At a time when Korea was occupied by a foreign power, severe persecution came to Christians. Many churches were closed. Missionaries were ordered to leave. Christians were routinely imprisoned and some gave their lives for their faith. One Sunday, during this period of opposition, a small Methodist church was opened up, without explanation. So some Christians who had been in hiding came back to joyfully resume worship there. Once about 30 people were inside, the doors were slammed shut, petrol was poured on the ground around the church and it was set on fire. A squad of police surrounded the building, ready to shoot anyone who tried to escape through a window. All 29 people perished inside the burning building. They died singing the hymn that I’m told Korean believers still love to sing: Nearer my God to you, nearer to you, even though it be the cross, nearer to you.
After the Second World War, a group of Christians built a monument and engraved the names of those 29 people who were murdered in that church because of their love for Christ that day. Some years later a group of pastors from the former occupying nation visited the site. They returned to their home land and raised enough money to build a new church where the old one had been burned down. On September 27th 1970 at 3 o’clock, the new and beautiful church was dedicated. The place was packed out. The group of pastors who had raised the finance was there too.
And, as the final hymn was sung: Nearer my God to you, nearer to you, even though it be the cross, nearer to you, people spontaneously got up out of their seats and embraced one another. How much is that worth?
Jesus prepared his disciples for the worst saying, "Everybody will hate you because of me." Why? Because the Bible says that the message of the cross is offensive.
But when the Apostle Paul arrived in the city of Corinth he was on his own in what was renowned as the most corrupt and depraved metropolis in the ancient world. No Christian had ever set foot in that city. It was a notorious place. It was legendary as a place of decadence and moral filth. No wonder he entered the city, the Bible tells us, “in weakness with great fear and trembling.”It was an intimidating arena. It was a lion’s den of a city.
So what did he do when he got there? What kind of speech would he make? What approach would he take? How might you go about setting up a church in sin city?
This is how he puts it in his own words: “When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” (1 Corinthians 2.1-2 – The Message)
He could have seriously impressed them with some sophisticated learning and some polished speeches on all the latest philosophical ideas. He was a man of culture with a solid education. He was learned and distinguished. But he chose to talk about - of all things - the cross of Christ. And that is what I want to talk about tonight.
What Was the Crucifixion Like?
Imagine you are an eye-witness of the passion of Jesus Christ. What do you see?
You see an innocent man stripped of his clothes and chained to a whipping post. You see him flogged again and again with leather whips. Each time it opens up the flesh of his body on impact. You see Jesus’ arms, legs and back tear badly.
You see him led out, hardly able to stand, to a yard where men jeer at him and press a crown of sharp thistles down on his head. They put a royal fancy dress costume on him and do the “we are not worthy” thing in front of him. And then they stand in a circle pushing him back and forth to each other. They smack him in the mouth, they punch him in the ribs, they pull his beard, they draw phlegm and spit at him.
Then you watch as they load the horizontal section of the cross on his already butchered shoulders and back. His strength is failing and he cannot walk straight. But he carries it as far as he can until he drops to the ground, the heavy crossbeam falling on top of him. His hands, holding the crossbeam, are unable to break his fall, so His face hits the dust and cuts up badly. People help him up and push him on.
The gathering crowd are laughing, spitting, cheering, clapping, swearing at him and deriding him.
Finally, he arrives exhausted at the execution site. You can smell the blood. They strip him a second time. They stretch him out on his wooden cross. They hold his arms still and straight and then drive ten inch nails into his forearms – the place where you feel a pulse. Blood pours out of the gaping wound and drips in a pool to the ground.
According to medical professor Dr. Frederick Zugibe, the piercing of the median nerve of the hands with a nail can cause suffering so incredible that even morphine is of little use, "severe, excruciating, burning pain, like electric shocks traversing the arm into the spinal cord." Rupturing the foot's plantar nerve with a nail causes a similarly severe pain.
You look on. After his arms they twist his knees and drive one spike through his two ankles between the tibia and the Achilles tendon. It is unspeakably bloody and almost unwatchable. The violence and intensity of the pain is like nothing else known in human experience.
This is unspeakable, unimaginable, unbearable, intolerable agony.
You watch the cross get lifted up by ropes and the vertical beam drops into a three-foot hole dug in the ground and they wedge the cross into place.
