The Crime of the Crucifixion

‘He made the crime of the crucifixion to be the salvation of the world’. ^[1]

Oxford is a city that has inspired many crime dramas – perhaps, most famously, Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse series, which is the theme of many popular walking tours around the city. (Maybe you have visited some Morse or Lewis inspired locations this weekend as part of Oxford Open Doors). But although there are fewer walking tours dedicated to the detective novelist Dorothy L Sayers, we find ourselves today with the opportunity to remember her here at St Cross Church, which was the setting for the fictional marriage of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane ninety years ago this October. (I won’t give away any spoilers, but you can read about it in her book Busman’s Honeymoon).

Sayers is well known as a writer of detective fiction, but perhaps it is less well known that in her later years she turned her sharp and incisive mind to questions of theology and faith. Her father was an Anglican priest, and she herself a devout Anglican. She was a close friend of the Christian author and apologist C.S. Lewis, and although not formally a member of the famous Inklings group, she maintained strong connections with its members, not only with Lewis but also with the author Charles Williams – who is also associated with St Cross and is buried in this Churchyard. 

St Cross Church is not just significant for its association with some famous Oxford literary figures; it is also the only church in Oxford that is dedicated to the Holy Cross, which makes it significant to be joining here with Christians across the world today as we observe this feast. The feast originates in a pilgrimage made to the Holy Land in the early fourth century by St Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine, who travelled to Jerusalem in search of holy places associated with the life of Christ, and thereby discovered the cross on which Christ was crucified. Her discovery inspired the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the same site, and a devotion among Christians to the Holy Cross which is maintained to this day. 

The Cross is perhaps the most universal symbol of Christianity; and we need not look far to find images of the Cross in art and architecture; in churches and houses; in necklaces and keyrings; and in gestures of prayer. But the cross is also a complicated image: an image of death and violent execution; an image that was considered so shocking and controversial in the early years of Christianity that it was often disguised as an anchor (also as a way to hide Christian belief from the authorities in a time of persecution). The cross is an image that has been contested across the centuries; subjected to competing theological interpretations; and yet it persists in our devotions and in our wider culture. 

When Sayers writes about the Cross, she is unapologetic about its capacity to shock. Indeed, she worries that we often tone down the dramatic elements of the Christian story; losing their meaning in complicated theology or sentimental interpretation or just pure familiarity. When she received some complaints from BBC listeners and indeed a bishop or two in response to her radio play retelling the life of Christ – the Man Born to be King – she wrote: ‘It is curious that people who are filled with horrified indignation whenever a cat kills a sparrow can hear that story of the killing of God told Sunday after Sunday and not experience any shock at all’.^[2]

For Sayers, Christian doctrine is inherently dramatic – it should move us to tears, to shock, to horror, to curiosity. We may end up puzzled by it; we may end up doubting it; and we may like Sayers end up believing it. But we need to hear it; and this became part of Dorothy L Sayers’s mission in her later years, as she turned her creative efforts to the dramatization of Christian scripture and theology. 

There are two insights that particularly stand out to me when Sayers writes about the Cross. First, she emphasises that the crucifixion is not just an event that we should look upon from the distance of history; criticising the protagonists from the outside whilst reassuring ourselves that: ‘it can’t happen here’. For in fact, as she says, ‘God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own – in the over-ripeness of the most splendid and sophisticated Empire the world has ever seen’. By casting the Christian story as a drama, and in contemporary language, she makes vivid its significance to the present and not just the past. She makes us wonder whether we, too, are complicit in the execution of God.

And although this might seem a controversial point to emphasise – and judging from the letters she received, it was – it also forms the foundation for a second, more comforting insight. Rather than the Cross being something we observe from afar – something we look at in a church or wear as a piece of jewellery – the Cross is something we can participate in ourselves. The Cross becomes, in her words, ‘a pattern of life’. She writes about this in a letter to the Director of Religious Broadcasting at the BBC in 1943, discussing the Christian faith in a time of war. She wonders whether daily sacrifices – like going without fire on a cold night to save fuel – might, in her words, ‘sterilise’ the evil of war. She says: ‘if we refuse then the evil continues to propagate itself … Or if we violently resent the sacrifice, we start a fresh cycle of anger and hatred and trouble’. But if we choose to break the cycle – to say: ‘this thing stops here; it ends with me’ —we might come close to understanding something of the mystery of the Cross.

It's important to say that this not a way of justifying suffering or violence for its own sake; the Cross was an instance of brutal injustice, and Christians have always understood the need to fight injustice and stand up for its victims. But the point Sayers makes is different. She is saying that, when we have a choice between continuing a cycle of negativity or hatred or violence, or breaking that cycle by sacrificing something – perhaps our pride or ego or our time or resources – we can choose to break the cycle. And we might then, in her words, ‘see the pattern of the cross as the pattern of life’. 

That the story of Christianity should capture the imagination of an author of detective fiction like Dorothy L Sayers is perhaps not surprising. Because at the centre of that story is a crime. It is not the sort of crime that usually features in a detective fiction novel. It does not require the clever skills of Lord Peter Wimsey or Harriet Vane to solve it. But it is a mystery nonetheless; that the death of one man could lead to the salvation of all; that the cycle of violence and hatred and death which seems so entrenched in our world can be broken by acts of kindness and courage and compassion; that God suffers with the suffering, dies with the dying, and lives again. The crime of the crucifixion is a mystery indeed. And on that note, I will give the last word to Dorothy L Sayers: ‘He takes our sins and errors and turns them into victories, as He made the crime of the Crucifixion to be the salvation of the world’.