The Christian scholarly tradition universally applied all of this chapter of Isaiah to Christ himself; in particular, it affirmed that Christ was “like a chosen arrow” hidden in God’s quiver when he grew to life in Mary’s virginal womb.³⁷ The liturgy of 24 June, in singing that John the Baptist was the “chosen arrow” hidden in God’s quiver, was a startling example of how liturgical use could proclaim new dimensions of meaning in scriptural texts. Such hyperbole was an appropriate gift to John on his birthday. It reminded all how close John, the messenger (angelus: Mark 1:2) and the preacher par excellence, was to his cousin, Christ: if Gabriel’s name indicated that he personified “fortitudo Dei,” the courage or strength of God, John’s name indicated that he represented “him who was full of grace, or the grace of God.”³⁸ It was to emphasize the unique closeness between the cousins that the church had constructed the Christian solar cycle, centered on the solstices and equinoxes, that we have already discussed. Placed as it is, the archer image provides a vivid metaphor for what was central to the visitation scene: the hidden presence, and mutual recognition, of these two “chosen arrows.” The archer panel made it impossible for a monastic audience to ignore the physicality of the visitation scene just below it. There the sculptor concentrates on the moment when both mothers spontaneously react to John who, leaping for silent joy within Elizabeth’s womb, has physically proclaimed Christ’s presence. The archer panel insists that this dramatic moment should be understood, not as a static isolated “icon,” but as a crucial stage in the historic process that had already transformed the history of those “islands” at the end of the earth, Ireland and Britain, and of that “people from far off,” the Northumbrians. The archer, a heroic image, emphasizes that Christians are always called to be heroic: not merely to understand history, but to change it. The archer panel, encapsulating the dynamism of this side of the cross-shaft, encourages a monastic audience to remember that the annunciation (at the foot of the shaft: 25 March) would, after the visitation, lead first to the midsummer nativity of John the Baptist (24 June),³⁹ then six months later to the midwinter nativity of Christ (25 December), and thus to Christ’s heroic victory over death (25 March). Although there is no sundial on the Ruthwell Cross the sun’s yearly course, marking the seasons by solstices and equinoxes, is central to its meaning.

Between annunciation and visitation the designer juxtaposed two images of encounter with Christ (fig. 10b). First, just above the annunciation panel Christ heals the man blind from birth (John 9:1-38), an image of conversion; then, above it and just below the visitation panel, the woman who was a sinner kneels at the feet of Christ (Luke 7:36-50), an image of repentance. The long captions for these panels quote from the appropriate Gospel pericopes, each of which has Lenten associations. The healing of the man blind from birth in Saint John’s Gospel (9:1-38) was chanted on Wednesday of the fourth week in Lent, at a major ceremony (the “opening of the ears” or apertio aurium) in which the catechumens preparing for Easter baptism were symbolically presented with the four Gospels.⁴⁰ The high relief sculpture represents the dramatic moment when Christ, having mixed earth with his own spittle, anoints the sightless eyes of the man born blind. Like the archangel Gabriel in the panel just below, Christ leans forward slightly. A thin incised line runs from Christ’s right hand to the blind man’s face: a rod may originally have been attached along this line, to represent, in a vivid three-dimensional image, the rod with which Christ applied to the blind man’s eyes earth that he had mixed with his spittle. The sculptor followed early Christian iconography and, in concentrating on the moment of anointing, focused our attention on an action that symbolized the incarnation. Augustine had seen Christ’s mixing of his own spittle with (adam-like) earth as symbolizing the way in which Christ had, in his own person, forever unified the divine with the human: “And we were born blind from Adam, and we have need of him who enlightens. He mixed saliva with earth: ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.’”⁴¹

The lection telling of the woman who was a sinner (Luke 7:36-50) was read just before Lent. Gregory the Great, followed by Bede, identified this repentant woman with Mary Magdalen. Thus the Ruthwell community would have seen this vivid scene as beginning a major spiritual biography: the repentant love which here brought her forgiveness would lead Mary Magdalen to stand by the cross on Good Friday (John 19:25), and, on Easter Sunday, to be commanded by the risen Christ to announce the resurrection to the apostles (John 20:17).⁴² The Ruthwell titulus emphasizes how intense her repentance was: “She brought an alabaster box of ointment, and standing behind, (beside) his feet, she began to moisten his feet with tears, and with the hair of her own head she wiped (them)” (Luke 7:37-8). These verses were paraphrased in a Roman antiphon sung on Holy Thursday, the day when public sinners who, in order to do Lenten penance, had been formally “expelled” from the church on Ash Wednesday, were reconciled to the Church in time to celebrate Good Friday and Easter as members of the Christian community.⁴³ The sculptor has skewed Christ’s legs towards the right of the panel so that both of his feet are visible (fig. 10b). Mary’s intent face bends over his right foot to bathe it with her tears, while she stretches out her right arm and hand to dry his left foot with a smooth hank of her hair. Mary Magdalen responds here to Christ’s humanity, symbolised by his feet, with an intense love which will lead her, as the great contemplative, to worship his divinity by anointing his head (Mark 14:3, 8; Matt 26:7). As Bede put it,

