Author and professor of Philosophy Peter Kreeft writes a flowing essay on the wonder of the cross and the consistency of Christ’s suffering. Wonder in the depths of His love that Christ would die for us, that He would give Himself for us, dead in our sin but alive because of Him. Consistency in that Christ continues to suffer in empathy with the suffering today, we find Christ in our own and with others who are hurting. Kreeft ends with a call for followers of Christ to follow Him in suffering and ministering to those who are hurting.
My thoughts come from Kreeft’s first line after an extensive quote from John Stott. He says, “the Cross is judo.” He means by this that the death of Christ is using the cruel evil of this world to conquer the cruel evil of this world. Judo, as a martial art, focuses on using the opponents own strength against them. That is it, that’s what I know about judo. Yet, I know even less about the cross. I have studied, taught, and read often on the cross of Jesus, but do I really understand it? I praise God for its reality and hope to spend my life seeking the cross. Kreeft summarizes the paradox and joyful reality, “ It (the cross) is, of course, the most familiar, the most often-told story in the world. Yet it is also the strangest, and it has never lost its strangeness, its awe and will not even in eternity, where angels tremble to gaze at things we yawn at. And however strange, it is the only key that fits the lock of our tortured lives and needs.”