One of the reasons why the gospel spread so fast and so far in the early days of the Church was simply the message of the cross. What the Christians were preaching was more than cosmic myths and psychological mysteries. The fact that Jesus was executed on a Roman cross and nevertheless somehow still lives was the main factor making the gospel so powerful to other subjects of the Roman Empire. It is precisely why the Apostle Paul insisted on the cross as the center of faith, even though it was “a stumbling block for Jews and folly to Gentiles.”
The cross was a problem for Jews because, well, a crucified Messiah was not part of the expectation. But also, in Paul’s time, the Jewish authorities were still imagining that they had some special relationship with the Romans, indicated in their exemption from emperor-worship. Crucifixion was a punishment reserved almost exclusively for people convicted of sedition against the Empire. To admit that Rome killed the Messiah would automatically make Rome the enemy of all Jews. The establishment could not say that publicly even if they believed it.
Paul’s big epiphany is that his people, the Jews, are not that special but just a conquered nation like all the others, no less oppressed or victimized by Rome. But the Jews were different in being the sole stewards of the biblical story, and the nation from whom the Messiah, the deliverer of all people, emerges.
The cross therefore became the centerpiece of Paul’s teaching and one reason for the explosive growth of the gospel gatherings he founded across the Empire. The cross was, for people at that time, a loaded, highly political image. It was intended and utilized by Rome to strike terror into colonized populations. But the early Church uses it to unite those same oppressed, exploited people across ethnic, national, religious, economic, and racial lines, in a new, alternative society. Paul understood the cross to be the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures, which are at heart the story of a band of liberated slaves and their descendants. Christ had finally come to deliver us, not just from Rome, but from bondage to “sin,” the pervasive, demonic power that infected everyone with toxic self-interest, the concentration and application of which Rome was the worst example.
Similarly for Gentiles or “Greeks,” the fact that Jesus was crucified meant that he got himself in the way of Roman power in what could have been considered a foolish and self-destructive way. He said and did things that earned him the punishment everyone knew he would receive. Some would have thought that he should have kept his head down and stayed under the radar, as it were, and made sure he did not do anything to annoy the Romans. That’s what everyone else had learned to do. If somebody got themselves crucified it was often their own damn fault (not that Rome was shy about crucifying innocent people if it got their point across).
The difference between Jesus and the countless others who were murdered by Rome was the resurrection. Jesus’ uprising to a new and continued life with and within his disciples, even after enduing Rome’s worst legal sentence, was understood as at least an implicit defeat of Rome. It would have appealed to people who had Rome’s knee on their necks for generations. People joined the Church to participate in Christ’s victory over Rome, and the formation of a new kind of community in his Name.
The writings of the New Testament show the Church reflecting on the meaning of the cross. Their understanding gets expanded and widened metaphorically and spiritually, so that it reveals both cosmic and psychological dimensions. Representing the death of our old selves, the cross becomes God’s way of liberating each individual soul. At the same time, the cross depicts the liberation and renewal of the whole creation. Thus, through trusting in Jesus Christ people find deliverance from the consequences of their own sin as well as emancipation from the principalities and powers dominating the world.
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