the cross on Injury

Jesus: You gave us Your love at a high price – Your own death on the cross in our place! By Your grace you give us eternal life and entrust to us Your creation. Thank You, Lord! We come today as Y...

Pastor: Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.  People: He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; Pastor: and as one from w...

Grant, O Lord, that in your wounds we may find our safety, in your stripes our cure, in your pain our peace, in your Cross our victory, in your Resurrection our triumph, and a crown of righteousness i...

Any discussion of how pain and suffering fit into God's scheme ultimately leads back to the cross.

In their excellent book Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the reality of what it means to “take up our cross” in our daily lives: Sometimes we suffer u...

Hide not the offense of the cross, lest you make it of none effect. The angles and corners of the gospel are its strength: to pare them off is to deprive it of power. Toning down is not the increase o...

Executed publicly, situated at a major crossroads or on a well-trafficked artery, devoid of clothing, left to be eaten by birds and beasts, victims of crucifixion were subject to optimal, unmitigated,...

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...

Please know that when I take up my cross every day I am not talking about my wheelchair. My wheelchair is not my cross to bear. Neither is your cane or walker your cross. Neither is your dead-end job ...

Leader: Blessed Lord Jesus, before your cross I kneel and see the heinousness of my sin, my iniquity that caused you to be made a curse, the evil that provokes divine wrath. All: Show me the enormit...

In Jesus Christ on the Cross, there is refuge; there is safety; there is shelter; and all the power of sin upon our track cannot reach us when we have taken shelter under the Cross that atones for our...

There’s an aphorism repeated often in the writings of the medieval church: per crucem ad lucem, through the cross to the light. God loves us passionately and wants to bring us joy and flourishing, but...

No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.

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...

O all ye who passe by, behold and see; Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree; The tree of life to all, but onely me: Was ever grief like mine?

Through the death of Christ on the cross making atonement for sin, we get a perfect standing before God. That is justification, and it puts us, in God's sight, back in Eden before sin entered. God...

Preaching Commentary At the Turning Point Following Simon Peter’s climatic height of his faith, his confession that Jesus was the “Messiah, the Son of the living God,” Peter now exemplifies our hum...

The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought that takes success for its standards.

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,...

Cross-bearing is the long lesson of our mortal life. It is a part of God’s salvation, called sanctification. It is a lesson set before us every moment of every day.” “If life were an art lesson…we cou...

Preaching Commentary Ecumenical Note I celebrate the many flavors of Christianity which gather within The Pastor’s Workshop. As such, I recognize and respect the different names we use to refer to...

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. …………………………...

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,...

Jesus Christ is what God does, and the cross where God did it.

Christ and His cross are not separable in this life; howbeit Christ and His cross part at heaven's door, for there is no house-room for crosses in heaven. One tear, one sigh, one sad heart, one fe...

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...

Brothers and sisters, be assured of this, when we sin, “we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sin...

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...

Preaching Commentary Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Israel’s State of Mind The Book of Isaiah is a remarkable accounting of the history of the relationship people o...

The lectionary text from John is an exceedingly long passage, but covers the main events that we commemorate on Good Friday. For that reason, I am going to break up the text into manageable chunks. I ...