As we head up towards Easter: What’s the cross about? What do I learn from it? What fuel for worship does it give me?
Some of us may have a cross around our necks, or attached to our ears. How would we answer this question – just what is so wonderful about the cross?
It’s a vital question because the cross (and resurrection that’s part and parcel of it!) is the heart of Christian faith. There are so many fantastic things in our faith: the sermon on the mount, for example, is wonderful and radical – but it’s not the ultimate heart of Christian faith. Pentecost was fantastic, and one could say it transformed history even more than Jesus did on earth; but it’s not the ultimate heart of our faith. What we preach above all, says Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:22-23, is not first of all ideas, or signs or wonders, but `Christ crucified`. `I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified`, he adds in 1 Cor 2:2. `What I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures`, he says as he reminds Corinth of just what the `gospel` of `first importance` is in 1 Cor 15:1-40. In fact John 12:23-33 shows us that the cross, this incredibly profound and fascinating event at the centre of human history, is the ultimate revelation of the glory of God (so too Revelation 5:9). And so this is what is celebrated in our central sacraments of communion and baptism. If we really grasp the cross we’ll have really grasped the heart of Christian faith, the heart of what God is like, the heart of what human history is about, and the heart of how we should live. (Except: none of us will ever grasp it entirely; and we’ll be exploring it throughout eternity!)
So let’s recap this incredible story, rooted as it is in the blood and violence of the worst of human suffering, and far more besides as Jesus goes to the very bottom of the pit for us. Just why did he die? He need not have done, after all. He could have escaped, and then gone on teaching, instructing, healing. Indeed, until just a little before, Jesus has demonstrated his identity by wonderful supernatural healings, by casting out demons, by proclaiming truth as it had never been proclaimed before. And He enters Jerusalem triumphantly. And then suddenly, there’s a change of tone. There’s the agonising event in Gethsemane where Jesus sweats blood as he knows he is facing hell on our behalf, and his human body simply revolts against it; and he asks his Father, Is there no other way, then saying, Father I will do it if it’s Your will. Then he’s betrayed with a kiss; his own people who he loves arrest him; he tells them, This is your hour, when darkness reigns. It is: he’s abandoned by his closest friends, denied by Peter, sentenced to agonizing execution in a false trial when also a murderer is released instead of him, flogged and tortured, and taken away to be crucified where – as he paid for my wrongdoings, the wrongdoings of each of us – he will scream out, `My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?`
Here is what Alister McGrath says (in his brief but excellent book Making Sense of the Cross) that crucifixion was like: ` The word, which sounds neat and clinical in its precision, refers to nothing other than legalised sadism. It is probably one of the most depraved forms of execution ever devised. It is nothing other than death by slow torture. It works. No one has ever survived a crucifixion before. It certainly deters others from resisting the Romans. There is nothing like a row of crucified corpses, displayed for everyone to see along the public highway, to bring home the inevitable results of rebellion.
`Everyone knows what happens. They had been told often enough, and many have seen it for themselves. They begin by stripping the victim to the waist, and whipping him. Not with an ordinary whip, of course: it has broken pieces of bone or little pieces of rough metal tied to its ends. It tears the victims’ backs to shreds. Then they make them carry their own crosses to the place of execution… There is a kind of heavy crossbar… attached to the main upright beam. And this is what they make the victims carry to the local place of execution… It exhausts them – and it’s meant to.
`When they get them there, they strip them. That usually gets a few laughs from the crowds. Why is it that public executions attract people? Adding public humiliation to physical pain makes crucifixion especially degrading, and adds to its deterrent effect. Then they raise them up on the cross. Usually they nail them through the wrist; if you nail them through the hands, they fall off, and you have to start again. There’s a device that stops them falling off, called a sedile – a sort of small seat, about halfway up the main beam of the cross. It also stops them from dying too soon. It becomes too painful for them to breathe. Eventually, the effort is just too much, and they collapse and die of suffocation.` And this is Don Carson, in his classic commentary on Matthew: `Crucifixion was unspeakably painful and degrading… The victim endured countless paroxysms as he pulled with his arms and pushed with his legs to keep his chest cavity open for breathing, and then collapsed in exhaustion until the demand for oxygen demanded renewed paroxysms… When there was reason to hasten death, the execution squad would smash the victim’s legs. Death followed almost immediately, either from shock or from collapse that cut off breathing… In ancient sources crucifixion was universally viewed with horror. In Roman law it was reserved only for the worst criminals and lowest classes. No Roman citizen could be crucified without a direct edict from Caesar.` And we know there was yet far, far more: because Jesus was being separated from his Father, meaning he was going through nothing less than hell, unimaginable hell, on our behalf….
So much reason there for us to worship… And we’ll see more next time, as Easter draws nearer…
