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The preaching of the cross is an announcement of a living reality that continues to transform human existence and human destiny more than two thousand years after it originally occurred.
If our preaching does not intersect with the times, we are fleeing the call to take up the cross.
The truest way to receive the gospel of Christ crucified is to cultivate a deep appreciation of the way the biblical motifs interact with each other and enlarge one another.
The work of theology is the process by which the church continually rethinks its message.
In other words, Christians do not simply look to the cross of Christ with prayerful reverence. We are set in motion by its power, energized by it, upheld by it, guaranteed by it, secured by it for the promised future because it is the power of the creating Word that “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17).
Yet we cannot allow ourselves to be reduced to mumbling, “Well, you just have to take it on faith.” We have evidence from within Scripture itself that scholarship, reflection, and wrestling with the text are part of our calling as God’s people; the profound engagement of the Evangelists and apostles with their own received Hebrew Scriptures bears witness to this.
One of the traits that continues to compel us about this man Jesus is that, unlike anyone else who ever lived, he was entirely directed toward others at every moment of his life.
Christianity does not recommend suffering for its own sake, and it is part of a Christian’s task in the world to alleviate the suffering of others. By no stretch of the imagination, however, could Christianity ever be said to recommend the avoidance of suffering in the cause of love and justice.
The high value thus placed on the earthy, worldly, material, physical dimensions of life is one of the most striking characteristics of the Judeo-Christian tradition, marking it out from religious gnosticism.
It is essential to remember that it was the preaching (kerygma) of the apostles and early Christians that created the church in the first place. Men and women did not forsake their former ways of life because they were offered spiritual direction or instructed in righteous living; they became converts because of the explosive news that they heard.
The cross can never be merely assumed but must always be interpreted and re-placed at the center. There is a centrifugal force at work in human nature; we want to spin out and away from the offense of the cross. A current tendency is to interpret the incarnation to mean embracing the world just as it is, because the Son of God hallowed the world by becoming flesh — incarnatus est. This, however, can easily become a sentimental evasion of the tension between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be — the life of the world to come, the world that God is going to bring into being.
the crucifixion is the touchstone of Christian authenticity, the unique feature by which everything else, including the resurrection, is given its true significance.
That is one of the most important reasons — perhaps the most important — that Jesus was crucified, for no other mode of execution would have been commensurate with the extremity of humanity’s condition under Sin.
This is what happened on the cross. The Son of God gave himself up to be enslaved by Sin, condemned by the Law, and subject to Death.
Miroslav Volf’s words, “Only those who are forgiven and who are willing to forgive will be capable of relentlessly pursuing justice without falling into the temptations to pervert it into injustice” (Exclusion and Embrace, 123).
