THE CRUX OF THE MATTER
There were those who would apologize for the preaching of the cross but Paul wasn’t one of them.
He said “We Preach Christ crucified”—we don’t whisper it. “We preach Christ crucified,” said J.H. Jowett “we don’t timidly submit it for subdued discussion in the academic grove; we don’t offer it to the hands of exclusive circles—we preach it, we stand out like the town-crier in the public way, and we proclaim it to the common and indiscriminate crowd.”
Lothar Coenen reminds us that in classical times, the kerux (the preacher), was the person who was commissioned by his ruler or the state to call out some item of news to the public with a distinct, clear voice. Despite some differences in function and self-understanding, that’s what the early church did. They stood out in public and with loud voices so that everyone could hear they preached about a crucified Christ and thought they were saving the world (1 Corinthians 1:21)!
The Cross and Our Changed Lives
“We preach Christ crucified,” he said—we don’t preach our own commitment or holy lives. In 2 Corinthians 4:5, in the face of those who loved the limelight, he said “we proclaim not ourselves; we proclaim Christ Jesus as Lord.” And why not, since he is the Lord and Savior! Our changed lives are no substitute for the life and death of Jesus Christ so we mustn’t offer our moral and spiritual attainment as a necessary proof of the cross. It isn’t our transformed lives that make the cross the moral and spiritual center of the universe. It’s the cross that creates our transformed lives as a witness to the true moral and spiritual center of the universe—Jesus Christ and him crucified.
But to the degree that we have experienced it, we shouldn’t hesitate to thank God for and speak of the way he has changed our lives. This transformation is part of the proof of the truth of the gospel because it makes Christ’s cosmic victory concrete in local places. But it can’t stand alone and it must not be made a substitute for or a topic that hides the cross events themselves. What transforms us and shapes our lives is the cross. In a very real sense our lives don’t validate the gospel but the gospel makes sense of our lives.
It’s true that we need more than words about the cross if we’re to make the whole gospel known all around us. Along with the message and Bible study we must have discipleship and outreach because this too is an aspect of the redeeming work of Christ. But it is the Christ himself that we speak and sing and pray and live. If we hide him behind our fine lives and gentle ways and lovely marriages and families we are obscuring the gospel by which the world and we are saved.
We preach CHRIST...and we preach him CRUCIFIED
“We preach Christ crucified”—we don’t preach the crucifixion of Christ. It isn’t the crucifixion that gives glory to Christ but Christ that gives meaning and glory to the crucifixion. It isn’t a deed we proclaim but a person who embraced and accomplished the deed we call the crucifixion. It isn’t the bare act of dying we proclaim but the person who accomplished the dying. It isn’t the bare act of dying we proclaim but the meaning and purpose and effects of that act of dying.
Nevertheless, it is Christ crucified that we preach. While in John 10:18 Jesus insisted that no one robbed him of his life and that he chose to follow the will of his Father by laying it down, he was still seized and killed.
This was no death of old age or “natural causes”. It would be a tragedy to underestimate how much is revealed in the incarnation but it would also be a calamity to short-circuit the meaning of the incarnation but it would also be a calamity to short-circuit the meaning of the incarnation by avoiding the cross. Luther raged against the theologians of glory who wanted all the sweetness and light of logic but exorcised the cross.
To reject the cross as the critical point of the revelation and work of God is to create a god in our own image. Whatever else the cross says, it says that God will not be boxed-in; he will reveal himself as he is and not as we determine he can or cannot be. The united witness of the whole biblical corpus is to be given its place but the cross is the peak from which everything is to be surveyed and understood.
The crucifixion wasn’t merely a way of dying it was a kind of dying; it was violent death at the hands of transgressors. It was humanity conspiring to do away with the unique Son of God and by doing so revealing unfathomed depths to our sin. On the other hand it was the supreme act of obedience in the life of a holy Son that crowned and completed his self-offering to his Holy Father as humanity’s redeeming representative (Philippians 2:8).
His death was more than something he and his Father agreed would take place, it was a purposed attack on the satanic kingdom. Revelation 12:11 in an outburst of joyful praise tells us the followers of Christ overcame Satan “by the blood of the Lamb”. Not by his pitying love, not by his warm affection, not by his tolerance and bravery, not by his sweet words and true teaching, but by his blood! All these other things must be taken up into that death or that death doesn't deal with the world's destructive sinfulness. But all these things must be taken up into his death because his death was the crowning moment of his life; it was the point at which he offered all that he was and did and meant to do on our behalf. It was there he willingly shared with his sinful human family the worst that the world-spirit could do--death!
