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Jesus did not die in order to spare us the indignities of the wounded creation. He died that we might see those wounds as our own.

PETER J. GOMES,
Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living

The symbol of the cross in the church points to the God who was crucified not between two candles on an altar, but between two thieves in the place of the skull, where the outcasts belong, outside the gates of the city. It does not invite thought but a change of mind. It is a symbol which therefore leads out of the church and out of religious longing into the fellowship of the oppressed and abandoned. On the other hand, it is a symbol which calls the oppressed and godless into the church and through the church into the fellowship of the crucified God.

JÜRGEN MOLTMANN,
The Crucified God

Christ on the cross cries:
My people,
what wrong have I done to you?
What good have I not done for you?
Listen to me.
Is it nothing to you,
all you who pass by?
Look and see if there is any sorrow
like to my sorrow.We adore you,
O Christ, and we bless you,
because by your holy cross
you have redeemed the world.

ANONYMOUS MEDIEVAL PRAYER,
2000 Years of Prayer

It was not human beings who accomplished anything here [on the cross]; no, God alone did it. He came to human beings in infinite love. He judged what is human. And he granted grace beyond any merit.

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER,
from a sermon on Romans 11:6
in Meditations on the Cross

There is no smooth path to God which we can ascend with all our expectations of life confirmed and fulfilled. There is only the way of the cross, where the condemned and crucified Jesus contradicts our expectations, forces us to see ourselves as we really are, not as we would like to be seen, and reveals the world as a strange new landscape we had not seen before, a paradoxical game in which only losers can succeed.

RICHARD BAUCKHAM AND TREVOR HART,
At the Cross

Christianity does not ask us to live in the shadow of the cross, but in the fire of its creative action.

TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
in John Moses, The Desert

It is curious that people who are filled with horrified indignation whenever a cat kills a sparrow can hear the story of the killing of God told Sunday after Sunday and not experience any shock at all.

DOROTHY SAYERS
in Barbara Brown Taylor, God in Pain

God, the God I love and worship,
reigns in sorrow on the Tree,
Broken, bleeding, but unconquered,
very God of God to me.

G. A. STUDDERT KENNEDY,
from "High and Lifted Up"

See also our "Reflections on Easter Sunday", also posted today on ChristianityToday.com.

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April 3 2000, Vol. 44, No. 4