Aug 25 Tue
Should I sign myself with the Cross?
Making the Sign of the Cross should be less about habit and more about choice. If we put some mental effort into it, it can be a strategy for our whole lives.
How often I sign myself with the Cross using holy water, and within seconds (or even as I'm doing it!) have no real memory or sense of doing so!
The Bible makes no mention of making the Sign of the Cross. Instead, it offers many reminders of the importance of the Cross. The four Gospels are sometimes considered as Passion accounts preceded by long introductions. Early Christians knew well the importance of the Cross – that Jesus’ life was not about himself.
About the year 200 AD, Tertullian referred to the Sign of the Cross on the forehead as a well-established custom that was not questioned. In doing so, he showed it as a universal and deeply embedded Christian practice that likely began as a more personal devotion as early as the late first century.
Think of how a mother’s kiss supports her words, “I love you.” Similarly, Christians found a simple gesture to remind themselves of the Cross. We also know that 100 years after Tertullian, it had become a larger gesture: head–body–shoulders.
Early Greek-speaking Christians spoke of the Sign of the Cross as a sphragis, meaning seal. Roman soldiers were tattooed with a sphragis as a permanent sign of their loyalty to their general or legion.
Christians owed their allegiance to Jesus, and their seal (their sphragis) was Jesus’ Cross. Instead of a tattoo, they traced it on their foreheads and, in time, as the larger sign of head–body–shoulders, as if telling the pagans: “You used the cross to put Jesus to death and to terrorize us into submitting to your authority, but we are not afraid of you.”
When we see Jesus on the Cross, we see him not as self-serving but as serving us. His life is not only about himself.
And when we enter a church and sign ourselves with the Cross using the holy water of our baptisms, we remind ourselves, not that we were baptized, but that we are baptized with Jesus as our present-life strategy, finding our lives to be not about ourselves.
In baptism, the priest says: “Receive the Cross on your forehead. Christ himself strengthens you with the sign of your faith.”
Our concern is not that we forget to make the Sign of the Cross, but that we might trace it and then forget who we are. May our Lord Jesus remain the pattern of our lives. As we live our lives not for ourselves, but for whomever God puts near us, may Jesus’ Cross be less of a habit and more of a virtue.
“The Cross on your breast?... Very good. But the Cross on your shoulders, the Cross in your flesh, the Cross in your mind. Only then will you live for Christ, with Christ and in Christ; only then will you be an apostle."
Some excerpts from Fr. Dave Mercer, Aleteia