The Awful Beauty of the Cross

Sermon 420 St. Martin’s 174 (Riverway) 4/3/26

The Crux of the Matter Today we have come to the crux of our faith.

All of human history has led to this one crucial moment. It is the culmination of God’s plan for salvation, for all people, for all time. It was so definitive, so singular in its importance, and yet so ordinary. Another day, another cross on a lonely hill, with some unlucky guy nailed to it who was caught at the wrong place and the wrong time. Or was it?

On this day, we ask the very same question people walking out of Jerusalem’s city gate asked on that first Good Friday: “Who is that man hanging on the cross?”

Our answer to that simple question is the summation of our faith and the defining characteristic of a Christian. That is no mere man up there—that is the Lord of life dying before our eyes, and his death means something for all of us.

The cross, in some strange way, is both awful and beautiful; it is simultaneously to be abhorred for the barbaric violence it inflicted and venerated for the One who took such senseless violence upon himself. It defies the logic of the world, and this tension was experienced firsthand by the early church.

They were eyewitnesses to the horror of crucifixions on a regular basis, and so they had no concept of a cross being anything other than an instrument of supreme torture and degradation.

Awful We modern folks have become so desensitized to the reality of crucifixion that we rarely grasp how our Lord beautified that which was abhorrent.

Crucifixion was nothing new. The Persians were among its earliest adopters, some 500 years before Jesus.

Like most things, the Romans stole innovations from their rivals and perfected them for their own purposes. In some form of twisted irony, the Romans used crucifixion to establish ‘peace’ throughout their empire. They used it as a warning to all those who threatened the Pax Romana (the so-called Roman Peace) that was established by the son of god, Caesar Augustus, himself.

Unruly slaves and insurrections who threatened the empire’s peace were guaranteed to meet the grim fate of someone the state didn’t even deem to be human.

 What the Romans saw as an unfortunate (but necessary) tool for peace, their subjects understood it to be a weapon of terror.

Terror is not usually the feeling we have when we look at a cross nowadays. But again, we are so far removed from seeing an actual human being writhe on a cross for hours or days.

It feels more like ancient history, or something you’d read in a grim novel, than an event you could actually witness with your own eyes.

That may have changed for many of us about a decade ago when news reports told (in vivid detail) the destructive nature of ISIS as they entered towns and villages. It was jarring just how far they took their agenda; destroying precious artifacts of history, never to be reclaimed. Priceless sites turned to rubble, families terrorized, and children kidnapped.

If that wasn’t enough, chilling reports were coming out of Syria that ISIS militants were carrying out crucifixions. Ancient history, long buried, had come back to life in the worst possible way.

At first, they were hanging men who had already been executed on makeshift crosses in the town square of Raqqa, leaving them there for over three days so that every man, woman, and child could see what would become of those who challenged their authority.[i]

Soon Christians began meeting the same fate as their Lord, some being crucified in front of their families.[ii] Mary’s pain at the foot of the cross had become their own in the 21^st century.

As I read some of these reports this week, I began to cry. You likely feel the same sickening feeling I do. But I tell you all of this so that we can be clear just how abhorrent crucifixion was — that feeling we have now is the feeling we should have when hearing the Passion of our Lord.

We may be accustomed to seeing crosses in churches, along highways, or even in jewelry we wear, but that it has been reclaimed as a tool of gruesome execution in our lifetime is too much for our modern sensibilities to handle.

There’s nothing humane about executions, but crucifixions were meant not only to kill but to humiliate. The goal was to dehumanize the poor soul who happened to find themselves stripped naked and nailed to a cross for all to see.

They would die a miserable death, with their own body being the final executioner, their lungs unable to receive the breath of life it so desperately needed. Hours turned into days for many to succumb to the trauma, and it would all play out along major roads or just outside the city gate for all to see. Not one ounce of dignity was afforded to the crucified. 

Beautiful The cross is awful, even downright offensive. And yet, the man on the cross is beautiful. Though disfigured from hours of torture, Jesus was beautiful—it was the purest act of love ever done, and it was the culmination of a life that was radically different from any other we have seen.

Throughout his ministry, there was something otherworldly about him that attracted sinners and saints to drop everything they were doing and follow him. He practiced what he preached to the bitter end.

He was the light of the world, the bread of life, the Good Shepherd himself, and time and again, he showed his disciples that the way of God’s kingdom required nothing less than extreme humility and sacrificial love.

He even said that if you had seen him, you had seen the Father because he and the Father were one.

To the horror of all of his followers, he not only preached about sacrificial living for the glory of God, but he became the sacrifice. He did not consider himself above degradation and humiliation. It was the purest example of how far God would go to show his love for us and what it cost to save his creation from the powers of sin and death.

By his wounds (and his humiliation) we are healed, made whole, made into his beautiful image.  

Humiliation Corrie ten Boom was a young girl when she and her family were sent to Ravensbrück, a notorious Nazi concentration camp. They had been arrested for hiding Jews in their home. The Nazi’s considered the entire family guilty for showing mercy to their Jewish neighbors, and so they all had to pay the price.

Every Friday in the camp, the prisoners were required to strip naked and stand in line for their weekly ‘medical’ inspection. A cruel joke that was one of many ways of humiliating people who were practically walking corpses.

They were forced to stand up straight, with their hands at their sides. They were not even granted the dignity of covering themselves with their hands.

One particular Friday, as Corrie stood behind the emaciated frame of her dying sister, Betsy, she was reminded of a verse she had heard in church many years ago. “He hung on the cross.”

She whispered to her sister, “They took his clothes, too.”[iii]

In what was a living hell on earth, they were reminded of the humiliation of the Son of God. They were not alone; God had been there too, and he was there with them now.[iv]

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And so, we ask again, “Who is that man on the cross?”

It is none other than the Almighty God, the Paschal Lamb, the Prince of Peace, who submitted himself to the cruelties of this world so that we would never be alone in our pain; and in so doing, he disarmed the powers of Sin and Death, creating a permanent bridge between God and humanity so that we might be reconciled to God and to one another.

On the cross, we see horrendous evil and the goodness of God. Jesus’ humiliation becomes God’s ultimate sign of vindication and our hope of redemption.

It is indeed ‘awful,’ but in the older sense of the word. As we gather around this cross, we are full of awe and wonder because of Jesus, who beautified it by his great love.

[i] https://www.cnn.com/2014/05/01/world/meast/syria-bodies-crucifixions/index.html; https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27245852

[ii] https://www.christianpost.com/news/isis-told-crucified-christians-if-you-love-jesus-you-will-die-like-jesus.html

[iii] The Crucifixion. Fleming Rutledge. p. 564

[iv] “Where can I flee from your presence?” the psalmist writes, “even in the depths you are there.”  Even in the depths of human pain, suffering, violence, and degradation: Jesus is there. He has redeemed it all because he has been through it all.

Photo by Frantisek Duris on Unsplash