Holy Gas Chamber Lutheran Church

Over the centuries Christians have (rightly) come to view the Cross as a blessed thing -- it is where Jesus died for our sin. But in doing so, I think we also may have become a bit dulled to recognizing just how offensive "the message of the Cross" would have been in Jesus' day. To understand perhaps just a glimpse of that offense, I sometimes play a game where I substitute modern execution devices for the word "Cross" in different phrases. As in:

"I attend Holy Electric Chair Lutheran Church."

"Just take your problems to the Gas Chamber."

"The Blessed Hangman's Noose."

"On Being a Theologian of the Firing Squad."

Those phrases sound pretty repellant to me, so I figure that they capture at least a little of the offense that the ancients faced when confronted with the message of the Cross.

Or think about this: What would parents do if their daughter began wearing a little golden electric chair on a necklace around her neck? Or what if she wore tiny silver hang-man nooses as earrings?

The point isn't at all to censure that behavior. It's just that after centuries of hearing that the Cross is a blessed event -- which it certanly is -- I think it's also obscured the fact that the Cross was a Roman execution device, one in fact more terrible than the relatively humane (at least in intention) execution devices used today.

I've found it useful for myself occasionally to shake myself out of thinking of the Cross as a purely benign event by thinking about modern execution devices as replacements for the cross, and so reminding myself how truly horrible sin is, and what a truly horrible thing Jesus needed to undergo in order to procure my forgiveness on the Cross.