Personal engagement with the cross is difficult and painful, but leaders of congregations will have a hole in the center of their ministry without it. Leech writes, [I]t is the task of the preacher to hold up Christ [crucified] as a symbol of folly and scandal, a sign of contradiction, and so to bring about the krisis, that turbulence and upheaval in the soul which opens it to the word which is the power of salvation. . . . The proclamation of Christ’s death involves an engagement with the wounded Christ, the Christ who suffers, who “bears in his heart all wounds” [Edith Sitwell]. If this
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