Thought Exercise on Crucifixion

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The Cruelty of Crucifixion

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Exposed to public view like slabs of meat hung from a market stall, troublesome slaves were nailed to crosses…past. No death was more excruciating, more contemptible, than crucifixion. To be hung nake...

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If He Gets Crucified

Author

Stuart R. Strachan, Jr.

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 27:35, 1 Peter 2:24, John 19:16-27, Matthew 27:32-44, Luke 23:33-43, Mark 15:21-32

There’s a story told in Soviet Russia during the reign of Joseph Stalin. An elderly woman was praying in a Russian Orthodox Church. Walking to the front of the church, she came to a cross of Jesus and...

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A Most Cruel & Disgusting Punishment

Author

John Stott

Keywords

Scripture

Deuteronomy 21:23

Roman citizens were exempt from crucifixion, except in extreme cases of treason. Cicero in one of his speeches condemned it as crudelissimum taeterrimumque supplicium, ‘a most cruel and disgusting pun...

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A Strange Exaltation

Author

Lauren F. Winner

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While summarizing the work of Joel Marcus, professor Lauren Winner describes the irony that in crucifixion, the victim is literally elevated above the rest of the crowd: As Joel Marcus explains, this...

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And So Was Raised the Cross…

Author

Melito of Sardis

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And so he was raised on a cross, and a title was fixed, indicating who it was who was being executed. Painful it is to say, but more terrible not to say. . . . He who suspended the earth is suspended,...

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The Cross as an Enduring Image

Author

N. T. Wright

Keywords

Scripture

Hebrews 12:2, Colossians 2:14-15, Philippians 2:8, Galatians 6:14, 1 Corinthians 1:18

In 2000, the National Gallery in London put on a millennial exhibition entitled “Seeing Salvation.” That was a case in point—especially remembering that European countries tend to be far more “secular...

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The Impact of Going Through the Fire

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

Scripture

John 3:16-17, Romans 5:8, 1 John 4:9-10, Matthew 27:45-50, Isaiah 53:1-5, Luke 23:34, 2 Corinthians 5:14-15, Ephesians 5:2, John 15:13

In George Bernard Shaw’s play about Joan of Arc , as Joan faces her execution by burning, she addresses those in power who have condemned her: “I will now go to the common people and find comfort in ...

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Simon of Cyrene an Archetype for Carrying our Cross

Author

Judith Couchman

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The Dolorous Passion described Simon of Cyrene as a “stout-looking man,” and a fourth-century sarcophagus (stone coffin) from Rome supports this description – The Passion Sarcophagus, probably from th...

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The Two Thieves on the Cross

Author

Johann Ernst von Holst

Keywords

The two thieves appear to be representatives of two opposing directions. One of them founders on the cross; the other is raised up by it. The story of the repentant thief does not teach that every sco...

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Preference for the Christ-Child Over the Cross

Author

Stuart R. Strachan, Jr.

Keywords

Scripture

Luke 19:10, Luke 2:7, John 19:18, Philippians 2:8-9, Isaiah 53:5, 2 Corinthians 5:17

In the sixteenth century, Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci journeyed to China, bringing religious art to share the Christian story with those unfamiliar with it. The Chinese readily embraced images of t...

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His Stigma became His Glory

Author

John Ortberg

Keywords

Scripture

Leviticus 13:45-46, Isaiah 53:3-5, 2 Samuel 9:3, 6-7, Mark 1:40-42, Luke 7:37-38, John 20:27

Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote in his classic study Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity that the term stigma originated with the ancient Greeks, roughly during Jesus’ tim...

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St. Matthew’s Passion: Not Theater But Prayer

Author

N. T. Wright

Keywords

Scripture

Philippians 2:8, John 12:32, Isaiah 53:4-6, Luke 23:39-43, Hebrews 12:2

Another example struck me forcibly during the 2014 season of Promenade Concerts in the Albert Hall in London. (The “Proms,” as they are known, make up a major annual festival, offering world-class mus...

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Remembering who we are and whose we are

Author

Mia Levetan

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 8:1, Genesis 19:29, Exodus 2:24, Exodus 6:5, Exodus 13:3, Exodus 32:13, Leviticus 26:42-45, Deuteronomy 4:10, Deuteronomy 8:2, 18, Judges 3:7, Psalm 78:11, 1 Samuel 1:11, 19, Psalm 63:6, Psalm 74:2, Psalm 77:11, Psalm 78:35, 42, Psalm 105:42, Psalm 106:45, Psalm 111:5, Psalm 119:52, 55, Psalm 143:5, Isaiah 44:21, Isaiah 57:11, Jeremiah 14:21, Jeremiah 51:50, Jonah 2:7, Mark 14:72, Matthew 26:75, Luke 22:61, Luke 22:19, Matthew 27:33-55, Mark 15:22-41, Luke 23:33-49, John 19:16-30, 1 Corinthians 1:18, Philippians 2:8, Hebrews 12:2

God remembers Noah. God remembers Abram. God remembers Lot. God remembers the Israelites. The Israelites, in the book of Judges, do not remember God—this was their problem. God remembers Hannah. The P...

