Why we need the cross

If you did a street survey asking people what the cross means to them, unless they’ve just stepped off a passing spaceship, most would still get the link with Christianity. But beyond that it’s anybody’s guess. For some, the cross is just the Christian equivalent of the Golden Arches on a McDonald’s restaurant—an easily recognisable logo stuck on buildings to tell you where to find a church, if you’re that way inclined.

For others, it’s a cool design to have tattooed somewhere on your body, alongside a yin-yang or your star sign. Or a lucky charm to hang round your neck, bringing good fortune and warding off any vampires who happen to be in the neighbourhood.

If you did the same survey with churchgoers, however, the responses would be equally varied. For some the cross is just an example of self-sacrifice to inspire us to live better lives. For others, it is the place where God deals with what’s wrong in the world, but any idea of it involving a sacrifice for sin to save us from the judgment we deserve is dismissed as primitive and immoral.

Or the cross is acknowledged as part of the story, but the real action is seen as being elsewhere—at the incarnation (Jesus being born as a human), or the resurrection, or Pentecost and the outpouring of the Spirit.

Are the answers to those questions of mine really to be found in the cross?

A curious logo

Nowadays, when sports clubs have an animal as part of their logo, they tend to choose ones which are impressive and intimidating to the opposition: bears, bulls, tigers, lions—although in the case of Stockport County, the local soccer club in the town where I grew up, the rampaging lions on the badge haven’t helped much (the team languishes in the sixth division).

The same sort of thing was going on back in the first century when Christianity was spreading across the ancient world. Each legion in the Roman army proudly carried the symbol of the eagle. Imagine if instead they’d gone into battle holding aloft a bunny rabbit, or a mouse, or a lamb! And yet for the early Christians a lamb it was.

A lamb isn’t remotely impressive. It’s weak and vulnerable. And for the Jews, who would celebrate Passover by sacrificing a lamb, it was something you killed. So when those first followers of Jesus found out that he was to be known as “the Lamb of God”, questions would have been asked in the marketing department. “Can’t we have a lion on the banner instead?”

But a lamb it had to be, because it is the death of Jesus that is central to the Christian message—the gospel. His death on a cross no less, with all its associations of criminality, public shame and divine curse.

When John the Baptist saw Jesus coming towards him, he said: “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1 v 29). And in the last book of the Bible, Revelation, Jesus is referred to once as a lion, but no fewer than 27 times as the Lamb of God. On the throne of the universe, for all eternity, there will be God and the Lamb (Revelation 22 v 1). The angels sing: “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain” (Revelation 5 v 12). It is as the Lamb of God that Jesus will be known in the new creation, because it is his sacrificial death which is the key to God’s eternal purposes.

And that is why the cross is also the key to so many of the issues with which we struggle as Christians today.

The aim of this short book is that we would understand the cross more deeply, and treasure it more dearly. And that, as a result, we would live increasingly cross-centred and cross-shaped lives, and love and worship more the one who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all.

Marcus Nodder pastors St Peter's Barge, a floating church in the centre of London's Docklands. This is an extract from his newly released book in our Questions Christians Ask series entitled: Why did Jesus have to die; and other questions about the cross of Christ and its meaning today.