lenten blog | March 28, 2025

How do we look at the cross?

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for March 28th:  Joshua 4:14-24; Psalm 32; and 2 Corinthians 5:6-15.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

The cross can be approached from many perspectives.  In general, those perspectives seem to fall into two main categories.  One is to emphasize forgiveness and the other rebirth. 

Jesus died to take away our sins.  I can imagine the earliest Christians struggling to explain the crucifixion.  It would not be long before they drew upon their Jewish heritage and saw Jesus’ cross as akin to a temple sacrifice offered to God.  From the earliest stories in Genesis, the faithful erected altars upon which to offer sacrifices to Yahweh.  These would be simple piles of stones.  Eventually, this would morph into the monumental architecture and religious establishment of the Jerusalem Temple.  As Jesus was crucified, the sacrifices to God continued atop Jerusalem’s hill.  Almost immediately, Christians linked the Temple’s worship to that of Jesus on the cross.  He became the perfect sin offering that appeased God’s judgment forever.  This is one way to look at the cross – from the perspective of our sinfulness and Christ’s forgiveness.

A second way to process the mystery of Golgotha is to look at it from the perspective Paul offers in today’s reading.  Rather than emphasizing the negative of sin, it is edifying to instead use the cross as inspiration to imitate Jesus’ life.  The cross in this way is not about death.  The cross becomes the final and most powerful statement of Jesus’ life.  The cross becomes the closing punctuation of an exclamation point to all that Jesus lived and preached about forgiveness, love, empathy, generosity and peacefulness.  Jesus would not betray His nature and His gospel even to save His life.  He goes to the cross because He will not deny or even shy away from the truth that He lived.  The cross in this way does not emphasize our sinfulness that needs to be atoned by God accepting Jesus’ death in place of our own.  The cross is rather the perfect testimony to God’s love as lived to the very last agonizing moment in Christ Jesus, and the salvation that it offers by almost compelling us to live like Jesus.

When believers look upon the cross in this way, it should lead to renewal, or as Jesus explained early in John’s Gospel to Nicodemus to being born from above or born again.  It is a spiritual rebirth.  Or, as Paul writes today, “For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.”

It is “the love of Christ” manifest in His dying that “urges us on.”  It is not His death per se, which belongs to the first understanding.  It is Jesus’ love that is stronger than death, that will not retreat in front of death, so that “those who live might live no longer for themselves.”  Rather than self-centeredness the Christian is so inspired by Jesus’ lesson offered in the extreme that we have died to our old selves and risen to a new life in imitation of Jesus:  Jesus has died so that we might live.

On this Lenten Friday, may we spend some extra time in prayer, with Scripture, in a quiet awareness that allows God to whisper, so that we may think beyond what we think we know of the cross and what it means to us and for us, and dwell upon the possibilities of what it means to believe “that one has died for all; therefore all have died.”

If you would like to join us for our online Bible study, please send an email to [email protected] for the Zoom logins.
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.