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What We Preach

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

Scripture

Revelation 2:4-5, Colossians 1:18, Philippians 2:8-11, Galatians 1:6-9, 1 Corinthians 2:2

A strong church once inscribed these words on an archway leading to the churchyard. Over time, two things happened: the church lost its passion for Jesus and His gospel, and ivy began to grow on the a...

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The Cross According to Albert Camus

Author

Albert Camus

Keywords

[Christ] the god-man suffers too, with patience. Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to him since he suffers and dies. The night on Golgotha is so important in the history of man only bec...

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The Cross Was The Devil's Mousetrap

Author

Os Guinness

Keywords

Scripture

1 Corinthians 1:18, 1 Peter 2:24, Galatians 3:13, Revelation 5:9-10, Isaiah 53:

The cross, Martin Luther wrote, was the devil’s mousetrap. The devil smelled cheese, and wham, felt steel. Thus, we see a little baby lying defenseless in a crib at Bethlehem, and a tortured man hangi...

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Christ Is to Us Just What His Cross Is

Author

P. T. Forsyth

Keywords

Christ is to us just what his cross is. All that Christ was in heaven or on earth was put into what he did there…Christ, I repeat, is to us just what his cross is. You do not understand Christ till yo...

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The Centrality of the Cross

Author

John Stott

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The fact that a cross became the Christian symbol, and that Christians stubbornly refused, in spite of the ridicule, to discard it in favour of something less offensive, can have only one explanation....

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Let Us Not Turn the Cross Into a Metaphor

Author

John Updike

Keywords

Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door. …………………………...

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Insulting the Cross?

Author

John Ortberg

Keywords

During a recent Holy Week a cross with a mocking sign ROFL (a texting abbreviation for “rolling on the floor laughing”) was placed on Cross Campus at Yale. It stirred considerable conversation about f...

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Ghandi on Jesus

Author

Mohandas K. Gandhi

Keywords

Scripture

John 3:16, Romans 5:8, 1 John 4:9-10, 1 Peter 2:24, Colossians 2:13-14

It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate Son of God, that only he who believed in him would have everlasting life…my reason was not ready to believe literally that Jesus by h...

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A View from Eternity on the Cross

Author

Jonathan Edwards

Keywords

Scripture

Ephesians 2:4-5, Hebrews 2:14-15, 1 Peter 2:24, Philippians 2:6-8, Isaiah 53:5, John 3:16-17, 1 John 4:9-10

Why should I, who have been living from all eternity in the enjoyment of the Father’s love, go to cast myself into such a furnace for them that never can requite me for it? Why should I yield myself t...

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Where is God? Hanging From the Gallows

Author

Jonathan Cornell

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 27:46, Hebrews 4:15, 1 Peter 3:18, John 19:30, 1 Peter 4:13

In Elie Wiesel’s Night , Eliezer is a Jewish teenager, a devoted student of the Talmud from Sighet, in Hungarian Transylvania. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis occupied Hungary. Increasingly repressi...

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The Cross is the Pivot of History

Author

Samuel M. Zwemer

Keywords

If the Cross of Christ is anything to the mind, it is surely everything – the most profound reality and the sublimest mystery. One comes to realize that literally all the wealth and glory of the gospe...

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The Cross is Not Tragedy

Author

Os Guinness

Keywords

Scripture

1 Corinthians 1:18, 2 Corinthians 13:4, Luke 24:5-6, John 16:20, Revelation 21:4

The cross of Jesus is the world’s supreme example of anguish, suffering and injustice, but it has nothing to do with tragedy as we experience it in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Shakespeare—trag...

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The Swoon Theory

Author

Stuart R. Strachan, Jr.

Keywords

Scripture

1 Peter 1:3, Luke 24:1-12, Mark 16:1-8, Matthew 28:1-10, John 11:25-26, John 20:1-18, 1 Corinthians 15:3-8

The “swoon theory” argues that Jesus never really died, only appeared to have died, and then came back to life while buried in the tomb. It’s an interesting idea, one that was popularized in a book in...

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No Shock with God’s Death

Author

Dorothy L. Sayers

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It is curious that people who are filled with horrified indignation when ever a cat kills a sparrow can hear the story of the killing of God told Sunday after Sunday and not experience any shock at al...

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The Crucifixion of Ministry

Author

Andrew Purves

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In his book of the same name, seminary professor Andrew Purves describes the centrality of the cross as it relates to ministry: When I speak at conferences about the crucifixion of ministry, ministe...

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Elijah Experiencing the Crucifixion of Ministry

Author

Andrew Purves

Keywords

Scripture

1 Kings 19:12-15

In his important book, The Crucifixion of Ministry, seminary professor Andrew Purves sees a paradigm in Elijah’s ministry: For many years I have taken Elijah’s story in 1 Kings 19 as a paradigm. Eli...

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Did Jesus Really Suffer on the Cross?

Author

Gerhard Lohfink

Keywords

Jesus did not descend from the cross. He was powerless, delivered up to his opponents. There was a false and erroneous form of Christianity that refused to accept that. As early as the second century ...

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