Good Friday

Paul: "For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. " - 1 Corinthians 2:2 ESV

Peter: "For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit"- 1 Peter 3:18 ESV

John: "In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. " - 1 John 4:10 ESV


"Why am I a Christian? One reason is the cross of Christ. Indeed, I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the cross. It is the cross that gives God his credibility. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche (the nineteenth-century German philosopher) ridiculed as ‘God on the cross’. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?

In the course of my travels I have entered a number of Buddhist temples in different Asian countries. I have stood respectfully before a statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, serene and silent, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after awhile I have had to turn away. And in my imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness.

The crucified one is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us, dying in our place in order that we might be forgiven. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question-mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross, which symbolizes divine suffering." -- John Stott in Why I Am a Christian