treat weakness, need, and differences as contemptible, and the weak and needy as expendable, we are twisting, bending, breaking and burning the Cross of Christ. Notions of racial supremacy and actions of ethnic cleansing are only the most overt, aggressive and egregious ways to twist, break, hack or burn the Cross.
So whenever we see those hacked and crooked crosses, let them neither convert us nor convince us with their showy displays of power, pomp and intimidation. Instead, make them backfire by remembering every beautiful and blessed thing of God for which the true cross of Christ stands, that the bent and twisted crosses of the world seek to parody, pervert and contort. But don’t stop with remembering: let us also then celebrate, advocate, pray for and work for the blessed and beautiful things of God for which the True Cross of Christ (la Veracruz) ever stands.