Crux probat omnia.
“The cross tests everything.”
Martin Luther wrote these words. The cross defined his theology…defined his life.
And the cross defines our lives as well.
What you think about the cross of Christ says everything about you.
Either you are convinced that life is all about you…that there is no God…or that you are god…or that spirituality is some brand of esoteric knowledge…along with mystical practices…and being contemplative and one with the universe…or just being good…or being your good ol’ religious self…
Or you recognize your desperate need for a Savior…for the cross.
The four Gospels focus on the cross of Christ. Everything leads up to the cross. Jesus’ birth…miracles…teachings…healings…parables…actions… all point forward to His death. His sacrificial life was the precursor to His sacrificial death.
John’s Gospel begins with the declaration that defines Jesus’ life.
Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! (John 1:29)
Matthew’s Gospel reminds us that the very name of Jesus points to the necessity of the cross.
You shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins (Matthew 1:21b).
Christianity is the cross. Take away the cross and all you have is another religion.
For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified (1 Corinthians 2:2).
The bodily resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate proof of Christianity. The cross is Christianity’s content…its message.
The crucifixion is the touchstone of Christian authenticity, the unique feature by which everything else, including the resurrection, is given its true significance. …It is the crucifixion that marks out Christianity as something definitively different in the history of religion. It is in the crucifixion that the nature of God is truly revealed. …The crucifixion is the most important historical event that has ever happened. (Fleming Rutledge)
Whatever you want to say about Christianity, it is not like other religions. There is no other event like the cross. There is no other person like the Crucified Savior…the Lamb of God.
Clearly, the cross is what separates the Christ of Christianity from every other Jesus. In Judaism there is no precedent for a Messiah who dies, much less as a criminal as Jesus did. In Islam, the story of Jesus’ death is rejected as an affront to Allah himself. Hindus can accept only a Jesus who passes into peaceful samadhi, a yogi who escapes the degradation of death. The figure of the crucified Christ, says Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, “is a very painful image to me. It does not contain joy or peace, and this does not do justice to Jesus.” There is, in short, no room in other religions for a Christ who experiences the full burden of mortal existence–and hence there is no reason to believe in him as the divine Son whom the Father resurrects from the dead. (Kenneth Woodward, Newsweek, March 26, 2000)
The central event of Christianity is too offensive and too much against the grain of religious thought as we know it to have emerged out of human religious imagination, no matter how philosophically subtle or humanly moving that religion might be. (Fleming Rutledge)
Every other religion is based on our attempt to reach God…to appease Him…to show ourselves to be good…redeemable. We inherently like those kind of religions. They speak “good things” about us…about our abilities…about our knowledge…about our “spirituality.” We like feeling pretty special about ourselves…especially about feeling more spiritual and knowledgeable than the next guy.
The cross shatters all of this gnostic spiritual elitism.
There is no spiritual hierarchy.
There are only sinners in need of grace.
The cross by its very nature is a skandalon. It confronts us…it offends us…it humbles us…it calls us to make a decision. Either the Man on the cross is my Substitute or he is just a man who died a criminal’s death on a Roman cross for no apparent reason. Either the cross is the most important event in human history or it is just an odd blip on the page that deserves no real notice.
Either the cross of Christ is my salvation or I am my own salvation.
But God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world (Galatians 6:14).
Crux probat omnia.
“The cross tests everything.”
