The Cross and the Pulpit, Part 1 | Christ, His Cross, His Church

1 Corinthians 1:18-25

First Corinthians chapter 1, beginning in verse 18, reading through verse 25. “For the word of the Cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’ Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.

“For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”

If we’re going to consider and contemplate the theology of the cross, it seems to me that we want to know something fundamental about what the cross meant in the first century. That’s kind of a starting point for coming to grips with it; is having a bit of a historical context to it all. Many of the great hymns of the faith emphasize the cross of Jesus Christ. You may remember these lyrics, “Beneath the cross of Jesus I fain would take my stand, The shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land. When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of glory died, my richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride.”

And so the old hymn writers saw something in the cross that needed to be celebrated and sung about and, and, emphasized in the poetic music that they brought to the people of God. And so, it’s right and understandable where we would sing that we, we, cherish the old rugged cross. We cherish it, because it was the instrument that that brought us justification; the price of our redemption was paid in the atoning death of Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary. That’s where our sin debt was paid. And so we cherish the cross.

 But Beloved, to really understand the theology of the cross, you need to enter into that historical reality that the cross was not always cherished. In fact, as we read in this text here today, that the cross and the fact that Christ was crucified was actually an impediment, humanly speaking, to the gospel. There was a reproach to the cross, to crucifixion that made hearers turn away both Jews and Gentiles. And so why would that be? And what did the cross mean in the day of Jesus? And what does that mean for the way that we conduct a ministry of the pulpit today? It’s directly relevant. It’s directly determinative of the way that we think and the way that we, the way that we, contemplate what we do and our awareness of the impact that it has, and what we do with the objections to a cross based ministry.

And they, so the answer of what the cross meant in Jesus’ day has a guiding determinative impact for a, a, philosophy of pulpit ministry today. So I want to just take you back into the first century, and even further back, take you back almost 2500 years, as we do this little bit of, her, historical survey. And I just want to tell you up front that what you’re going to hear over the next several minutes is not for the faint of heart, and we need to consider these details.

 They’re essential for our study, but it’s also just essential to see how deeply rooted the, the, significance of the cross is in Christian ministry, and how that bleeds over, no pun intended, bleeds over into a pulpit ministry. And so, as we do this historical review, I just want to tell you, first of all, that crucifixion was common in ancient history. It was common in ancient history.

It’s been, it’s been, over 1000 years since crucifixion was indiscriminately practiced. And so, for us, you know, especially if you walk in off the street and are relatively new to the church, that there’s not really a, a, modern context to understand crucifixion, and what the cross might mean, and what its implications might be. That was not the case at all in the first century, crucifixion was common.

 Now crucifixion, just to give you a simple definition of it, it was a method of capital punishment. It was a method of execution, in which the reigning officials, military, or governmental leaders would, would, attach a victim to a wooden cross and then just leave him there to die. They would, they would, just nail him or tie him to a cross and leave him there to die over a period of, you know, could be days.  As we’ll see in a little bit.

 The origin of it seems to have developed about 600 years before the time of Christ, during the reign of the Persians. And there’s just a, there are, there are, just a few historical markers to just show the continuity of the practice, that I want to take you through. Crucifixion would be used individually to execute one criminal. It would be used in mass executions.

 So about 600 BC there was a Persian ruler named Astyages who put his advisors to the stake for giving him bad advice. And then about 200 years later, Alexander the Great crucified 2000 people at the same time after a military conquest, and one historian records that event, in this way, he says, “The anger of the king offered a sad spectacle to the victors. 2000 persons for who’s killing, the general madness had spent itself, hung fixed to crosses over a huge stretch of the shore.”

 If you can imagine being at a beach someplace, you know, a long stretch of open, open, sand, and you just look down as far as you can see to the left, people hanging, groaning, suffering on a cross. Down to the right, same thing. That maybe gives you a little bit of a picture of how vast the mass execution was at that time.

 About another 200 years later, a leader in Palestine named Alexander Janius took vengeance on his opponents. He crucified 800 men at the same time, and in an added measure of sadism, he brought their wives and children out, while they were hanging on the cross, slaughtered the wives and children before their eyes, so that their dying vision was that of their loved ones being executed in front of their eyes.

