By Theresa Rézeau

The cross is not standing yet.

In Peter Paul Rubens's The Elevation of the Cross, painted in 1610–11, Jesus Christ has already been nailed to the wood, but the Crucifixion has not reached the image we know so well. The cross is still being hauled upright. Men bend beneath its weight. Others pull from above. Muscles tighten, ropes strain and bodies press against one another as an execution becomes physically possible.

The Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) could have shown Christ already suspended above the crowd. Instead, he chose the labour required to put him there. That decision changes everything. The Crucifixion is no longer only an image of suffering. It becomes an image of participation.

The Elevation of the Cross is a monumental triptych now in the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp. Across its three panels, Rubens constructs a continuous field of movement around the central body of Christ. The composition rises diagonally from darkness towards light, with the cross cutting through the centre at an unstable angle.

Christ's body dominates the central panel, but he cannot move himself into the position in which Christian history remembers him. Other bodies must do it. One man braces his shoulder beneath the wood. Another pulls. Others push, grip and stabilise. Their bodies form a machinery of human effort around Christ. Rubens gives them extraordinary physical presence. They are not incidental figures required merely to fill the composition. Their strength is necessary to the event. Without them, the cross does not rise.

This is an uncomfortable dimension of an image so deeply embedded in Christian devotion. The Crucifixion is central to Christian theology as sacrifice and redemption, but before it can become either of those things, it is an execution performed by human beings. Wood must be carried. Nails must be driven. Ropes must be pulled. Orders must be followed. Violence requires participation.

Rubens does not give us a single villain onto whom responsibility can conveniently be transferred. Instead, he gives us a network of bodies performing different functions within the same act. Some exert themselves directly. Others witness. Some appear absorbed by the task before them.

Who is responsible for the Crucifixion?

Christian theology has answered that question in different ways across centuries, but Rubens makes another dimension impossible to ignore. Whatever theological meaning will eventually be attached to Christ's death, the immediate act depends upon human agency. Someone has to raise the cross. There is something disturbing about the ordinariness of that fact.

History's violence is rarely accomplished by a single pair of hands. Systems require participants: people who give orders, people who execute them, people who administer procedures, people who transport bodies, people who keep records and people who look away.

Not every participant possesses equal power. Not everyone understands the full consequence of what they are helping to create. Some act under coercion, duty, fear or obedience. Responsibility is therefore not simple, but neither is participation meaningless. Rubens places that difficulty before us in flesh.

For Christians, the day commemorated as Good Friday presents a linguistic contradiction before its theology is even considered. A man is betrayed, arrested, humiliated, tortured and executed, and the day is called good.

The word does not mean that the violence itself is good. Christianity does not require the nails to become merciful or the execution to become morally desirable. The designation comes from what Christians believe follows from Christ's death: reconciliation, salvation and, ultimately, Resurrection. Good Friday therefore asks the believer to hold two realities together. Something terrible happens. Christianity nevertheless finds redemptive meaning through it.

There is a dangerous temptation whenever suffering and meaning are placed too closely together. If something meaningful eventually emerges from pain, we can begin to speak as though the pain was therefore necessary. If suffering produces courage, wisdom, solidarity or transformation, we can retrospectively make the suffering itself sound valuable.

But meaning after suffering is not the same as justification for suffering.

A person may build an extraordinary life after grief without the grief becoming good. Someone may discover strength after injustice without the injustice becoming necessary. A community may become more compassionate after catastrophe without the catastrophe deserving gratitude. What comes after pain can transform its meaning without changing what the pain was.

Rubens's painting protects this distinction because he refuses to beautify the Crucifixion into abstraction. Whatever Christians believe this death will mean, the painting insists that we first look at what is being done. The wood is heavy. The body is vulnerable. The men are still lifting.

There is another reason Rubens's choice of moment matters. We know what comes next.

Anyone familiar with the Christian story approaches Good Friday with knowledge unavailable within the moment itself. The Crucifixion will be followed by burial. Good Friday will be followed by Easter Sunday. Death will not have the final word.

That knowledge can become a form of escape. It is possible to move so quickly towards Resurrection that the Crucifixion becomes merely a necessary stage on the way to triumph. Easter can swallow Friday, but Rubens does not allow it. There is no empty tomb in this painting. There is no risen Christ. There is not even the terrible stillness of death.

The cross is still moving. The viewer is held inside the act before its theological resolution becomes visible. We know what comes next, but the painting does not let us use that knowledge to escape what is happening now.

There are moments in human life when meaning is visible only retrospectively. While we are inside grief, displacement, failure, rejection or loss, we do not possess the completed story. Other people may tell us that something good will come, that suffering will make us stronger, that there is a reason for what has happened. Sometimes they may eventually be right, but the person inside the moment does not yet know that.

Good Friday occupies that interval. Christianity places hope beyond the Crucifixion, but Rubens paints before hope has become visible.

The physical force of The Elevation of the Cross makes distance difficult. Rubens constructs the central panel around the enormous diagonal of the cross. The composition seems to strain upward with the men lifting it. Christ's pale body catches the light while much of the surrounding action emerges from shadow. Every element pushes the eye towards the same upward movement.

But elevation here is not triumph. The higher the cross rises, the closer the execution comes to completion.

That inversion gives the painting much of its power. Upward movement so often carries positive associations: ascent, transcendence, victory, heaven. Rubens turns ascent into something terrible. The physical elevation of Christ is simultaneously his public exposure and approaching death, and yet Christianity will later understand this same cross as a sign of salvation.

One movement therefore carries incompatible meanings. The cross rises towards death and will become a symbol of life. Neither meaning cancels the other.

This is why the physical labour of the men matters so much. Their bodies prevent theology from floating away from history. Whatever the Crucifixion ultimately means within Christianity, it enters the world through material things: wood, rope, muscle, blood and human decision. The divine is not protected from the conditions of human violence. It is subjected to them.

There is a natural desire to move beyond suffering. We want the diagnosis followed by recovery, the rejection followed by opportunity, the injustice followed by vindication, the grief followed by peace. We want to know what the terrible thing was for.

Sometimes an answer comes. Sometimes it does not.

The danger lies in demanding redemption so quickly that we stop seeing suffering on its own terms. A theology of hope can become cruel if it requires a person in pain to explain what their pain will eventually produce.

Rubens offers no such explanation to the body on the cross. He paints the Friday.

This is why the painting can speak beyond the boundaries of Christian belief without requiring the Christian meaning of Good Friday to be diluted. A viewer does not have to share the theology of the Crucifixion to recognise the questions Rubens places before them. What do human beings become responsible for when they participate in systems larger than themselves? What happens when suffering is given meaning afterwards? Can we believe that something lies beyond pain without using that belief to look away from the pain in front of us?

Good Friday gives Christianity its own answer to the last question. Resurrection will come.

But not yet.

Rubens's cross remains suspended in the act of becoming what history will remember. Men still push from below. Others pull from above. Christ's body rises with the wood. The future meaning of the event is enormous, but none of it makes the wood lighter. None of it makes the violence good. And none of it releases the men from having to lift.

The cross is still moving.