JohnCalvinYoung.com

Around Easter, in either late March or early April, the dog­woods around my home in North Carolina and my school in Virginia burst into bloom. Although they come in many dif­fer­ent col­ors, white, cream, pink, and near-orange, it is the deep pink/red ones which are my favorite, for they have a story behind them.

As you will find if you ever have to cut down a dead dog­wood tree, the wood is a beau­ti­ful thing. It’s a clear, smooth pink hard­wood, with a fra­grant scent—a wood seem­ingly excel­lent for any of a num­ber of projects. But if you look closely at the trees, you see that there are very few branches larger than a half inch, and the trunk and major branches both are short and branch often, leav­ing few straight sec­tions suit­able for any­thing big­ger than minor wood­crafts. But the leg­end states that the dog­wood was not always this way. Supposedly, the dog­wood was once a tall, straight tree, easy to grow and easy to work. So easy, in fact, that the rough cross hacked out for Jesus’s exe­cu­tion was cut from a dog­wood. In pun­ish­ment (or com­mem­o­ra­tion, depend­ing on how you look at it), the Lord remade the dog­wood, mak­ing it a low, twist­ing, largely orna­men­tal tree, so that never again could it be used for a pur­pose so heinous.

Its flow­ers and blood-red berries are also said to carry a memo­r­ial. In the dead of win­ter, in the sea­son of our Savior’s birth, you will notice almost alone among the trees the dog­wood stands laden down with deep red berries that sus­tain birds and other beasts through the worst of the win­ter. And then when Easter comes, its del­i­cate flow­ers open at last, a storm of creamy petals, mostly in pure white and a red-tinged pink. Each flower tells the story, for at the edge of every smooth petals appears a wound or scar, mar­ring the per­fect beauty of the four petals with a sym­bol of Christ’s hands, feet, and side. A wash of red, like blood, stains each white petal. In the cen­ter of the flower* appears a crown of thorns. These spec­tac­u­lar flow­ers appear typ­i­cally shortly before Easter and stay for a short period, then fall in a rain of vel­vet petals, leav­ing the “crown” to bear fruit for the next winter.

Do we know what tree the cross was made from? No, we don’t. Is it even impor­tant? No, of course not. But like the sham­rock, every sym­bol we can find in cre­ation is worth remem­ber­ing that all cre­ation cries out to remind us of the truth? And like Lewis’s Ransom, with a God like ours, how can we be sure of coin­ci­dence? When we con­sider the love and pur­pose of God, how can we say the dog­wood was not orig­i­nally cre­ated like that to remind even one of us, when we walk among the red-tinged flow­ers at Easter, of the true story and mean­ing of the sea­son? In this way does the hum­ble dog­wood memo­ri­al­ize Christ’s death until this world shall pass away.

* tech­ni­cally, the dog­wood bears inflo­rations, flower clus­ters with bracts, but we’ll call them flow­ers for now.