The CROSS or THE CRUCIFIX?
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There is no true Christianity without Jesus on the cross. It is His death on the cross that makes Heaven possible. THIS IS WHY we need a crucifix in sight always, in our homes but most especially in our hearts. This is where we unite ourselves to HIM, in love.
The temptation is to take Jesus off the cross, just as those at His crucifixion taunted Him , Luke 23:37 they called out, “If you are King of the Jews, save yourself.”38 Above him there was an inscription that read, “This is the King of the Jews.”39* Now one of the criminals hanging there reviled Jesus, saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us.”
We are also tempted to reject our crosses, and ask to be taken off as well, echoing "save yourself and us."
It is Jesus' corpus that makes a cross THE CRUCIFIX, our crosses only have redemptive power when we unite ours to HIS. This is the distinction between a cross and the crucifix, if our crosses were not connected to HIS we would be building our own tower of babel to heaven, in that case it would be the heresy of "works" as many protestants claim of Catholicism. Many miss out of participating in the redemptive power of suffering when the suffering is not "offered up" in union with The one and only crucifix on which IS JESUS.
The image above is called COMPASSION, painted by William A, Bouguereau in 1897 after suffering immense personal grief from losing four of his five children and his wife over the preceding decades. It depicts well not Bouguereau but someone representing all of humanity embracing and uniting our cross with Christ on The Cross. We do well to meditate on it, for there we will have an option to participate.