Passion Week of Christ (Part 13)
Why Christianity Has a Cross - Romans 6:5-8

A six-pointed star for modern Judaism, a crescent moon for Islam, a lotus
blossom for Buddhism — these symbols of the other so-called "world
religions" suggest charm and attractiveness, radiance and light. Yet the
universally known visual symbol for Christianity is an instrument of
death. Does that strike you as strange?

Romans put thousands and thousands of people to death on crosses. Jesus
of Nazareth was, of course, one of those victims. But memorializing him
and representing the movement he founded under the symbol of a cross is
strange, to say the least. Unless there is a good reason for choosing
that symbol, putting it in front of a building or around one’s neck on a
chain makes no more sense than engraving a guillotine, hangman’s noose,
or electric chair on my business card or grave marker. Yet we put crosses
even in those places!

Why, then, does Christianity have a cross?

Struggling to Find a Symbol
As a matter of fact, the cross is not the most ancient visual symbol of
Christianity. During the late first and early second centuries, the
simple outline of a fish was commonly used by Christians to identify
themselves to one another. Theirs was an illegal religion at the time,
and they used the sign of the fish to identify themselves to one another
in undercover fashion.

From the second century forward, Christians drew, engraved, and painted
the cross as the universal symbol of their faith. Not a crucifix — a
cross to which a figure of Christ is attached — but a cross. They did not
see their Savior perpetually nailed to the cross. They knew that both his
cross and tomb were empty and abandoned! So the empty cross signified
death to believers, but it simultaneously signified the hope of death
conquered.

But we are still left with the original why question? Why does
Christianity have a cross? Why has this visual image remained central to
the identity of Jesus’ followers? Why preserve the memory of so awful an
event as crucifixion? Why remind ourselves that all we are in focused on
the death of Jesus of Nazareth?

Here are four things the cross suggests to this believer. By telling you
what it signifies to me personally, I both expect to speak for millions
of other Christians and intend to explain some very basic truths of our
common beliefs.

To Remind Us How Bad Sin Is
One hundred sixty-eight people died when Timothy McVeigh parked a truck
that he had converted into a bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah
Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. In the sentencing
phase of McVeigh’s trial, jurors told how his evil sense of vengeance
against the federal government left their lives in shambles.

Sharon Coyne told the court how guilty she felt about going home that
night while her only daughter, Jaci Rae, remained trapped in the day-care
center that was in the bombed building. "She’d been there for twelve
hours, she was in a dirty diaper, she didn’t have a bottle, she didn’t
have me to hold her, and she was afraid, " Coyne told the jury. "And I
could picture her just saying ‘Mama,’ and I felt so guilty leaving this
place." Seven days later, rescuers found the fourteen-month-old girl
dead. "I got to hold her wrapped in a beautiful receiving blanket made by
my friend, Joyce," she said. "And that’s the last thing that I held."
Does listening in on Sharon’s heartache tell you something of how awful
sin is?

Twenty-six-year-old Carrie Lenz’ husband told jurors that he and his wife
learned the day before the bombing that the child they were expecting was
a boy. They gave their son a name, and the next morning the mother-to-be
left for work at the Drug Enforcement Administration office — anxious to
show co-workers the ultrasound pictures and to tell them her baby’s name.
"We were ready to raise a child. It was going our way. And in one fell
swoop, I went from being a husband and a daddy to . . . realizing that
everything I’d worked for was gone. There was nobody coming home. There
was nobody going to be in the driveway," Mr. Lenz said. And his days grew
darker. He started drinking too much. So he pulled out his pistol and put
it in his mouth. Then he put it back. "There is nothing, nothing more
dangerous than a man who has no reason to live," Lenz told the jury.
"I’ve been there." Does that tell you something of how bad evil is in
this world?

· Infamous Lowero Triangle in Uganda: "killing fields" and saw the
remains of hundreds of people who had been murdered during Idi Amin’s
reign of terror in that once-beautiful, once-thriving East African
nation...skulls stacked like cannon balls on an American Civil War
battlefield. We see how bad sin can be as I walked through those fields
and felt the oppressive weight of evil that still hovered in the air.
· Monument to evil that is called Auschwitz....medical experiments
building....piles of human hair and the gold fillings torn out of human
teeth...the gas chambers and the crematoria.

But the cross of Jesus Christ is the ultimate testimony to how bad sin
is. For it is not simply a case of someone in the wrong place at the
wrong time — as with those innocent people in Oklahoma City. The cross is
not a monument to a war casualty, a victim of a massacre, or even a
fatality to genocide. The cross is the horrible death of history’s one
innocent person being executed as a criminal against the Roman Empire.
Jesus died because of human sinfulness. "The wages of sin is death" (Rom.
6:23). "After desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when
it is full-grown, gives birth to death" (Jas. 1:15). But that leads us to
a second reason why Christianity has a cross.

To Show Us How Great Love Is
Some people see the crucifixion of Jesus as the unfortunate ending to a
once-promising career. Others see it as a great miscarriage of justice.
And still others see it as a grand instance of martyrdom for the sake of
one’s convictions.

