Good Friday Meditation

People often asked :

Why is the cross, the capital punishment tool, be the symbol of Christianity and the center of its focus ? How could an ever loving forgiving God let His own Son to die on the cross for the mankind they created which they could declare as lost and failed project on big blue planet ? 

I do not always have a good answer to these questions. I know that God died for my sins on that cross many years ago just to enable me to come back to Him and live the life He has purposed for me. I shiver to think that He would still die for me should I be the only human ever lived. 

To the world, the cross is the symbol of ultimate cruelty, both from God's and mankind's perspectives. It is unimaginable to think God would put His Son through this agonising death. To just witness His own son death on the cross would be a near-death agonising experience. 

But to Paul, he said, the cross is the symbol of Love at its summation, Love at its peak form, it is a symbol of God's Goodness for Mankind. He is Good and He will lay down His life for His own. 

As I ponder on this questions, I became clear why the symbol of cross means to us who have come into faith in Christ, it means that God is willing to be wounded for our sake, God is willing to suffer and die for us in a special way so that death will hold its sting no more and we be set free. The price Christ paid on the cross is not to give us a ticket to heaven, it is more than that. The cross is a reminder that we need to die to the world and we need to die to self in order to  live an abundant life even as we are on earth. God is not just a distant, un-involved God who judges, all Holy, all worthy and all mighty, all perfect and having nothing to do with sins. He is not like that. He is the God with a wound. If we look around the world, there is so much suffering, how could we worship and follow a God who cannot identify with suffering and wounds ?

John Stott said it best in his reflection on the Cross :

“I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as 'God on the cross.' In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?

I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world.

But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness.

That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross that symbolizes divine suffering. 'The cross of Christ ... is God’s only self-justification in such a world” as ours....'

The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak; they rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne; But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak, And not a god has wounds, but thou alone.” 

― John R.W. Stott, Cross