If you find it difficult to 'explain' the cross to others, you are in good company. The cross rivals calculus and theoretical physics for making our heads spin. (You can tell I am neither mathematician or scientist, right?)
Crucifixion is an inhumane, albeit effective, form of torture and execution. It was used by a powerful nation as a deterrent (questionable effectiveness) and a solution (always effective). Anyone looking at a poor victim hanging on that cross would conclude that 'there must be a better way.' The fact that the one we call Son of God, the Savior and Anointed One was executed in this manner defies logic for most of us.
Yet there it is.
In the middle of our gathering, at the center of our worship, there is the cross. It is the great coincidence of opposites: death and life in one. We believe that Jesus took on the evil of his time and, although it appeared at first that the Powerful Ones had won, the tomb was empty and Jesus was alive. By his great sacrifice, Jesus defeated the one thing we fear above all others - death.
It is around the cross, where Jesus turned the end into a new beginning that we gather to hear again a word that gives us strength and hope. This word convinces us that through this Jesus our Creator God is doing a new thing - something never before imagined. God is making a new creation, offering a life that is not like the old broken one but a new life that empties the tombs and creates a new community.
When we begin to grasp that all of this was given out of love as a gift, we too ask with the psalmist, "What are human beings that you are mindful of them? Mortals that you care for them?
Jesus says, Come to me. Trust in me. Believe in me. Live as I live. Forgive as I forgive. Care for one another as I care for you. Be brother and sister to each other so that life might truly be life and not the crazy, dangerous game it is now.
Come to me Jesus says, and I will show you a more excellent way for God is doing a new thing in me.
There is much that I cannot explain, but this I know: without Jesus and the kind of grace that loves the unlovable and embraces the pariah and binds up the wounds of the guilty, we would be lost.....I would be lost.
I do not understand the cross, but I cling to the Jesus who died there.
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