 All of this leading up to the time of Christ and the execution of Christ. So this was a very broad, long established historical practice. You know, that covers 600 years in, you know, kind of a highlight fashion or a low light fashion, I guess you could say. And you think about the history of our country, you know, coming up on 250 years, double that, add 100 years to it and you have something of the, of how deeply ingrained this was in ancient culture.

 The Romans after the time of Christ continued this practice. The wicked emperor Nero encased Christians in wax, crucified them, and, and, then set them on fire, as human candles to light his garden in 64AD. And then subsequent leaders carried out crucifixions, as well. And it wasn’t until the early 300s, in the, when the famous Emperor Constantine, and he supposedly converted to Christianity, he ended the practice of crucifixion once and for all, in the early 300s. Nearly 1000 years after it was first instituted by the Persians.

My point is that the crucifixion as a means of execution was not unique. And immediately you’re given a sense of perspective of what Christ submitted himself to and what he did. This was not a spectacular death that he died. It wasn’t a, it wasn’t a, glorious martyr’s death that he suffered. He suffered just like tens of thousands of people had suffered before him. His identity with humanity and, and, the, the, extent to which he obeyed to death, even death on a cross, as it says in Philippians 2, gives us a sense of how lowly and how much he condescended, in order to identify with us and to accomplish our redemption. So it was common in ancient history.

 Now secondly, crucifixion was a sign of disgrace. It was a sign of disgrace. Now military leaders, political leaders, they use, crucifix, crucifixion to maintain public order or to take vengeance on their defeated foes. And it was not indiscriminately practiced, at least by the Romans.

 For the Romans, if you were a citizen of Rome, you were exempt from being crucified. It was a privilege, a negative privilege of citizenship, that you would not be subject to crucifixion, even if you were to be executed for capital punishment. No! Crucifixion was used on criminals, on military enemies, on rebellious slaves, those that had set themselves in opposition to the government, in opposition to leadership, those that had, had, established themselves as the dregs of society.

And what crucifixion did as it humiliated and tortured the victims; it was a public manifestation of Roman supremacy over those who resisted the empire. You rebel, you incite insurrection against the empire, against the Emperor, you go to the cross, and publicly you are seen suffering, disgraced, and you are identified with the bad element of society. A cross disgraced its victim and put him with those who were social outcasts at, at, best. And so, it was common. It was a sign of disgrace.

 And crucifixion, thirdly was sadistic. And sadistic is the only word that I know how to, is the word that I best know how to use to describe it. And here’s what we want to see. And, and, this is a place, this is a place, where, where, we have to forcibly eject ourselves from our modern society and our modern way of thinking, and project ourselves back 2000 years into the way that they thought at the time, if we’re going to actually understand the cross.

 Because the way that they handled capital punishment, the way that they handled execution, is completely different than what we do, at least here in America; where we have constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. That was not the case back then. And so, we have to step back into their way of thinking and what they did and, and, how they used it. And this manner of execution was brutal beyond anything that we have ever seen in our lifetimes.

 You know, perhaps excepting the way Islamic radicals will execute their enemies. Back in the first century, there were preliminaries to the cross, to the crucifixion. The victim would be flogged with a leather whip, and not just with a leather whip, but with leather that was studded with bone and metal, so that it would dig into the flesh and then tear it out of his back as it was withdrawn and struck again.

 And so, before he was ever crucified, the victim had his back turned into throbbing ribbons of exposed flesh. That was the starting point. And then what they would do after that preliminary flogging they would force the condemned to carry the crossbar to his execution site with a placard around his neck that indicated the crime that he had committed.

 And so, he’s, he’s, being marched through public streets, having already been sadistically tortured, carrying the instrument of his own execution, with a sign around his neck indicating why he was being crucified. Completely, utterly demeaning. There were no 14th Amendment protections. There was no right to counsel. There were no Miranda warnings that you were entitled to. There was nothing protecting them at all.

 They were at the mercy of their executioners, and so they’re outstretched arms, when they reached the execution site, would be tied or nailed to that crossbar, and then the executioners would hoist that crossbar up, fasten it to the vertical post, and then they would be hanging there. There was usually a peg driven into the vertical post where they would somewhat sit to support their weight.

 And after all of that, beloved, then the real agony began and they just allowed the victim to die of suffocation or exhaustion. You can find, you know, multiple articles online that describe the medical aspects of crucifixion. Some of those men would suffer for several days before death came to them. And unlike and here’s, here’s, where we kind of have to step out of our modern context.

