arts and culture on Crucifixion

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...

The Roman world was largely unanimous that crucifixion was a horrific, disgusting business.. . . The relative scarcity of references to crucifixions in antiquity. . . are [sic] less a historical probl...

Christianity is the only major religion to have as its central focus the suffering and degradation of its God. The crucifixion is so familiar to us, and so moving, that it is hard to realize how unusu...

O Lord, We marvel that you would take on flesh and blood in order to be crucified, killed, and buried for us. You humbled yourself and submitted to the hatred of sinful men, accepting the thorns, the ...

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...

God of grace and truth—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Thank You. Thank You for being there even when we don’t feel it. Thank You for keeping Your eyes on us, even when we lose sight of You. Thank You f...

The cross was not a symbol of the earliest Christians, who preferred the anchor, the fish or Chi Rho. The crucifixion was a problem for the early Church, since it had to convince unbelievers of what w...

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...

They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich men among the first Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in his garden the Romans setting a military guard lest there...

If Jesus preached the same message minister's preach today, He would have never been crucified.

Written almost a hundred years ago, this excerpt from the Reverend John W. Rilling points out one of the main reasons we continue to observe Lent, a period of repentance and discipline for many who ca...

In 1964 Peter Higgs wrote a paper entitled, “Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons,” which proposed the existence of a new fundamental particle of matter based solely upon mathematical dedu...

The Cave One of the most famous passages in Plato's Republic is his "Allegory of the Cave," which is found at the beginning of book seven . Socrates imagines the human condition al...

Eternal and Generous God, Every good gift comes from You. Your generosity is expressed best Through Jesus, the Crucified and Risen One, Who gave Himself for us. We acknowledge we often doubt Your will...

God–our Father, Lord and indwelling Spirit of grace and power: Thank you for hearing us when we pray whether in songs of rejoicing or through tears of sorrow. Thank you for gifts–for the gifts of musi...

The problem was that . . . Christian values were always more popular in American culture than the Christian gospel. That’s why one could speak of “God and country” with great reception in almost any e...

Every time we look at the cross, Christ seems to say to us, “I am here because of you. It is your sin I am bearing, your curse I am suffering, your debt I am paying, your death I am dying.” Nothing in...

Precisely how a man nailed to a cross 2,000 years ago, who claimed to be the Son of God, came to signify reality, in contradiction to the sawdust men of destiny with their fraudulent wars and revoluti...

If ever mortal men found a real hero on this earth, those men were the disciples. They, indeed, were hero-worshippers. Then think of the horrid shock and shame which overwhelmed them at the Cross. It ...

If ever mortal men found a real hero on this earth, those men were the disciples. They, indeed, were hero-worshippers. Then think of the horrid shock and shame which overwhelmed them at the Cross. It ...

In the wake of slavery and the Civil War, there was so much ugliness in black life that one would have had to be blind not to see it. And nothing, absolutely nothing, was uglier than lynching in all o...

In the Christian theology of history, the death of Christ is the central point of history; here all the roads of the past converge; hence all the roads of the future diverge.

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...

We want gain without pain; we want the resurrection without going through the grave; we want life without experiencing death; we want a crown without going by way of the Cross. But in God's econom...

The Eucharist, as a communion of love in and through Christ’s sacrifice, involves learning cruciformity as members of Christ’s sacrificial Body. As such, the Eucharist fulfills Israel’s mode of sacrif...

When Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn’t give them a theory, he gave them a meal.

At the heart of the city of London is Charing Cross. All distances across the city are measured from its central point. Locals refer to it simply as “the cross.” One day a child became lost in the bus...

One of the great leaders of the first generation after the apostles was a man named Polycarp. Polycarp, it is believed, was discipled by the apostle John and carried out a long and fruitful ministry i...

Jesus, the hero of the world’s most well-known spiritual narrative, offers us a mysteriously clear path to the good life: “Anyone who doesn’t pick up their cross and follow after me doesn’t deserve me...

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always enjoyed the public nature of Ash Wednesday. That is to say, what happens when we leave an Ash Wednesday service and there is the sign of the cross, for all who ...