A special episode just in time for Holy Week. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of the Cross of Jesus Christ. What exactly do we believe about Jesus’ death and why does it matter? Listen in and enjoy this reflection as we move towards Good Friday.
Episode 026 – SHOW NOTES – The Cross of Christ
The cross is the crux of the whole story, the unexpected plot twist… who could have seen that God would rescue by becoming the afflicted one, by becoming the judged one…
Good Friday reminds us of the costliness, the weightiness, the holiness of the sacrifice of Jesus… you can only be prepared to receive Easter Sunday morning when you’ve properly gone through Good Friday…
In our generation of outrage, we tend to want the powerful abusers to pay, and Jesus in his death is not just showing solidarity with the victims, but is paying the judgment that we demand to see from the abusers…
Sin actually does have a real impact in human life… you don’t just wave a magic wand over it and watch it go away… sin drove us away from the heart of God, and Jesus went to find us… he absorbed the weight of our failure in order to bring us back home…
We need to think of sin not just as “doing bad things” but as a power that we were enslaved to… God judged Sin in the body of Christ Jesus and in doing so rescued us from slavery…
The powers of the air exhaust themselves on Jesus, who overcomes them by the power of an indestructible life… his victory over them accrues for us…
When we talk about God being love, the cross is the ultimate demonstration of God’s love… which is exactly what Paul says… some distortions of cross-preaching make wrath primary, that it was a demonstration of how mad God was at us… but the storyline of the cross is love, not wrath…
Because God is love, he opposes everything that mars, defaces, or destroys us… the expression of that is wrath, but always the wrath is an expression of love…
People come into a Good Friday service hurting, and one of the scariest thoughts to me is that those people would think they need to leave that in the car… on Good Friday we can say “There is no place that you have ever been that Jesus has left vacant…”
RESOURCES
Athanasius – On the Incarnation
- T. Wright – The Day the Revolution Began
Fleming Rutledge – The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