By our Lord’s head, which Mary anointed, is represented the sublimity of his divinity, and by his feet the humility of his incarnation. We anoint his feet when we proclaim with due praise the mystery of the incarnation which he took upon himself, we anoint his head when we venerate the loftiness of his divinity with an assent that is worthy of being spoken of.⁴⁴

The Ruthwell designer created a sequence of five panels (including the archer) which, of all early medieval sculpture, most coherently celebrates how Christ’s incarnation provides a model for the catechumenate and the rites of Christian initiation (fig. 9b). During the Lenten scrutinies of the catechumens the bishop told them that “already [in Lent] having conceived you the pregnant Church rejoices,”⁴⁵ and images of pregnancy and new birth predominated in the baptismal ceremonies of the Easter vigil. Pope Leo I the Great (440-61) repeatedly linked the rebirth of the Christian neophytes from the baptismal font to Christ’s birth from Mary’s womb:

He placed in the font of Baptism that very origin which he had assumed in the Virgin’s womb. He gave to the water what he had given to his Mother. For, the same power of the Most High and overshadowing of the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35) that caused Mary to bear the Saviour makes the water bring the believer to new birth.⁴⁶

At Ruthwell the annunciation and visitation panels provide an enclosing envelope, a symbolic womb for the central images, of conversion and repentance. Not only are the blind man and Mary Magdalen represented at the moment when they come to spiritual birth, they are also represented at the moment when they, like the Virgin, begin to bring Christ to birth, when they begin to be a “brother and a sister and a mother” to Christ.⁴⁷ On Easter morning the angels addressed Mary Magdalen simply as “woman” (John 20:13), and, when he appears to her, Christ at first also calls her “woman” (v. 15); only then, when she tells him she is seeking for Christ’s body, does he call her by her name, “Mary” (v. 16) for the first time in the scene. Saint Ambrose saw in this an image of how all spiritual growth, for men as well as for women, meant re-enacting the Virgin Mary’s role at the incarnation: “when she did not believe, she was ‘woman’; when she begins to be converted, she is called ‘Mary’: that is, she receives her name who brings Christ to birth, for now she is a soul who spiritually brings forth Christ.”⁴⁸

It is possible that the original transom of the Ruthwell Cross, which has never been found, represented a baptismal scene, possibly John baptizing Christ in the Jordan: later cross-transoms, representing such scenes, have survived from Northumbria.⁴⁹ Above the transom the small panel at the head of the cross has survived: this fragment was mistakenly reversed in the nineteenth-century restoration. It depicts an eagle, with hooked beak, clinging to a vine-scroll: in baptism the youth of the neophytes was renewed “like that of the eagle.”⁵⁰ In the context of a baptismal scene on the transom the eagle, another image of life renewed, would have brought to an appropriate climax the profound meditation, on this side of the cross, on how the stages of Christian initiation re-enacted those of Christ’s incarnation and birth.

Continuing sunwise around the cross we come to the second narrow side, which probably faced south originally (fig. 12). Like the opposite narrow side it is covered by a great inhabited vine-scroll. The titulus for the vine-scroll on this southern side of the lower stone brings the vernacular verse crucifixion-narrative to its conclusion. Once more the designer has carefully edited the titulus to form two great columns of runes, each of them a coherent sentence. The first runs across the top of the lower stone, and then down the right hand side of the vine-scroll:

Christ was on the cross [+ krist wæs on ro_di]

But eager ones came thither from afar

noble ones came together: I beheld all that:

I was terribly afflicted with sorrows:

     I bowed {to the hands of the men}⁵¹

The first clause of this sentence encapsulates in four words the reason why the symbol of the cross has always been central to Christian liturgy and art. In this epitome the poet uses the technical word for a Christian liturgical cross (ro_d, modern “rood”) for the only time in the poem: it is in bearing Christ that the Cross, fulfilling its destiny, is revealed as a rood. On the other side of the cross, the poem had begun with a theophany of the courage, at once human and divine, of “Almighty God” as revealed in Christ, “brave before all men.” This second side begins with a double epiphany of how the Rood “raises up” Christ (cf. John 12:32): at this point both the Rood and Christ (Greek Christos, “the anointed one,” “the Messiah”) are named by their true titles for the only time in the poem. After this epiphany everything in the poem changes: this second titulus methodically reverses the themes of the first. On the opposite (north) side, the Cross and Christ were together mocked by their enemies; now Christ’s followers hasten from afar to the Cross. Referring to Christ’s prophecy in John 12:32 that “if I be raised up from the earth, I will draw all things to myself,” the poet has created a poetic narrative of how each Christian community is created by being drawn together around Christ crucified (ecclesia derives from “calling together”).⁵² In the first titulus the Cross was required to stand immobile and to kill its Lord, but now, in an image that has no parallel in medieval art, literature, or theology, the Cross bows down to present the body of Christ to his gathered followers.

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