The positioning of the body on a cross makes it difficult to breathe. Frederick Farrar described this graphically: saying this: "A death by crucifixion seems to include dizziness, cramp, thirst, starvation, sleeplessness, traumatic fever, tetanus, shame, publicity of shame, long continuance of torment, horror of anticipation, mortification of untended wounds, all intensified just up to the point at which they can be endured at all, but all stopping just short of the point which would give to the suffer the relief of unconsciousness."
As you watch the events described in the Gospels, you are appalled and traumatised by what you see. It will probably haunt you for the rest of your life. Three men pathetically trying to lift their hideously lacerated bodies up on their crosses as they battle against suffocation, taking sharp and noisy gasps of breath as they do so. You watch them get weaker and weaker, through exhaustion, caused by sunstroke, massive blood loss and all to the sound of cruel taunting from the crowd.
Hanging there in the stifling midday heat, thirsty, in shock, betrayed, denied and left for dead by his friends, exposed to the watching crowd, tormented by his gloating enemies Jesus is the embodiment of utter rejection.
You look round and see Jesus’ poor mother sobbing uncontrollably before her son. And of the three men crucified, her son will have been the most unsightly. And the scene, for her, amongst all the observers, is particularly traumatising. His whole body is horribly gashed. His head is bruised and disfigured with blood from his crown of thorns. What mother wouldn’t think back to that same head of soft brown hair she had once cushioned on her arm whilst breast feeding him as a baby?
When the executioner drives the third nail through his victim's ankles, what mother wouldn’t think back to the happy and proud day when her son first walked on his little feet as a one year old boy?
And as his weakening arms hang from the horizontal beam of his cross, increasingly unable to support his body weight, making it harder and harder to breathe, does Mary remember the first time those same arms had so proudly carried a plank for his dad in the carpenter's workshop in Nazareth?
Jesus' pain is magnified by having to watch his distressed mother be led away as it sinks in for her that God is not going to send his angels this time, like he had in Bethlehem. Her boy really is going to die.
We sometimes get romantic about all this, singing about the old rugged cross, or thinking upon his sacrifice to pretty tunes - and there's nothing wrong with worship that is centred on the cross. In fact, there’s everything right with it. But let's not lose sight of the fact that Jesus' death was sickening to witness. It was ugly and disturbing.
Dr. Zugibe concluded his study by saying that Jesus probably died from loss of blood and fluid, plus traumatic shock from his injuries, plus cardiogenic shock, causing his heart to pump weakly, then fail altogether.
Whatever the final cause of death, this was one of the most macabre and degrading executions ever staged.
What It Means
What is good about that? Why did Paul write in Galatians 6.14, “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ”?
Now what about you? Do you boast in it? (That is to say do you go on about it and how good it is?) Have you grasped it? I Corinthians 1:18 says, “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
It’s the power of God. Only at the cross is there power to change the way we think, to change the way we conduct ourselves, to change our lives. Only at the cross is there power to overcome the addictive pull of sin. Only at the cross is there power to mend broken marriages and families, power to bind up broken hearts and heal the sick. Only at the cross is there power to fill chasms of loneliness. Only at the cross can we see and receive God’s power to change us, to transform us, to make us new.
There are so many reasons, on so many levels, why the cross is the heart of what being a Christian is all about. Here are 10 for a start:
Jesus, in laying down his life,
- made you right with God, because his righteousness was transferred to you
- secured and sealed your eternal salvation
- abolished rituals and ceremonials as a way to God
- broke down walls of every human division
- made all healing possible
- cancelled out forever all your sins, however bad and however many
- opened up for you direct access to God as a son or daughter
- turned away the wrath of God from you onto himself
- gave purpose and perspective to all suffering
- bound and defeated the principalities and powers of evil
and much, much more. The cross says it all.
I could talk for a week about all this; the cross is like an enormous diamond with hundreds and hundreds of facets; each one glorious in itself and each one uniquely contributing to the unsurpassed beauty of the whole. But, because time is limited, I’m just going to spend a few minutes on the first four.
The first facet I want to mention is what the Bible calls justification. In laying down his life on the cross, Jesus made you completely right with God, because his absolute righteousness was transferred to you – if you can believe it to receive it, because we are justified by faith.
So whenever God looks at you, as a believer living by faith, he does not see at all your brokenness or unworthiness or sinful failures; he sees Christ’s perfect holiness and moral blamelessness. He declares you innocent and looks at you through the filter of Christ’s infinite perfections.
