As part of my undergraduate studies in biology, I had to do a great many lab dissections. Over the course of those several years, I learned a lot about desensitization. That is, after doing so many of those dissections, they no longer struck me with the same shock factor they once did. I guess you could say I was a biologist who became desensitized to biology!
In a similar fashion, I think many Christians have become desensitized to some of the more shocking aspects of Christianity, some being central to our faith. On this Good Friday, I have in mind the cross of Jesus Christ.
So many of us have at times become so used to the cross as a fixture on our walls, a pendant around our neck, or an image on a graphic t-shirt that we forget just how shocking the cross really is.
But isn’t it utterly bizarre that we have an ancient tool for execution—for killing people (in a terribly gruesome way, at that)—as the core symbol of our faith? Other religions employ as their main symbols things like stars, crescent moons, hands, wheels, shrines, geometric shapes, and so on. But no, Christianity’s marketing team decided to go with the tool of execution upon which its founder was brutally murdered![1]
It’s absolutely scandalous, and we as a church culture have largely become desensitized to this seemingly out-of-place centrepiece of the Christian faith. But the scandalous nature of the cross mustn’t be overlooked as it actually points to Christianity being true.
In other words, the message of the cross of Christ is simply too scandalous to be false.
Stumbling Over the Cross
Paul declares the preaching of Christ crucified to be “a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.” It was foolishness to the Gentiles for several reasons, not the least of which was that it made no sense to them to follow a man who had been tried and executed by the state as a criminal—much less sense to worship such a man as divine. Such a thing was complete nonsense to them—certainly not the sort of wisdom normally sought after by the Greeks.
As for the Jews, they always expected God to work in miraculous ways, and there wasn’t anything particularly miraculous about the crucifixion of an unemployed carpenter from Nazareth. But the preaching of the cross would have been even more of a stumbling block because, on the Jewish view, anyone who was crucified was, in fact, cursed by God (Deut. 21:22-23).[2]
The preaching of the cross was so scandalous to the Jews, then, because of who Jesus’ followers were claiming him to be despite his crucifixion: God’s chosen Messiah—the promised one who would be specially anointed by God to be the Saviour of his people.
Let me put it into context for you.
The Cursed Messiah
On the typical first-century Jewish view, the Messiah was to be some sort of military and political leader, a man of power and influence like King David who would save Israel from her human oppressors—at this time, Rome. Needless to say, an alleged Messiah who not only failed to defeat said oppressors but was, in fact, publicly and shamefully executed by them wouldn’t have impressed anybody. The fact that Jesus was executed on a cross made his and his followers’ claims even less believable because of, you know, the whole cursed-by-God thing. It would have been a no-brainer, then, to dismiss Jesus of Nazareth as an entirely unimpressive, utterly defeated, and divinely cursed false Messiah.
Such was the scandal of the early Christian preaching of the cross, which was a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.
Why, then, was it preached? Why in the world does the cross—this object of execution associated with being cursed by God—feature so prominently in Christianity from the beginning? Why did Jesus’ disciples continue to proclaim him as God’s chosen Messiah despite his utterly failing to do what the Messiah was supposed to do?
Remember, these earliest followers of Jesus were just as Jewish and devout as the ones who crucified him, so we must seriously wonder why they didn’t see an issue here! A crucified man who was still the Messiah—a divine Messiah, no less—was certainly not the sort of thing they would have made up. It would have been just as repulsive a thought to them as to any other Jew.
So, what so dramatically changed their minds?
The Vindicated Messiah
Something significant must have happened to convince these devout Jews that Jesus really was the Messiah despite his death on the cross, vindicating him in their eyes as indeed being chosen by God and making them see the cross to which he was nailed as being central to what he accomplished as the promised Saviour to the people.
It seems to me that that significant something would need to have been a supernatural return to life. Why? Because when you’re left with the dead body of a divinely cursed would-be Messiah, what better sign of vindication could God provide in that moment than to raise that man to life again? Only this, I think, would have changed the first-century Jewish mind about Jesus, his messiahship, and his death on the cross.
And wouldn’t you know it, the unanimous testimony of the New Testament writings, tracing back to the eyewitnesses themselves, is that on the third day following his execution by the Roman regime, Jesus of Nazareth was, in fact, raised from the dead.
This changed everything Jesus’ followers thought they understood: the nature and role of the Messiah, their own role in the messianic mission, and, of course, what exactly happened on that t-shaped piece of wood upon which Jesus the Messiah was crucified. They now recognized that on the cross, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, because it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree’” (Gal. 3:13; cf. Deut. 21:22-23).
The cross—this ancient tool of execution associated with being cursed by God—became the very means by which the Messiah would save us from the curse of the Law—from sin and the condemnation that goes with it. In a great twist of irony, Jesus Christ has saved us via that very thing which is a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles!
This is the Good News that we preach. And it’s utterly scandalous.
But again, I think its very scandalousness (if that’s even a word) is what makes its fabrication so unlikely.
The Movement That Couldn’t Be Stopped
There’s a very interesting passage in Acts 5 wherein we find the apostles once again arrested and brought before the Jewish council for questioning concerning their preaching of the gospel. In response to the council’s order that they stop talking to everybody about Jesus of Nazareth, the apostles reply that they must obey God rather than people (v. 29). They then assert that Jesus, whom the council “murdered by hanging him on a tree,” was raised from the dead and exalted to God’s right hand as ruler and Saviour (vv. 30-32).
The Jewish council was, to say the least, utterly scandalized by these claims and wanted to kill the apostles (v. 33). A certain Pharisee on the council named Gamaliel, however, spoke up and cautioned the council to leave the apostles alone, reasoning that if their movement is of human origin, it will die out like previous messianic revolutionary movements with the death of their leaders—in Christianity’s case, Jesus (vv.34-38). He then says that if, however, the movement is of divine origin, then the council wouldn’t be able to do anything about it anyway (v. 39).
Interestingly enough, the Christian movement didn’t die out with the death of its leader. It only grew louder and stronger and spread across the globe, and at the centre of it all was the preaching of the cross. And as our friend Gamaliel pointed out, in light of Jesus’ death, the only way for this cross-centered message of the earliest Christians to have gotten off the ground and spread the way it did was for it to really have been of God as they claimed it to be.
And for that to have been the case, this man Jesus of Nazareth must really have been who he and his disciples claimed he was.
And for that to have been the case, this man Jesus who was killed by being hung on a tree must really have been raised from the dead, vindicating him and completely undoing any false preconceptions of who the Messiah was, what he would do, and how he would do it.
The cross of Christ is still a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles. Its preaching is still utterly scandalous. But it’s simply too scandalous to be false.
Notes
[1] To be fair, the early Christians did make use of some other symbols like the famous ichthys, popularly referred to as “the Jesus fish”—but they also included the use of and reverence for the cross of Christ (though they did not worship the cross), and only the cross played a central role in the gospel message.
[2] When the Mosaic Law spoke of being hung on a tree, crucifixion hadn’t been invented yet, and so the Law of Moses had in view the practice of impalement on a wooden pole. However, by Jesus’ time, Roman crucifixion had become so widespread that the Jewish rabbis had already determined that the nature and posture of crucifixion matched the intent and disgrace of impalement closely enough for the same principle to apply—that is, that the crucified victim was cursed by God. See Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament: Countering the Challenges to Evangelical Christian Beliefs (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2016), 707-708.
