The resurrection affirms that sin and death do not have the last word. At the cross the finest religion of the ancient world (Judaism) and the finest system of justice of the ancient world (Rome), joi...
Exodus 20:3, Isaiah 53:4-6, Matthew 16:24, John 19:17, Psalm 22:14
An American businessman went to Oberammergau to witness the famous passion play, just before the outbreak of World War II. Enthralled by this great drama that depicts the story of the cross, he went b...
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...
Reflection The television series Alone follows ten individuals who are left to fend for themselves and by themselves in the wilderness. Now, these aren’t everyday individuals plucked from Main St...
Reflection Sister Helen Prejean’s 1993 book Dead Man Walking , adapted into a 1995 film starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, tells the story of her work with two convicted killers on death row. Sh...
The crucifixion is the touchstone of Christian authenticity, the unique feature by which everything else, including the resurrection, is given its true significance.
Who would know Sin, let him repair Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair, His skin, his garments bloody be. Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain ...
The inner criterion of whether or not Christian theology is Christian lies in the crucified Christ . . . we come back to Luther’s lapidary statement, the cross is the test of everything:
Love was compressed for all history in that lonely figure on the cross, who said that he could call down angels at any moment on a rescue mission, but chose not to – because of us. At Calvary, God acc...
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...
[Speaking of crucifixion] It seems almost inevitable to me that Jesus should go through this kind of darkness. . . . If you think of Jesus as God disguised as a man, then this will have no meaning for...
Merciful and everliving God, Creator of heaven and earth, the crucified body of your Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy day. Grant that we may await with him the dawning of the third day...
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...
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 ...
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...
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....
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,...
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...
The cross is the center of the world's history; the incarnation of Christ and the crucifixion of our Lord are the pivot round which all the events of the ages revolve. The testimony of Christ was ...
The Son and the Father are doing this [the crucifixion] in concert, by the power of the Spirit. This interposition of the Son between human beings and the curse of God upon Sin is a project of the thr...
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...
In order to speak of the crucified God we need a theology of abandonment, of dereliction, of an alienation so profound that it can only be expressed in language marked by paradox and by great daring a...
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,...
Remember that each of us has his own cross. The Golgotha of this cross is our heart: it is being lifted or implanted through a zealous determination to live according to the Spirit of God. Just as sal...