The Message of the Cross
In the first Century, as Christianity was getting started, it reached out to two cultural groups. The Jews had an ancient religion with a strong sense of how God would would work in the world. The Gentiles, though they had various religious systems, were more interested in pursuing knowledge. They sought to discover the systems of nature and understand the laws that control them. As the Christian message - the message of the cross - began to spread, it faced two challenges. It did not fit with the interests and preconceived ideas of either group.
The message of the cross is more than just the fact that the Rabbi Jesus, who was identified as the Messiah, died on one. The message of the cross starts with some spiritual background. God is love, but His love is conditioned by His holiness. That is, while it is God’s nature to love, the full expression of His love was hindered by human sinfulness. That sinfulness, which characterizes all of us, prompts us to reject God’s love by refusing to conform to His purpose for us.
Out of this background, came God’s solution to the apparent impasse. The Son of God was miraculously conceived in the body of a peasant girl, was born, grew up and spent three years as a travelling rabbi. At the end of that time, He delivered Himself up to die by execution on a Roman cross. The surrender of that perfect sinless life in death satisfied the justice of God regarding the sin of humanity. Jesus made the way, the only way, for God to reconnect with His crowning earthly creation, us.
But the message of the cross does not stop there. It is a shorthand expression which includes aspects inherent in both the lead up to the moment of crucifixion and in the days immediately following. The message of the cross carries on from the triumphant cry “It is finished!” and the head bowed in death. It includes His burial in a rock-hewn tomb. It takes in the early morning events three days later when angels rolled back the stone to reveal that He had risen. It culminates in His physical ascension into heaven after 40 days of appearances to encourage and instruct His followers.
The message of the cross was first presented to two cultures, the Jews and the Greek-influenced Romans. For quite different reasons, both groups tended to reject it. The Jews would not accept Jesus as the Son of God, the Messiah, whom they conceived as a glorious triumphant warrior. The Gentiles, with their pantheon of deities, would not accept as authoritative, what seemed to them to be just one more fable concerning the gods. That God would become man – a humble man, at that – and die to make humanity acceptable to God was simply ridiculous to them.
Today people are equally dismissive of the message of the cross because it doesn’t fit with their conceptions of reality. The challenge is, do those conceptions of reality conform to reality or are they more a matter of wishful thinking. Paul admitted that the message of the cross sounds like foolishness to those who have no part in it, while to those who are being saved it is the power of God. [See 1 Corinthians 1:18]
The world can never find what it’s looking for through its own wisdom. This is because what it is looking for is God, though the world doesn’t know that up front. Those who reach beyond human wisdom and accept the message of the cross find that life becomes coherent. It makes sense. This is so because it is based on reality, not on some human ideal.
People who are out of touch with reality are sometimes labelled “insane.” Surely the ultimate form of insanity is to defiantly reject the expression of reality that God Himself presents to us. That reality is that He made us for Himself and though we have turned our back on Him, through the message of the cross, we can return to Him and find fulfillment and freedom in our relationship with our heavenly Father.
Ron Hughes
© April 2008
