It’s a hunch, but I suspect that, if asked to explain the significance of the Cross, the average Christian would reach for John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
Through the gift of God’s Son, we can have unmerited life instead of deserved death. The crucifixion of Jesus has done for us, for you and me, what we could never have done for ourselves.
Yet reading on to John 3:17, we find this: “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
The most famous verse of the New Testament is one that we frequently misunderstand. Jesus’ concern in John 3 is not just you and me, but something that has far wider ramifications and a much broader focus: the whole world. And the world is not just the sum of the inhabitants of Earth, the global population (which according to worldmeters.info is 8,215,746,255 as I write this).
Rather, it includes the pattern of existence of this world that encompasses far more than individual humanity. It is the sum of the physical and the spiritual. It includes the world’s machinations and malevolence, the spiritual powers and principles at work behind it, and the human powers and people who participate within it.
Ephesians 2 hints at something more by talking about how we, dead in our sin, were “following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air” (v. 2), part of a world of a host of rulers and authorities, both human and spiritual (cf. Eph. 1:21). This trans-material world includes us, but is more than us and, left to its own devices, is on a trajectory into an ever-deepening cosmic tragedy.
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In my years in parish ministry, like many, I have witnessed significant losses. There are the common griefs seen in pastoral work: walking with people through divorce, job loss, infertility, death. But then there is the less-common tragedy that torpedoes life more widely. In 2017, when I was ministering in Houston, Hurricane Harvey hit, with a deluge of over 50 inches of rain in 24 hours, bringing the city, the fourth-most populous of the United States, to a halt. Well-known, arterial roads became rivers. Homes were destroyed. Lives were lost. Neighbor rescued neighbor by boat. If you helped clean out homes in the aftermath, the smell of damp (and increasingly moldy) sheetrock became very familiar.
Then of course, there was the pandemic of 2020 onward, which reached to every corner of the globe, redirecting the course of 21st-century history with it. Five years on from its onset, most people have some kind of COVID story of how the pandemic affected and continues to affect their lives. My husband and I certainly do.
In 2025, we have wars, earthquakes, and geopolitical and economic instability, the likes of which has not been seen in a very long time.
Tragedy, grief, and death are part of this broken world at every level. Spiritual death and lifelessness seeps through it all.
John reminds us it is into the world that a crucified God offers life. Beyond a personal salvation offered to you and me, which sometimes gets explained if it were a spiritual get-out-of-jail-free card (which would be to gravely miss the point), God’s work in the cross is a work for the world.
Christ crucified dethrones spiritual and human rulers and upends kingdoms (even if they don’t know it yet). It brings down the powerful and lifts up the humble. It brings to a screeching halt all injustice (even if we are still waiting for many). It reconciles and reunites the world with its Creator, in a move that only God could fashion (2 Cor. 5:19). To a world spiraling ever further into unspeakable loss, the cross offers hope. The crucifixion is the means by which the world might be saved, even from itself.
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So what message do we believers have for the world—a world that seems hopelessly chaotic—on this Good Friday?
The Generosity of the Cross
John 3 clearly demarcates God’s purposes in sending his Son: Salvation and not condemnation. To rephrase, we might say it was to bring life to the world and not abandon it to its looming and self-imposed death. I have noticed over the years a tendency for the Church to prefer self-righteousness and indignation to this kind of generosity. We publicize how aghast and grieved and angry we are, rather than do the work of wrestling with what the cross offers such a devastated world. We speak as though the world should know better, when history makes clear it never will.
Or we act as though the Church is somehow in a position to offer judgment, when it wasn’t in the first century (see 1 Cor. 5 for a pertinent example) and it certainly isn’t now (Anglicanism being by no means last on this list of offenders). Yes, John 3 makes clear that there is a judgment that comes through not choosing the light, but that is not the message of the cross.
The message of the cross is that no matter how bleak, how chaotic, how destructive the world’s choices, something different, something better, is possible by God’s grace. To offer this generosity to the world, we are compelled to pray for wisdom to speak words of hope, forgiveness and reconciliation, not theological cheap shots that shore up confidence in our perspective. God’s generosity in the cross declares that the world’s trajectory and pattern of existence is not the only way.
The Courage of the Cross
To preach the cross for the world includes courageously naming where we see death in this world. It includes naming where human limits have been reached and there’s no other way out. In the face of powerlessness. Preaching the cross to the world means exposing the world’s powerlessness and the inevitability and futility of its thinking.
This takes courage. Proclaiming powerlessness to a world hungry for power does not always go over that well. When it comes to looking at our collective darkness, it is hard to turn and look. Many would rather look away than to face our shame. It takes great courage to be a voice that points to hopelessness, powerlessness, and death.
Naming what is dead or corrupted or futile is quite different from moral outrage, a more typical religious response.
Moral outrage is predicated on difference, i.e., that you are doing something unacceptable, something that I would never do. Moral outrage is driven by indignation. Naming the death around us is not so easy, and the payoff not so quick. For it is to name the patterns of reality around us that we ourselves can all too readily identify with (if we are honestly contending with ourselves and that reality).
I might not understand how Putin could have invaded Ukraine in the manner he did. But do I understand what it is to act without regard for my neighbor and the boundaries between us? Do I understand what it is to take what is not mine and resolutely refuse correction? It is to look deeply into the world around us and see not just superficial differences or indignities, but the true devastation and death being meted out in the world of which we are a part.
We need immense courage to look unflinchingly at the world around us and not shy away from its ugliness. It take immense courage to name what the darkness has concealed and to not leave ourselves exonerated. Only there, in that place of sober honesty, does the cross offer hope.
Faith in the Foolishness of the Cross
In John 3 we might read of God’s intentions to the save the world, but the wisdom shown in the Cross, the wisdom that makes this salvation possible, looks ridiculous (cf. 1 Cor.1-2). Preaching, teaching, and witnessing to this kind of foolishness is easier said than done. It takes faith. For when the stakes are high, the fears are many. And those who come into church on Sunday are looking for security, certainty, a word that everything is going to be okay. Facing that pastoral challenge, it can be so much easier to slip into a worldly wisdom and to trade in clichés and moral self-help. This is true especially when clergy can be just as hungry for answers and clear paths ahead.
Paul writes that “we proclaim Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23): We proclaim that our hope comes through the One who set aside heavenly power to embrace humility, betrayal, suffering, and ultimately death. This is not the death of a valiant warrior, fighting to the last. This is an obedient Son giving himself over to his enemies.
This death did not come about from violence meeting violence or hate pushing back against hate. Jesus did not call on the armies of heaven to overthrow the corrupt religious or political power that was conspiring to have him killed. The crucifixion makes no logical, worldly sense. It was surrender, and surrender to a shameful and humiliating death.
Temptations can arise to preach another gospel, a safer, easier one perhaps, but the world—of which I am a part—desperately needs the foolishness of that cross. For it is only in that foolishness that God is reconciling the world to himself, and not counting our trespasses against us (2 Cor. 5:19).
The Rev. Suse McBay, PhD is a Guest Writer. She is a Tutorial Fellow in Ministry and Preaching at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford; her research and writing is in Second Temple Judaism. Dr. McBay's ministry experience includes almost a decade on the staff of St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Houston.