But Jesus’ death on Calvary was neither unforeseen nor unexpected. As a
matter of fact, it was the most prepared-for and well-announced event in
history. Its meaning has to be found against the background of an event
destined to take place.

Jesus came to Planet Earth to die on Calvary. He came knowing what lay
ahead for him, for the awfulness of sin could be countered only by the
infinity of divine love.

Here are the words of Paul on this point: "You see, at just the right
time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly "for the
ungodly". Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a
good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own
love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us"
(Rom. 5:6-8).

Have you heard the story of the judge whose son appeared before him on a
drunk-driving charge? Because he was sworn to uphold justice, the man
behind the bench had to find him guilty; then he imposed the heaviest
fine allowed under the law. But he immediately stepped down from his
chair and paid the fine from his own pocket.

That's a tiny glimpse of what God has done for us. Unable to declare us
innocent under the law and knowing we could not set right the wrongs we
had done, he pronounced us "Guilty!" and imposed the law's full penalty —
death. Then Jesus Christ went to the cross and paid the penalty for us.

Jumping in front of a speeding car, taking the bullet meant for your
heart, suffering your hell of rejection by God and man on the cross —
pick the metaphor that makes it meaningful to you. All point to the same
marvelous fact of God’s grace. Jesus paid the debt we owed to sin by
dying in our place on the cross.

During his own lifetime, Jesus quoted an aphorism of his day about
friendship and love. To his own disciples, he said, "Greater love has no
one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).
Then he proceeded to falsify it by showing us a far greater love.
The love that is greater than dying for one’s friends is the one that
moves you to sacrifice your life for your enemies. And Christianity has a
cross to remind us of a love so incredibly vast and encompassing.

To Show How Involved God Is In Our Human Predicament
In explaining the meaning of the birth of Jesus, Matthew cites a text
from the Hebrew Bible: "All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had
said through the prophet: ‘The virgin will be with child and will give
birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’ — which means, ‘God with
us’ " (Matt. 1:22-23; cf. Isa. 7:14).

Jesus Christ is God with us in our human predicament of vulnerability,
pain, and mortality. He is God with us in the experience of being lied
about or having your friends abandon you in a crisis.

Have you ever experienced prejudice because of your race or religion?
Jesus is God with you in that. What about injustice? Your refusal to
conform to the norms of The Establishment? In all of these and more, I am
in position to affirm that Jesus Christ is God with us.

The second daughter of Queen Victoria was Princess Alice. She had a
four-year-old son who was the apple of her eye. When he came down with
the disease known as "black diphtheria," Alice was overwhelmed with
anxiety. The disease was highly contagious and very deadly. Because of
her own frail health, nurses attending the child repeatedly warned the
princess to stay away from her son.

One day as Princess Alice stood in a far corner of her son’s room to weep
and pray for her beloved son, she heard him whisper to the nurse, "Why
doesn’t my mother kiss me any more?" The princess-mother could not stand
such a thought in the mind of her dying child, so she raced to his bed,
held him in her arms, and smothered him with kisses. Regrettably, they
turned out to be kisses of death. The mother contracted the awful
disease, and within a few days both mother and son were buried.

Was it a foolish thing for her to do? Should she have known the likely
outcome? Did she seal her own fate? Even if the answer to all these
questions is "Yes," who ever said the calculus of love is sensible? God
loved us so deeply that he was required — not by any external compulsion
but by love alone — to become God with us. To embrace us in our death
throes. To be infected with our disease. To die and be buried for us.

This is an extremely important point to those who have had their heads
turned by the problem of evil. How can God allow suffering, death, and
injustice in the world he created? If God had kept himself distant and
safe from those things, the argument might be unanswerable. But because
of Calvary, the force of the objection is blunted.

No one can raise an accusing fist at God and say, "You don’t know what
it’s like!" No one can say, "You kept yourself above the fray!" God did
not insulate himself from our predicament but came among us, took our sin
to himself, and died for our redemption.

To Show How Sin Is Overcome
The ultimate human problem is sin. It separates us from God and makes it
impossible for us to enter heaven. Nothing impure, defiled, or unholy can
enter God’s heaven, so there is no way I can go there to be with him.

No way, that is, unless my sin can be removed. And removing sin and its
effects from a human heart is roughly analogous to removing a crack from
a pane of glass. It can’t be done!

"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has
gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to
himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that
God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s
sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of
reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were
making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be
reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that
in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor. 5:17-21).

The cross tells us how our sin problem is overcome. We don’t have to fix
things, for God has taken the initiative and fixed them for us — in
Christ. Our problem has been taken care of in full at the cross. Jesus
did everything necessary to make us new creations before God.

Conclusion
The love of Jesus Christ for you is real. He has died in your place, and
you are offered eternal life in him. How could you not love him and
dedicate your life to telling everyone why the Christian religion is
symbolized by a cross?

Last modified: April 18, 2006