Word: crossing
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...many." The First Epistle of Peter, meanwhile, takes a radically different tack, posing Jesus' trials as occasion for imitation: "because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps." And Paul's letter to the Colossians pauses only briefly at the Cross on its way to the triumphal image of the risen Christ parading demonic enemies in chains: "He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them...
...kind of divine bait-and-switch scheme, whereby the devil thought he had claimed a particularly virtuous human victim only to discover he had allowed into his sanctum the power that would eventually wrest humanity back from his grasp. St. Augustine likened the devil to a mouse, the Cross to a mousetrap and Christ to the bait...
...Christ's sacrifice. But no other postbiblical formulation has so elegantly intertwined the Father, the Son, wayward creation and intimations of sin and grace. None has so bound believer to Saviour in the intimacy of pain (and eventual Easter glory) and fulfilled Paul's great work of turning the Cross, an image of ultimate horror, into the paramount Western icon of love...
...still possible to have a really good fight about the meaning of the Cross. In 1994, for example, when a participant in a national feminist conference paid for in part by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) announced that "I don't think we need a theory of atonement at all; I don't think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff," the backlash to the remark and other controversial aspects of the conference resulted in the resignation of one high Presbyterian official and a cost in contributions that the denomination estimated at $2.5 million...
...wrong message. Writes the Rev. Dr. Susan Thistlethwaite, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, of her experience as a spiritual counselor: "Countless women have told me that their priest or minister had advised them, as 'good Christian women' to accept beatings by their husbands as 'Christ accepted the cross.' An overemphasis on the suffering of Jesus to the exclusion of his teaching has tended to be used to support violence...