Why Contemplate The Cross?

The other day I watched a video of a guy playing a kazookeylele and singing "The Final Countdown" loudly and off-key. (A kazookeylele combines a keyboard, a ukelele, and a kazoo.) I laughed hard and showed it to my wife, who could not understand why I found something so annoying to be so funny. So I sent a link of the video to my son, figuring that since he gets half his DNA from me (a fact he may regret but cannot deny), he would laugh too.

But when I talked to him on the phone he said that he watched the kazookeyleleist right after seeing Team USA member Paul George get his leg gruesomely broken in an exhibition basketball game. The video of that injury was so disturbing that he wasn't in a frame of mind to chortle over some mindless buffoonery. Bad timing, I guess.

I told my son that I had not seen the Paul George injury. I can't watch those things. To this day I've never seen the famous Joe Theismann or Kevin Ware bone-breaks. Whenever a sportscast shows a player twisting his ankle, I look away. Call me a wimp, and I'll agree with you. Mine is a sensitive nature. Though the main reason I've never seen The Passion Of The Christ is because I object to actors portraying Jesus, it is also true that my spirit erupts with profoundest discomfort whenever I see someone getting beaten. The book Unbroken is one of the best I've read in a while, but I won't see the movie version. I can't imagine sitting there watching poor Louie Zamperini get tortured in a Japanese POW camp for an hour or more.

Christians are sometimes accused of morbidity because of our weird obsession with the agonizing death that Jesus suffered on the cross. Why focus on that? Why are we so into pain?

Well, I'm not into pain. My cowardice and extreme sensitivity, though embarrassing to me, serve to deflect suspicion that I might be guilty of sadism or masochism. That can't be it. I'm no voyeur. I cannot bear the thought of experiencing, inflicting, or even observing great physical distress. I'd rather watch a kazookeyleleist any day.

So why think about Jesus on the cross? Two reasons occur to me. The first is the obvious one, that contemplating the cross of Christ reminds me of the wrath of God toward sin and of his love for me, the sinner. On the cross, God took upon God the brutality, ugliness, corruption and outrage of the whole writhing mass of humanity at its most foul. Evil - including my evil - met its match at the cross of Jesus, and was swallowed up in his love.

There is another reason too, and it is kind of related to my son's inability to laugh right after watching Paul George get hurt. Certain scenes temper our spirits and deepen us, and it is good for us to allow those things to affect us that way lest we spend our whole lives splashing about in a shallow pool of fluff and nonsense. I don't think that regular contemplation of the cross of Christ will - or should - diminish our joy or impair our ability to indulge in occasional giddy romps of clowning around. In fact, it has always seemed to me that devout Christians laugh more than anyone else I know.

But contemplating the cross does make it a bit harder to sin. Try being a real jerk to somebody right after, in your mind's eye, spending some time at the foot of the cross of the suffering Lord Jesus. It's like giggling at comedy after watching a brutal injury - you can't do it.

I like to quote a professor of mine who interviewed evangelical scholars and administrators Kenneth Kantzer and Carl F. H. Henry shortly before they died. He asked them how they had kept themselves from becoming proud because of their prominent roles in scholarly evangelical witness and influence in the latter half of the 20th century. By what means of grace had God preserved in them the spirit of charity, humility and good will? They sputtered in their embarrassment, till at last Henry answered, "How can anyone be arrogant at the foot of the cross?"