4 Days that Changed the World | Good Friday: What happened on the cross? | Week 3

As a youth pastor, I can remember telling my students a fictitious story about a father and a son.  The father was a draw-bridge operator.  His son was with him at work, down climbing around in the gears, having a good time.  A train was coming.  The drawbridge was up.  The father had to decide:  Am I going to crush my son, kill my son, and save everybody on the train?  Or, am I going to let my son live and everybody on the train die?  It's a very emotional story and one that stirs the human heart.  The punchline was that this was a picture of what happens on the cross, and God decides to kill his son, so that we, humanity, on the train might live.  It's emotive.  It stirs a response.  But is it accurate?  Is that what's going on on the cross?  Ever since there's been a cross, there's been discussion.  Paul would say:  For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God [to save].  (Romans 1:16)    The reason he's saying 'I am not ashamed' is because there were some people who were ashamed.  There was shame to be had.  The cross was as much about shaming someone as it was about killing someone.  

Jesus's cross wasn't the only cross people had seen.  It's the cross we talk about, but there's this story that Josephus records.  He was a Roman historian.  He wrote that in 4 B.C, when Varus, one of the governors of Rome, propped 2000 people on crosses. . . . .ONE day, outside the city of Galilee, and he crucified them all in ONE day.  People in Jesus's day would have understood the shame of the cross.  They would have understood the pain of the cross.  They would have understood the cross in a far better way than we do.  They would have struggled just as much with Paul's statement that the cross is the wisdom, and the power, and the glory of God.  How could something that was so shameful be so glorious...