What do you see when you look at the cross?

What does the cross mean to me when I look at it? What the cross mean to us as a congregation, faith community? It is a question that was put to me earlier this week in a chat that I use a part of my sermon prep. I can remember people being horrified by the movie, “The Passion of the Christ’ and its well documented violence and brutality... but what I find we often missed is the last moments of the movie, and of the Passion narratives themselves. Jesus is raised from death and leaves the tomb. I have placed the video from Youtube for you to watch and would encourage you to do so before you and I continue...

So often, we tend to forget that the plan for salvation was God’s idea. Jesus was born in a stable, to a faithful couple who were open to what God was planning to do in the life of their child, even thought it was hard to see and difficult to understand much less explain to anyone else. The disciples were in that same boat. They could see that God was doing something marvelous in the world through Jesus. They had their own thoughts on who Jesus was and what Jesus should do – to the point where one of them betrayed him into the hands of the authorities to try and force him into open war and rebellion as a way of trying to make a new world and a new life by force. Another disciple, after promising that he would be faithful to follow even though only the two of them be left to face death together, denies that he even knows the man he vowed to follow into the gates of death and hell. God chose the way that salvation is provided for us. God chose the method. God chose the time. Christ chose the nails.    

So when you look at the cross, what do you see? When I regard the cross, I remember him who possessed it as a throne. I see God’s mercy in the face of hostility. I see and hear forgiveness when pain is inflicted. I discover and possess grace for the time of suffering and brutality. I hear and experience the cry of accomplishment and victory at the completion of the mission. I know the helpfulness of community and am grateful for the hospitality of a borrowed tomb. Most of all, I see that the cross and the tomb are empty and that he who died, lives to be with us.

If that is foolishness to the world, so be it. It is self serving and self destructive to think only of one’s self and serve only number one. If you believe that you are fine and that you don’t need God or the community which he calls his own then I suspect that God will honour that choice. If the sight of the cross and the one who occupied it for your sake cannot make you see that he has your lumber and nails; that he has taken on himself your stripes and pain on himself, then you must be truly good and lost. And you have my pity.

God chose the foolish thing to confound the wise and the weakest way possible to make the strong stumble. Was it foolish for God to love us and to choose the nails? I believe that God deliberately chose to love us and to receive the nails. Those amongst the people of the world who would see, hear and respond to him and use the foolish/weak/the thing that are not to nullify the things that are wise/strong/that are seemingly permanent by the worldly standards. Those people are you and me, as God works out salvation among all his people. And he does it to make sure that this world will one day find itself upright and the way it was intended to be, as it was in the beginning.

So what do you see now, when you look at the cross?

Jason+