"Messiahs don't grow on trees"

At first, Paul hated the cross. He thought it offensive, foolish even that you would put your trust in a crucified criminal. Perhaps you could imagine his feelings better if you picture a new American cult of followers of an executed convict, setting up electric chairs in their houses of worship to kneel before, expecting his return as their God-given President to pardon all their crimes.
Actually, it was worse than that. The cross was a symbol of foreign oppression. Only those without Roman citizenship could be crucified. It was an extremely gruesome death reserved in particular for rebels and slaves, designed to shame and debilitate the naked person on the cross and to intimidate the population for hours or even days. Some second century Christians loathed the idea that Jesus could have been crucified. “It must have been Simon,” they fantasized, “or an image that looked like him.” It cannot be that God would have allowed his Messiah to be killed by pagan oppressors. The Quran joins them: “They said in boast: “We killed the Messiah Jesus son of Mary, the Messenger of God.” But they killed him not, nor did they crucify him – but it was only made to appear as such to them.” (Surah 4:157).

It was even worse for Paul as a zealot for the Jewish Law. He believed that the cross showed that God had forsaken Jesus for a good reason. In the Thora, those ‘hanging from a tree’ are described as cursed people whose dead bodies defiled the land (Deuteronomy 21:23). A crucified man was not kosher but unclean. Worshipping him was like trashing the Thora and mocking God’s holiness. So when some of his friends and acquaintances joined the followers of Jesus, he was eager to see them arrested and punished. Sometime later, however, Paul saw that it the other way around. The crucified Messiah had saved him. The Laws of his fanaticism that separated him from his non-Jewish friends no longer held power over him (I Corinthians 2:2,7-8):

For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus (as) the Messiah and him crucified. (…) No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

So why did he change his mind? And who are the rulers of this age? And what does that mean today?

Alexander and Rufus heard it from their father Simon

When Jesus died on the cross, the disciples were devastated and scattered around the city – hiding from the Jewish and Roman authorities. What they had refused to accept as a real possibility had happened. The Messiah of Israel, the beloved of God, was hanging on a Roman cross, forsaken by his Father. And some of the bystanders were laughing. The disciples never forgot it. This trauma would become the centre of their storytelling over the coming years, and the stories of their children. Alexander and Rufus, were the sons of Simon. If their names are any indication, the family came from Cyrene in North Africa, visited Jerusalem, perhaps some other city, and are then found in Rome. The sons were known to Mark's audience and they may have shared their father’s story. 

When the New Testament Gospels were written, the crucifixion took centre stage, even more than the resurrection. Mark, the oldest gospel, does not describe the virgin birth, the nativity or the ascension, and only hints at the resurrection. In fact, of its sixteen chapters, seven concern Jesus’s final and fatal journey to Jerusalem. The reason for this is extremely simple: the disciples experienced the deepest love from and for Jesus in this time of crisis, distress and grief. He did not give up his mission and flee to safety, he never gave in to his oppressors, he gave his full attention to his friends and their families who would have to go on without his presence, he shared with them his trust in God that his life and death would not be in vain, and he was convinced that he would one day be with them forever in a future that his Father would provide.

Paul was not party to the experience of friendship and love that the disciples had shared with Jesus. But he received it from them, in particular from Mary, Simon’s widow and the mother of Rufus and Alexander, who was as a mother to him (Romans 16:9). Through her and others he learnt that the love of Jesus extended to him as well. How could they love him after what he had tried to get them arrested and tortured? And they told them about their experiences. Perhaps she told him how Simon came to faith when carrying the cross. Perhaps the centurion told him how he came to faith, while nailing Jesus to the cross – and hearing the words: ”Father forgive them, because they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). Perhaps he heard about John and Mary, given to each other as mother and son, or about Nicodemus being born from above while staring at Jesus up high. The cross, the hated symbol of impurity and shame became for him Paul the symbol of Jesus’s love and the sign of his new life. In fact, he embraced the cross to such an extent that he himself became an outcast to his former zealot friends, much like today people who change their mind can be ostracized for it (Galatians 2:20):

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

The cross changed how Paul thought about the Law

Paul concluded that if his religious beliefs and laws could make him curse a righteous and loving man like Jesus, then something was seriously wrong. Or, to be more precise, they may have been useful once, to lead the people of Israel out of the desert into the promised land, to give them a sense of unity and destiny, but since Jesus that was no longer what really counted. It may come as a surprise to many Christians, but in Galatians 3 and 4, Paul does not see all of the Thora as the direct word of God, but as God’s will mediated through angels (‘messengers’) and humans (3:19). As such, even the Thora is only a temporal and contextual interpretation of God’s will and cannot come in the place of God’s direct promise to Abraham that he would be a blessing to all peoples. In fact, Paul discovered, love fulfills the spirit of the law in a way that literal obedience can never do. The love of Jesus puts an end to all ‘rulers’ of this world that seek to prescribe how a just society looks like: the Thora, the Constitution, the Sharia, socialism or even public opinion. They are all contextual and temporal, ever in need of critical rethinking and – when required by love – civil disobedience. That is what Paul discovered in the image of the cross (Galatians 6 14):

May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

Perhaps you could think of that when you carry a cross around your neck or have it tattooed on your wrist: according to Paul, the person hanging on that cross is you! With that cross, you are saying “I won’t be bullied, I won’t be shamed. I am standing with the one who comes in the name of love.”

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