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Whenever you put the cross on screen, you have to start thinking about what you're doing with it because the possibility is that you'll get into trouble. Now, you take a movie like, for example, Ken Russell's film The Devils. The Devils of Loudan - it's a true historical case about 17th century France. The background to the story is that it's a political story in which Cardinal Richelieu was trying to knock down the walls of Loudan. What Russell attempted to do was show that how the organisation of the church and the organisation of politics was becoming corrupted whilst this man, the priest was quietly finding his own faith and the central scene in the film was a scene which unfortunately has now been tagged "the rape of Christ".
What happens in this film is that Grandier is seen having a roadside communion, very quietly breaking bread, taking wine, blessing This is intercut with a terrible spectacle going on in the cathedral at Loudan in which these nuns believe they are possessed. They've been whipped up to believe it by these evil politicians; they perform all manner of sacrilegious blasphemies in the church and the climax of this sequence is that the group of nuns charge the altar, tear down this enormous crucifix, lie it on the floor of the cathedral and proceed to assault it.
Now the reason that scene is interesting to me is that when that film was made, although it contained many things to many people that would find unacceptable even today, the one scene that came out of the film in total was the sequence with the cross. The whole thing came out because when Russell made the film he showed it to his distributors and his distributors looked at it and said no. There is no way you are putting that kind of defilement of the cross on any screen with our money, thank you very much.
So, if film makers understand the power of the cross to stir up an audience, what about musicians? The artist formerly known as Prince surprised his fans in by dropping a song called The Cross into the middle of his dance double album "Sign o' the Times". And Prince isn't the only one. In Madonna's videos she didn't just wear a cross, she wore lots of huge crosses and danced around lots of others. She even set light to them. As a lapsed Catholic, Madonna is more than aware of the power of the cross. And that means when she subverts it or plays with it, it's a more powerful message I suppose than somebody like Catherine Zeta Jones, who may just like to wear a nice Tiffany cross, or Judy Finnegan, who wears the Tiffany diamond cross every day on the television.
I can't imagine Judy Finnegan is trying to challenge the Church or challenge conventions by wearing a diamond Tiffany cross. It's just a present that Richard gave her and she likes it. Whereas Madonna, writhing around on the floor in a very low-cut gown grasping a crucifix - that's a different story.
Mother Claudia comes face-to-face with the image of Christ crucified countless times a day. There's a crucifix on the wall of every room of Tyburn Convent in London, where she's lived for ten years, and of course - like half the population it seems - she wears a cross around her neck. In recent years there seems to have been a tendency to use the cross as a fashion ornament. I can only say that you cannot, you can never judge an individual person's reason for doing things.
Because God is God But He's always thinking of us and in human terms, if people in any area or any religion or belief take something that's sacred to a group or a religion and mock it, and use it in a sacrilegious or blasphemous way, then that's not a good thing.
And it has repercussions - not so much hurting that group or religion - it hurts that person in their soul, in a way they're probably not aware of. That's why the Christian tradition would be quite wary of people maybe using it as a fashion symbol in a profane way. If the cross is abused, mocked or trivialised, many people still feel outraged, but what about the original image itself? Isn't that pretty horrifying? Whether or not you think Jesus was the Son of God, the vision of a tortured human being left to die in agony, his arms nailed wide open in a lost embrace, should be one of the most shocking images in our culture.
But perhaps it isn't any more. Maybe our saturation with images of violence inoculates us against it? For theatre director Deborah Warner, the horror of the crucifixion still cuts through. Well the violence of it appals me. I can't really come to terms with that part of it. I absolutely understand the strength of the huge gesture that somebody gave their only son.
Sproul and his sermon on Galatians 3: My father brought a handful of them home. The Scriptures declare that all humankind lay under the curse of God for having violated the precepts of divine Law. Or a Jesus like a super sports hero who always wins! We think to ourselves what a beautiful ending to the story, but it was not an ending, it was a mere intermission!
But that they gave their only son to that degree of torture, followed by death, does seem very hard. Crucifixion was the way that people were killed. I mean it wasn't chosen especially on that day. For Deborah Warner, every time she sees a cross, she's reminded of the brutality of what happened on it.
For me, it's a good thing if it still has the power to turn our heads and our stomachs. If we're too anaesthetised to respond when confronted with what took place on the first Good Friday , then we've lost something profound. I'm sure it hasn't escaped your notice, but there was a blockbuster movie in that set out to challenge our numbness about the cross.
Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ is quite the most violent movie I saw that this year. It is clearly a horror movie.
It is absolutely 2 hours of relentlessly physical torture and to me, The Passion of the Christ was absolutely a film about an endurance test - a physical endurance test that used the language of horror cinema. It was a film about someone being flailed and battered and flagellated and abused and tortured and then turned over and had it all done on the other side. And then, you know, incredibly graphically nailed to a cross and then hung in what I have to say was glorious, gory revelling.