However it's to be spelled out, the death of Christ is the judgment of God against the sin of a whole humanity. Jesus’ death was not so much his getting what we deserved, as it is the Holy Father getting what he deserved. What Christ ceaselessly offered his Holy Father in his daily living is brought to focus in a cross that consummated his holy obedient life. In the cross we see God getting what he deserved; what humans should always give and have given him. Finally and completely a human gave to God, as an obedient child, what the Holy Father was worthy of.
His wasn’t only a death that spoke the judgment of God against sin and offered to God his holy due, it was tasted “for” (on behalf of) every person (Hebrews 2:9). It was as Scots theologian P.T. Forsyth said, for every person, from every person, as every person and, because he was always alone except for Him who never left him; it was apart from every person. He died alone in a sense in which it wasn’t possible for anyone else to die alone.
We make much of his death. How could we do otherwise? We speak of its glory, its power, its love and heroism—all true but in a very real sense it was “just another death”. Though we now know differently, at that time and for so many on that day the crucifixion was nothing they hadn’t seen or heard of before; it was back to the daily grind once the initial hubbub died away. “He tasted the average man’s death, not the hero’s alone but the death of the little man. He tasted death from a generation of vipers. It was death by sickly candlelight in a little house in a back street among miles of them. It was death made cheap, death for the million.
It was that cheap and ordinary death that the church proclaimed because for all its ordinariness it was the most momentous event in human history.
Glory in a Public Lynching
Of all the things Paul could have boasted in who would have thought, in light of his early years, that he would ever have said this? “But no boasting for me, none, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I crucified to the world.” (Galatians 6:14,Moffatt) He’d seen and heard a lot. He’d seen many fabulous temples such as those of Artemis and Aphrodite, magnificent Greek sculpture, Roman legions and endless miles of Roman roads. He’d been to famous place like Thermopylae where 300 Spartans galvanized the Greek world into war that shook the kingdom of mighty Xerxes to fragments. He was well acquainted with Herod the Great’s astonishing temples and shrines and fortresses. He had heard Greek orators, knew about the great philosophers and poets and perhaps could have been the class valedictorian under Gamaliel. He’d even been to heaven! The great Moses only went up a mountain and heard things he could repeat but Paul went into heaven itself and heard things too wonderful to repeat. He know his heritage and the glory that had been the Maccabean era when a little army the size of a postage stamp drove Antiochus IV out of his mind, but none of that captured his imagination or sent him careering all over the creation. If it had all been pieced together in one sequence and filmed in Technicolor it wouldn’t have made any different. “No boasting for me, none, except…”
There was an exception. Not only would he boast in that, no one could get him to stop his boasting in it. And what was it he strode half way across the world bragging about? What is it that set him on fire that he cared so little about his life that he left pints of his blood on the outskirts of every town in Asia Minor? Well? What was it?
A public lynching on a public gallows!
This Paul said he would brag on. This and nothing else! In light of the shame that was attached to death on a cross the irony in it is so thick you could cut it with a knife and spread it like butter on toast.
The Enduring Power of the Cross
The cross of Christ isn’t an apology! And we aren’t’ to talk about it as though we were continually apologizing. We aren’t to talk about it as if we wanted people to “pity poor Jesus for what we did to him.” The cross can speak for itself and has been doing that for millennia and it has been burying false gods and half-gods everywhere it was truly seen.
Heinrich Heine, German-born poet and literary figure, after quoting the Homeric description of the feasting gods, says: “Then suddenly approached, panting, a pale Jew with drops of blood on his brow, with a crown of thorns on his head, and a great cross laid on his shoulders: and he threw the cross on the high table of the gods so that the golden cups tottered and the gods become dumb and pale, and grew even paler till at last they melted away into vapor.”
Apologize for that?
I love it that every Sunday millions across the planet, in the Lord's Supper, "proclaim the Lord's death until he comes."
1 Corinthians 11:26
[I borrowed from a little book of mine called THE DRAGON SLAYER. If you'd like to purchse it I know someone who'd be pleased to sell you one. Write her at: weaverbethann@gmail.com]
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.