Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Today’s text

1 Corinthians 1:18

The message of the cross folly for those who are on the way to ruin, but for those of us who are on the road to salvation it is the power of God.

Reflection

There is nothing attractive about the cross despite the millions of replicas we hang on our walls or around our neck. We may make it of gold or silver and adorn it with beautiful stones. Our artists contort and color it in ways that can erase its brutality.

But it remains a ghastly affront to human sensibilities, which was always its intention.

In the ancient world, the cruelty of hanging society’s offenders on a cross, slowly to die, kept people in line. It was an instrument of execution and social order that made it clear who was in charge and what would happen to you if you forgot.

Centuries later, we can’t imagine the ugliness or pain of such a death. The cross has become an amulet, a good luck charm we hold up against the struggles of our lives to shield ourselves from the pains of living.

But it doesn’t protect us from a thing.

The cross invites into those pains, to give ourselves to those struggles trusting that there is One who has gone there before us, One who did not avoid the pains of the lost and forgotten, One who brings life out of death and hope where none seems possible.

The cross of Christ invites us to the hope of life where life seems most lost and we feel most alone.

For we are not alone. The Holy One who is God walked in the way of the forsaken, the way of the cross, awakening the awareness that there is no place the power and love of God will not go, no power that divine love cannot conquer.

Pr. David L. Miller