Would you wear a piece of jewellery in the shape of an electric chair? Or perhaps a noose and gallows? Unless you have a particularly macabre fashion taste, I suspect the answer would be no. After all why would you wear a symbol of torture and execution? But that is precisely what many people do by wearing a cross. Crucifixion was the cruel Roman method of execution that they reserved for the very worst criminals, yet the cross quickly became the symbol of the underground movement that made up the early church.
We have an unusual situation this year with Good Friday being in a different month to Easter Sunday, so we have the opportunity to focus on Jesus' death this month before thinking about his resurrection next month.
We're so used to seeing crosses around that we've lost the shock of what it represents. The early church chose not to celebrate Jesus' amazing miracles nor even his wise teachings but his death, and it wasn't a heroic or serene death but a shameful, criminal's death. If the early church wanted to commend their new faith to the world dominated by the Romans, emphasising Jesus' crucifixion is not the best way to start. But that is what they did. Why?
Well the simple answer is because the crucifixion is the centre of the Christian faith; it is the literal and metaphorical crux of Christianity. Paul wrote that he “resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). He knew that this would be a shocking message, writing “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:22-23). The Jews were expecting a Messiah who would kick the Romans out of Israel, not one who was killed by them! And the Gentiles (non-Jews) wanted a highly intellectual philosophy not the story of a man who rejected by his own people! Those who saw the cross as a stumbling-block and foolishness agreed with the Jewish religious leaders who mocked the dying Jesus: “‘He saved others,’ they said, ‘but he can’t save himself! He’s the king of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him’” (Matthew 27:42-43).
But the deeper reason why people then and now reject the message of Christ crucified is because it reminds us of a very uncomfortable truth: that we are sinners who need saving. Paul reminds us that all of us have sinned and fallen short of God's standard (Romans 3:23) (and if we are honest we fall short of our own standards too) and the punishment for sin is death (Romans 6:23), eternal separation from God. And because of our sin we are helpless to save ourselves. But the good news is that “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood – to be received by faith” (Romans 3:25), that's what it means to say that Christ died for our sins.
Christ crucified means that we cannot be saved by our own moral or religious efforts, but only because Jesus died in our place. The pathetic-looking figure on the cross is the solution to the world's problems, but only when we recognise our own pathetic-ness, let go of our pretensions to goodness and rejoice that “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
