Part 1: Our Aversion to the Cross
Our premise has been that church is meant to be a safe place where we discover the mercy and grace of God through His Son Jesus Christ. However, for many this has not been the case. Instead, too often church has become a place where we must put our best face on and pretend it is all going well. Church can become a place, where instead of being included and feeling understood, we feel excluded and misunderstood. I believe one of the reasons for this comes down to something that is suspiciously missing in much of the church: the preaching of the cross. The following is part 1 in a series entitled The Road Less Traveled.
The mere mention of the cross can make us somewhat uneasy because we want a gospel that makes us feel powerful, that makes us feel stronger, that underscores our personal strength and ambition, and that enables us to exert our will and shape life the way we see fit. We want a gospel that lifts us up and makes us feel better about ourselves. We want a gospel that exchanges our weakness for power, our hardships for comfort and our suffering for prosperity. We want a gospel that erases our limitations. We want the resurrection without the cross. We want Sunday without Friday. What we want is a religion. But the cross is not only non-religious, it is irreligious. The cross is scandalous.
Paul writes to the church in Corinth: For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. … For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. 1 Corinthians 1:18, 22, 23 ESV
The word in 1 Corinthians 1:23 for stumbling block in the Greek is scandalon; it is the word we get scandal/scandalous from and it can also be translated as offense as in Galatians 5:11. The cross is at the heart of the Christian faith, but to both Jew and Greek it was scandalous, it was offensive, yet for different reasons. For the Jew, death by hanging was the outward sign in Israel of being cursed by God. (Deuteronomy 21:23) It meant that the person hung had broken the Mosaic Law, and this law-breaking brought both curse and punishment. For the Gentile, the stumbling block, the offense of the cross was that the whole notion of the cross was foolishness. That God would ever allow himself to be pushed out of the world and suffer the humiliation of crucifixion was completely absurd. The cross was reserved for political insurrectionists, criminals and slaves. Why would God ever allow himself to be crucified as a common criminal or slave?
It is really no different today. Religious people are offended by the cross because it represents weakness and powerlessness and is the exact opposite of what they expect from God. For the religious man it is all about if he does it right enough then he will not suffer, will not face hardship, will not experience weakness or disappointment. And of course the secular mind is looking for proofs and data and arguments. Interestingly enough neither one wants anything to do with the cross, but here is the rub, even though we want to avoid the cross in our lives, “It is in the crucifixion that the nature of God is truly revealed,”[1] and without the cross there is no grace. I’ll put a comma right here and continue my musings next week. Thanks for taking the time to read them. Until then….
[1] Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2015), 44