A Strange Decoration
Crosses dot our skyline, decorate our necks and form the central focus of many a church building. How strange to have incorporated the Roman Empire’s most barbarous instrument of torture as a feature of our worship and architecture. Think guillotine, electric chair or hangman’s noose and imagine such a thing adorning an upright citizen’s neckline in polite company. You get the point: the cross was a symbol of shame, condemnation and violent, painful extermination. The crucified formed the garbage heap of society.
The Christian faith is unique. Its central vision is not of philosophers pouring over books or incense addled monks crying at the heavens but of the cross and the horrific death of an obscure and abandoned Galilean teacher.
Until Jesus no one had ever conceived of the worship of a crucified man. Yet there was the prophet Isaiah 700 years before, painting a deep picture of a suffering servant and a redeeming Messiah. Isaiah’s vision pulls into sharp focus on Good Friday.
Good Friday has to be the holiest day of the year for Christians so make sure, whatever you are doing, to take time to remember the cross and Christ’s sacrifice.
Here’s a couple of things to help us remember:
“God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” 2 Cor 5:19
This is how God wants us to see him: “God was in Christ”
The cross is scandalous and foolish in the eyes of secular philosophy and religious devotion as Paul makes clear (1 Cor 1:23). Yet it is in the blood and ignominy of a Roman execution that the God who made the world makes himself known to us. When we look at the cross, we see profoundly what God wants us to know about himself:
The creator of the universe loves us and wants us for His own.
The author of all things restricts himself to the limitation and vulnerabilities of human flesh and bone, even to undergo a tragic miscarriage of human justice and physical pain.
The one who made the cosmos with a word is prepared to be humiliated beaten up and blamed for the sum total of human stupidity and sin.
This is our God!
This is what God does: “reconciling the world to himself”
The cross not only makes God known but is the means by which he reclaims and restores all things.
It is here that God, Father Son and Spirit work most crucially to give life to the dead and redeem the whole creation.
It is here that evil is completely judged and defanged:
Brian Zahnd says:
“Golgotha is where all the great crimes of humanity- pride, rivalry, blame, violence, domination, war, empire – are dragged into the searing light of divine judgement“
This is the power of God today “and giving us the message of reconciliation”
The achievement of the cross is historical truth: the moment when the foundations of the world shifted, the time when pardon, victory and the judgment of God upon evil was achieved. But there is more.
The cross remains the most powerful active agent right now in the world.
As the wonderful Fleming Rutledge puts in her book about the cross
“The gospel is not inert: it has power to evoke both faith and action”
God speaks, imparting faith and understanding through our inarticulate, stumbling communication and cutting through by the Spirit into the human heart. God’s word is living and active, the message of the cross is charged with its own power.
The message of the cross is the greatest story ever told – may we be gripped by it, caught up in it, and proclaim it with joy, this Easter and beyond!