Now, I personally don't find that particularly spiritual beyond the experience of extreme cinema. If one indication of a living symbol is that it arouses strong emotions, then the cross clearly retains some of its ancient power. Those emotions can still surface when a filmmaker or a singer or a painter writhes around with it, or casts it in chocolate. But what happens when religious symbols become so much a part of the wallpaper that we no longer see them at all?
Throughout history, the cross has been re-imagined, as a fishbone, a wishbone, an anchor, a hook on which Christ hangs as bait for the devil, a wooden bridge connecting God with humanity. We're always finding ways of making it new again. I've noticed that the decorations that are the highest fashion at the moment after the Mel Gibson film are nails that you wear round your neck - crucifixion nails, three inches long.
That's a pretty nasty idea when you think about it. But again, I think that's an attempt to recoup the power of the cross, realising that the symbol has probably lost the power to shock. But the nails have not lost the power so now you have the nails. What's happened with the Gibson film is that people, because they have to think about it again, are not just simply shocked by the astonishing level of abuse prior to death. Had Christ been shot by a firing squad I don't know that we would've chosen the symbol of the gun.
It was very handy that it was that shape. Is the cross becoming the cruciform - just a geometric shape like a rectangle or square? Are we witnessing the death of one of the world's richest and most potent symbols? Well, I don't think so. Not while there are still people who believe it can change the world. At the height of the Second World War, the city of Coventry suffered very heavy bombing raids, and its medieval Cathedral was brought to its knees.
One November morning in , after a particularly damaging attack, a young clergyman - Philip Wales - was picking over the mountain of rubble where once a great cathedral stood. Philip's daughter Mary takes up the story. It was later exploring the ruins by himself that he found lying on the ground, under the burnt out beams, the enormous medieval nails which had held these beams in place - they are extraordinary - they are so large.
This bearing of sins was a legal transaction in which God the Father transferred to God the Son the penalty we deserve.
That God sent Christ to bear our sins means that God does not just shrug off our sin. We live in a day of loose justice at best. People commit horrible crimes and get off with a slap on the wrist. A man admits to sexually molesting, killing and dismembering numerous boys, but pleads insanity and will likely end up spending some time in a mental ward.
We all know that that is not justice. They think He will just overlook it. But the Bible is very clear: All sin must be judged! Either your sin is on you and you will bear the penalty; or your sin is on Christ who bore the penalty.
Either way, God does not take sin lightly! The just penalty must be paid. During the Napoleonic Wars, men were conscripted into the French army by a lottery system. If your name was drawn, you had to go off to battle. But in the rare case that you could get someone else to take your place, you were exempt.
On one occasion the authorities came to a certain man and told him that his name had been drawn. He claimed that the records would show that he had been conscripted two years previously and that he had been killed in action. The case was referred to Napoleon himself, who decided that the country had no legal claim on that man. He was free because another man had died in his place. Jesus Christ bore your sin on the cross, but you must take Him up on the offer.
If you turn to Him, you will be delivered from the penalty of sin which God justly must impose. But clearly that is not in the context neither here nor in Isa. Rather than straying like sheep, as we formerly lived, we now have been turned passive verb in Greek to the Shepherd and Overseer of our souls. There are three facts about the power of sin which we must grasp from these verses:. Peter uses a verb construction that emphasizes the continual past action of straying.
Before we turned to Jesus Christ as our sin bearer, we were characterized by straying from the Good Shepherd, going our own way. We were lost even though we may not have known it. We were in danger of harm and even death, although perhaps we were oblivious to it. Although I am not a shepherd or farmer, I understand that God did not do us a big favor by comparing us to sheep. Domestic sheep are some of the dumbest animals around. They must be under the care of a shepherd or they will fall prey to carnivorous beasts.
If they get lost in bad weather, they are not smart enough or hardy enough to survive. Why do sheep do that? This patch of grass looks good enough. The only way they come back to him is if he takes the initiative in going out looking for them. This means that none of us can boast in our smarts in coming to Christ. If you have not yet come to Him, you cannot save yourself. But the Shepherd is seeking you, even today. He wants to deliver you from the power of sin that causes you to stray from His loving care and protection.
There had to be a death of our old man toward sin and a resurrection to new life in Jesus Christ: That when Christ died, we who believe in Him died with Him. We were identified with Him in His death. This is not a symbolic or poetic forsakenness. In the fourth and fifth verses of this Psalm, the anguished suffered by the Messiah becomes even more acute as He recalls the covenant faithfulness of God towards His people. The apparent contradiction is clear. However, now the sinless Messiah hangs upon a tree utterly forsaken.