In Pidgin English the word for “Justification” is “God ‘e say ‘im all right.” You were justified at the cross. When Jesus died, he paid a debt you could never pay and he acquitted you from every charge against you. God 'e say him all right. And, though I don't speak Pidgin English, I would imagine you can say God 'e say 'er all right too.
The second facet I want to mention is that at the cross Jesus secured and sealed your eternal salvation.
One day someone wrote a letter to the veteran evangelist Billy Graham which was published in his newspaper column. This is what it said; “I turned my back on God over 60 years ago, while I was still in my teens. I can even remember when I did it. Now I'm old and dying, and I wish I'd taken a different road. Please tell young people not to do what I did. I was a fool, but now it's too late.”
And this is how Billy Graham replied; “Thank you for your letter. When we're young, we often don't realize how life-changing our decisions may be - for good or for evil. Only as we grow older do we begin to see it - and that's especially true for someone in your position.
The Bible speaks of the terrible consequences that await those who “did not choose to fear the Lord” (Proverbs 1.29). But listen: It is not too late for you to turn to God! Yes, your life would have been much different (and much happier) if you had given your life to Christ when you had the opportunity many years ago. But why enter eternity separated from God and his blessings if you don't have to?
God loves you, in spite of the way you've treated him. If you had been the only person on earth who needed to be saved, Jesus Christ would still have gone to the cross and died for you. God loves you that much! Right now, God is speaking to you and giving you a second chance to turn to Christ. Don't make the same mistake you did over 60 years ago. The Bible says, “Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near” (Isaiah 55.6). In a prayer of faith confess your sins to God and commit your life to Jesus Christ. You cannot change the past, but you can change the future.”
What a great reply!
In dying on the cross, Jesus did not just declare you righteous, he released you from the death sentence that was hanging over your head, took you off spiritual death row and he took the full punishment of the condemnation of the law on himself.
God the Father poured out on Jesus his judgment for the sins of the world. Jesus knows everything there is to know about you and he still chose to bear the penalty of it for you. If you had been the only person ever to have sinned, he would have still endured the darkness, the agony, the thirst, the heat and the loneliness of hell, so that you and I need never go there.
The third, briefly, is that Jesus, in laying down his life, abolished rituals and ceremonials as a way to God.
Why didn't you come to church tonight with a young goat or a pigeon so that Sylvia or I could cut its throat and burn it on that table? God requires that in the book of Leviticus. So why didn’t you? Because you don't need to!
Jesus made, once upon the cross, a full, perfect, atonement and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world and no more sacrifices are necessary. To even think of offering another sacrifice to atone for sin, to call that table an altar, would be an ungrateful insult to what Jesus endured for us all.
Jesus, our great high priest, has abolished the old sacrificing, mediating, go-between priesthood for good.
You don't need to watch a professional go in to the presence of God, because the way is open for you to freely enter the most holy place, wherever you are. You don't need a bearded man in a turban to tell you you're forgiven, because the Holy Spirit communicates that to your heart. You don't need present animals for a priest to offer up as a sacrifice, because Jesus' sacrifice is enough – and more than enough. You don't have to wait till it's convenient for the holy man to give you a blessing, because every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places is already your rich inheritance in Christ, if you're a believer. It’s because of the cross.
And finally, Jesus, in laying down his life, broke down walls of every human division.
Because of the cross, there is no relationship on earth that is beyond the scope of reconciliation and transformation (from the most serious to the most trivial) because Christ's empty cross has decisively demolished every dividing wall.
Ephesians 2 shows that the peace process between ourselves and others is a consequence of the peace treaty between us and God signed in Jesus' blood. In other words, the vertical reconciliation between God and us makes possible (and necessary) the horizontal friendship between human beings who were previously hostile.
Ephesians 2.13; "In Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ." Four times in Ephesians 2 Paul writes the little word "peace" and he means peace between parties who were previously completely incompatible. It's like a spiritual Berlin Wall, that separated people into two opposing camps, has been decisively smashed down. "Christ has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility," says v14.
Through Jesus, thanks to his empty cross, the wall of animosity between all peoples has been bulldozed down and ground to dust. Verse 15 says, "Christ's purpose was to create in himself one new humanity..., thus making peace, and... to reconcile both... to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility."
Are you holding onto resentment and unforgiveness? You’ve got to let it go. Jesus let go of your sin against him. “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.” You’ve got to leave the past in the past and refuse to hold it in the present. Jesus nailed your past to the cross – and it’s still there and your sins he remembers no more.
Ending
The cross has said it all. There’s little else to say…
Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 22nd May 2011
