What Do You Think About the Cross of Christ?

3rd Sunday in Lent, 3/4/18
1 Corinthians 1:22-25


What Do You Think About the Cross of Christ?


$167,000 per second. That sounds like it’s an incredible amount of money. In just the time since I opened my mouth, that would be blowing through $1 million. But $167,000 per second is actually a bargain compared to a year ago. What am I talking about? Paid TV advertising for the 2018 Super Bowl. Each 30-second spot cost during this year’s Super Bowl cost advertisers $5 million. A stunning amount of money, but still a bargain when you consider that’s down from $5.5 million for the same spots during the 2017 Super Bowl.

That kind of money simply isn’t real for most of us. It’s an amount of money we can’t imagine. But that’s the world of company branding. Smart business people know that this kind of advertising pays them more than it costs them.

Look around you. It’s happening in our area, particularly with medical corporations. Hospitals are no longer content to have their name affixed in large letters to the sides of their mammoth facilities. Their brand is now attached to the prominent facades of all sorts of high school and college sports complexes throughout the Miami Valley. I don’t know about you, but I don’t choose my health care facility based on its advertising, but apparently enough people do to make it worth the advertising dollars spent.

For more than 2,000 years Christianity has been “branding” it’s product with a symbol that often costs next to nothing. It’s the cross and you see it almost everywhere—our church, our homes, on buildings in our community, around the necks of countless people we see every day, along our nation’s highways. In fact, even people with little or no connection to Christianity recognize the cross as Christianity’s symbol.

I’m going to guess that you own and display that Christian symbol in your life. You, too, display it in your homes. You wear it proudly. You’re delighted to see the cross prominently displayed inside and outside our church building. But has that cross become so familiar to you that it’s almost as if it’s just another one of countless efforts to call attention to a brand? I’m hoping it’s not. I’m fairly certain you know what the cross of Christ is all about and why it’s the focus of our Christian faith.

But do you struggle at times with the cross of Christ? Are there times in your life in which you, perhaps unwittingly, wish to replace the cross with something else? Do you have trouble defending the cross at the most inopportune times? If you admit that you do, you’re not alone.

Bottom line—what do you think about the cross of Christ? That’s the unasked question that St. Paul presents to us this morning in this reading from 1 Corinthians. Are you willing to embrace the cross at all costs? Are you ready to defend it? May the Holy Spirit help us answer that question in a way that glorifies our Savior and leads others to him.

We’re saddened when we hear that the cross—the symbol of Christianity—is forcibly removed from another wall or building in our nation. Same thing with the 10 Commandments. But that’s the world we live in. And it’s really nothing new. There has always been opposition to the cross of Christ.

Look at the reaction to the cross in the days and months just prior and just after our Savior was crucified on one. Even though the crucifixion of Jesus was foreshadowed in every sacrifice the Jews presented to the Lord for centuries, and even though the Lord clearly foretold the crucifixion in places such as Isaiah 53, the Jews by and large wanted nothing to do with a crucified Savior. Recall their expectations, an expectation that even infected our Lord’s disciples. The Jews were fixated on a glorious, earthly kingdom. Right up to and even after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the disciples were prone to vying for places of honor and glory in that kingdom. They argued among themselves as to their rightful places in it. No doubt their fellow Jews were infected with the same erroneous thinking.

Those false kingdom concepts were inseparably tied with the expectation of outward signs. We’d call them miracles. In today’s gospel we heard Jews rattle their Jewish kingdom sabers when they challenged Jesus, “What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?” This was no polite request; it was an anger-filled demand that flowed from stony hearts.

For them, the cross was not the pinnacle of Jesus’ work for us; it was the nail in his imposter coffin. The fact that they nailed him to a cross was their personal proof that Jesus was a pitiful Messiah imposter. Their concept of the Messiah was far-removed from a cross; polar opposite. And thus, they stumbled over a crucified Jesus. Actually, the word Paul used isn’t a mild stumble and fall; the word he used indicates the trigger on a trap that results in death. Their rejection of the cross of Christ resulted in spiritual death in hell.

That’s what the Jews thought about the cross of Christ.

And the reaction of the Greeks wasn’t much better. As Paul states, the Greeks looked for wisdom. They were enamored with the latest thinking. Greek society proudly stood on the thinking of such great philosophers as Aristotle, Socrates and Plato.

That thinking didn’t necessarily exclude the divine. In fact, it often embraced it. Greek society was closely interwoven with the worship of all sorts of gods. National festivals were pagan religious festivals.

But when Paul proclaimed that Christianity stood firmly on the truth that Jesus was both God and man, they scoffed. Greek wisdom wanted to transcend the shackles of humanity. It knew how limited and empty the human experience on its own was. So, in their way of thinking, why would the divine want to take on the human? That would be a philosophical step in the wrong direction.

What’s more, why would God sacrifice himself for humanity? That simply didn’t make sense. All of human logic had the human-divine relationship going in the opposite direction—on what humans sacrificed for the divine. In fact, that was not only the Greek logic, it was the logic of all sinful humanity.

And thousands of years later, very little has changed. The “divine” is limited by what people “think.” It has become what the individual accepts as personal reality. In modern minds, your spiritual truth doesn’t have to have anything in common with my spiritual truth. It’s up to the individual to create their own divine truth. Meanwhile, the rejection of anything divine is on the increase. In the minds of more and more people, god doesn’t exist.

Is it any wonder, then, why the necessity of the cross of Christ is widely rejected? If the concept of sin is simply an ancient method of entrapping people in guilt, then why not deny its existence? And if sin doesn’t exist, there’s no need to believe that an execution on a cross 2,000 years ago has any effect on us.

But you’re aware of all that. You probably didn’t need me to remind you of it. So, what’s my point? Our question isn’t what the world thinks about the cross of Christ. The world’s reaction has always been the same—bold rejection.

The question is, “What do you think about the cross of Christ?” By the grace of God through the working of the Holy Spirit, you know that these words of Paul are true for you: “But to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.” When the Holy Spirit called you to faith in Jesus, he enlightened you with the saving wisdom of God. That saving wisdom centers in the cross of Christ. That Jewish man hanging on Calvary’s cross was also God’s eternal Son. That makes his death the redemption of all sinners. On Calvary’s cross the God-man, Jesus, died for the sins of the world. He died for me. He died for you. That’s God’s gospel—his saving good news. Paul told the Romans, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes” (Rom. 1:16). The life and death of Jesus is the wisdom and power of God which saves us.

So learn from history. Don’t repeat the mistakes of the Jews. They looked for signs from Jesus to verify that what he said was the truth. Look no further than the cross and empty tomb. That’s the sign Jesus pointed to. When you doubt the love of God, his plans for you, or his power in your life, look to the cross and the empty tomb. There our God showed that he loves you so much he sacrificed himself for you. What a loving God you have! And when you doubt his power, look to his empty tomb. He rose from the dead to assure you that he has conquered sin, death, and hell for you. So you live! You live with him forever!

And don’t fall into the cranial trap of the Greeks. The infinite cannot be confined by the finite. The supernatural cannot be fully understood by the natural. Instead, by the power of the Holy Spirit, believe what the Divine does for you—he takes your place and suffers your hell for you. That’s divine wisdom. That’s something human wisdom will never understand.

So now, what do you think about the cross of Christ? Well, it’s not so much what you think; it’s what you believe. The cross of Christ is not simply a marketing brand; it’s the very heart of your salvation. God became a man to take your place on the cross and then to rise again as he promised. Jesus Christ crucified. We preach it. We embrace it. We believe it. Amen.