Why did He turn away from His only begotten Son? In verse three, He makes the unwavering declaration that God is holy, and then in verse six, He admits the unspeakable - He had become a worm and was no longer a man. Why would Christ direct such demeaning and derogatory language toward Himself? The answer can be found in one bitter truth alone - God had caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him, and like a worm, He was forsaken and crushed in our stead. This dark metaphor of the Messiah dying as worm is not alone in Scripture. The first metaphor is found in the book of Numbers.
The Israelites were dying from the venom of the fiery serpents. Men die from the venom of their own sin. Moses was commanded to place the cause of death high upon a pole. God placed the cause of our death upon His own Son as He hung high upon a cross.
The second metaphor is found in the priestly book of Leviticus. The second goat was presented before the Lord as the scapegoat. There, it would wander alone, forsaken of God, and cut off from His people. How can we not think it astounding that a worm, a venomous serpent, and a goat should be put forth as types of Christ? We baulk even at the first step.
How was it that He was made sin? On the Cross, Christ did not become sinful, but rather our sins were imputed to Him, and God considered Him to be guilty of our crimes and treated Him with the judgment we deserved. We must not forget that even while He bore our sins, He remained the unblemished and spotless Lamb of God, and His sacrifice was a fragrant aroma to Him.
Although it was an imputed guilt, it was real guilt, bringing unspeakable anguish to His soul. He truly stood in our place, bore our sin, carried our guilt, and experienced the full measure of the wrath of God due our sin. It is a dreadful experience for the sinner to come face to face with his own sin and feel the weight of his own guilt. It is quite another thing for the beloved Son of God to be judged and condemned by His own Father with whom He had shared the most intimate communion throughout eternity and toward whom He possessed a love beyond definition and measure.
We enter the deepest cavern to find the Son of God hanging from the Cross and bearing His most infamous title — Accursed of God! The Scriptures declare that all humankind lay under the curse of God for having violated the precepts of divine Law.
He carried his cross up the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem to Calvary, was nailed to the Cross, and hung between two common criminals. He suffered an indescribable end, recalled by the Church on Good Friday of Holy Week. . We too are all alone at the time of death! . The Seven Last Words: The Message from the Cross. Even most ancient Christian art is full of blood in its scene of the crucifixion. NO , The real Man Jesus carried a REAL Cross, shed REAL blood, suffered in . Too much to think of this Savior, bloody, flesh torn from the back, face The story of the cross does not end in death, or at the grave; as a matter of fact it never ends!.
As the apostle Paul writes to the church in Galatia:. In the New Testament, it refers to the state of being under divine disapproval or reprobation leading to judgment and condemnation. The divine curse is the antonym of divine blessing, therefore, by using the Beatitudes as our standard, we can learn something of what it means to come under the curse of God.
They are a wretched lot, justly exposed to divine vengeance, and rightly devoted to eternal destruction. It is not an exaggeration to say that the last thing that the accursed sinner should and will hear when he takes his first step into hell is all of creation standing to its feet and applauding God because He has rid the earth of him. Such language is a gross offense to the world and to much of the contemporary evangelical community.
Nevertheless, it is biblical language and it must be said. The truth conveyed in this text is what made Jesus Christ and His Gospel such a scandal to the Jews of the first century. To entertain such an idea was more than scandalous, it was outright blasphemy! And He did it all in the place of His people! In the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth chapters of Deuteronomy, God divided the nation of Israel into two separate camps and placed one on Mount Gerizim and the other on Mount Ebal.
Those on Mount Gerizim were to pronounce the blessings which would come upon all who diligently obey the Lord their God. From behind the closed doors of heaven the Father crushed His only Son with every terror that should befall those for whom He died. The Lord sends upon you curses, confusion, and rebuke until you are destroyed and until you perish quickly As Christ bore our sin upon Calvary, He was cursed as man who makes an idol and sets it up in secret. However the curse did alight upon the Branch, not because of some flaw in His character or error in His deeds, but because He bore the sins of His people and carried their iniquity before the judgment bar of God.
The psalmist David cried out,. How blessed is the man to whom the LORD does not impute iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit! Yet on the Cross, the sin imputed to Christ was exposed before God and the host of heavens. He was placarded before men and made a spectacle to angels and devils alike.
If a man is counted blessed because iniquity is not imputed to Him, then Christ was cursed beyond measure because the iniquity of us all fell upon Him. Then the LORD will single him out for adversity from all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant which are written in this book of the law. It is referred to as the Priestly or Aaronic blessing:. Though beautiful and gracious, this blessing presents us with a great theological and moral problem.
How can a righteous God grant such blessing to a sinful people without compromising His righteousness. The answer again is found in the Cross. The sinner can be blessed only because the Holy and Righteous One was cursed.