Quotes about Cross

Even when theologians and preachers have seen this danger and have insisted that what was achieved on the cross was the direct result of the Father's love, when the goal is Platonized ("going to heaven") and the human role is moralized ("good and bad behavior"), the structure of the implicit story will still run in the wrong direction.

For John, the cross reveals God's glory; for Paul, God's "righteousness"; for both, God's love.

And the reason that death can be defeated—and was defeated in principle when Jesus rose again—is that on the cross Jesus dealt with sins.

We have, alas, belittled the cross, imagining it merely as a mechanism for getting us off the hook of our own petty naughtiness or as an example of some general benevolent truth. It is much, much more.

reality. It is the resurrection that declares that the cross was a victory, not a defeat. It therefore announces that God has indeed become king on earth as in heaven.

The only way we can get to the heart of understanding the moral challenge Jesus offered, and offers still today, is by thinking in terms not of rules or of the calculation of effects or of romantic or existentialist "authenticity," but of virtue. A virtue that has been transformed by the kingdom and the cross.

Like so many other early Christians and in line with Jesus himself, Paul interprets the cross in relation to Passover: a new Passover, a new Exodus.

His point is that the cross has liberated people from sin, so that they can be God-reflecting, image-bearing, working models of divine covenant faithfulness in action.

The story told by all four gospels is the story of 'how God became king': not by the usual means of military revolution, but by the inauguration of sovereignty during Jesus' public career, and the strange but decisive victory on the cross itself.

God grant us grace to be so filled with that love that we may work in our own day with mature, Christian, sober intelligence to address the problem of evil, to implement the victory achieved on the cross, and to be agents, heralds, and living embodiments of that new creation in which the earth will be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

We have failed to realize that the four canonical gospels (as opposed to the non-canonical ones) see Jesus' kingdom-work as completed on the cross and see the cross as the ultimate kingdom-bringing moment.

This is how the cross establishes God's kingdom: by bearing and so removing the weight of sin and death.