 What do we do in the relatively rare instances when capital punishment is practiced here in America today? How’s it done? Behind penitentiary walls? No media coverage, very few witnesses, very sterile environment, usually, especially if it’s death by lethal injection. You know, you’ve got a doctor there and intravenous, and the guy’s fed a final meal before he dies. But it’s so sanitized. It’s so beyond public view that we never even really think about it.

 Well, the Romans had a completely diametrically opposed view and philosophy of these things. They wanted it to be of maximum exposure, because of the public deterrent effect that it would have. You see someone being crucified and you read what he did; you immediately are taught you don’t do that. And it strikes fear in the public eye, satisfies their thirst simultaneously for justice, and becomes an instrument of maintaining public order. And so, it was made as public as possible in exact opposition to the way that we do it here in America today. Completely different mindset.

 And So, what Romans would do is they would hang people. They would crucify people on the busiest roads to maximize the exposure of those who were passing by. Men would see the indignity and learn not to repeat the crime. Now at this point I’d invite you to turn to the Gospel of John, because you see a hint of this in the accounts of the crucifixion of Christ in John chapter 19.

 John chapter 19, let’s pick it up a little earlier in the context and pick it up in John 19, verse 15. The crowd manipulating pilot, who was compromised politically, “The crowd cried out, ‘Away with him, away with him, crucify him!’ and Pilate said to them, ‘Shall I crucify your king?’ The chief priests answered. ‘We have no king but Caesar.’ So he delivered him over to them to be crucified.

 “So they took Jesus,” verse 17, “and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called The Place of a Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. And there they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them. Pilate also wrote an inscription and put it on the cross. It read, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.’”

 And then look in verse 20, you see this public aspect of it, just incidentally alluded to by the gospel writer John. He could incidentally allude to this, because it was such common knowledge in the first century. And he says there in verse 20, “Many of the Jews read this inscription, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek.”

 So you see the placard. You see the charges. The public charges against Jesus. He was the King of the Jews. You see that it was in a public place where many people saw it and saw him hanging there, crucified. You see it, in written in multiple languages to maximize the, the, exposure of the crime and the reason that Jesus was being crucified.

 All of this, beloved, all of this setting up for our understanding, that when a man was crucified, like that, it indicated that the victim was helpless at the hands of the invincible Romans. There is nothing you can do to stop our power, and our power is executed against you, and there is nothing you can do about it. And the ultimate indignity for many men, who were crucified is, it, at times they would leave the corpse to hang even after the man was dead, and his corpse would just be left for birds or animals to come along and, and, to eat, so that even after death there was further indignity inflicted upon them.

 What I want you to see, is there is no, there’s no, real analogy to this, to what we know in modern life. I mean, even my daughter and I were talking about this not long ago. She’s in, she’s a Hospice admissions nurse, and even, even, for the normal dying process, most, that’s so often hidden from us, that we, so many people don’t have any acquaintance with the dying process.

Well, here the, the, whole, the whole, aspect of it was completely reversed. And the sadistic dying process of crucifixion was on public display for everyone to see. And so there was a utter contempt attached to the crucified victim. There was utter suffering. And in the first century mindset, this showed how mighty the empire was. This showed the glory of the empire, to crucify men and teach them not to do what they had just done.

Now fourth point here, we’ve seen the crucifixion was, was, common in ancient history. It was a sign of disgrace. It was sadistic. And now we dig even deeper into the spiritual connections that it has in the, the, lessons that it has for us here. And let me just preface it by saying this, I would venture to say that for most of you, as you hear this and you contemplate and identify with the, the, men who are being crucified, that there’s an element of sympathy that you have for them.

 Say what a, what a, terrible way to die. I’ve. It’s such a what I, I, feel so bad that, that, people died like that, and they suffered like that, and, you know, and they were, they were, humiliated like that. And there’s a sense of sympathy that we have for them and perhaps rightly so. Whether that’s right or wrong doesn’t matter for our discussion here.

 What I want you to know is, that in the first century, for crucified men, there was not a sense of sympathy for them. These men were despised, and rejected, and they were not pitied. The men who were crucified were viewed with utter contempt. And so, for this fourth aspect of our historical review, crucified men were despised by the culture, not sympathized with. They were despised, and there is enough indication in historical writings to give us a pretty good picture.