The Amazing Disappearing and Reappearing Cross

When I was a boy, my grandfather had a painting of a sailing ship on his living room wall. Sometimes I would stare at the picture for a long time, looking at the ship, its masts and lines and the rolling waves.

Then I noticed something strange.

I found that I could make the ship disappear! If I stopped looking directly at the ship and focused instead on the wall or frame around the ship, then I would no longer notice the painting. If I did it long enough, the ship would seem to disappear. It would still be there, but I would no longer notice it.

It’s an old magician’s trick—getting people to focus on the edge of something, instead of what is happening in the middle. But there was no magic here. When I lost my focus on the ship, my mind simply overlooked it. Once concentration on the picture was lost, the ship seemed to disappear.

Something like this is happening in our pulpits every Sunday. The cross, which is central to our faith, is too often overlooked and ignored to the point of disappearing. The central tenet of the Christian faith is being ignored to a large degree.

Of all the world’s great religions, none is so focused as Christianity. Other religions are defined by a general philosophy of life. Christianity is focused on the deity of Jesus, His death and resurrection and the grace that flows from that divine sacrifice.

Everything we believe about God, life and the universe connects through this single event. The cross really is the intersection of all worlds.

Paul recognized this fact in 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” (NIV). And again in 1 Corinthians 1:18, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” The cross to him meant the same thing it does to us today—the atoning sacrifice of Christ.

Something has happened to those who preach Christ week after week—something terrible: We’ve gotten used to it. The

scandalous truth of the cross, which Paul calls its “offense,” is lost on us. Shorn of the cross, Christianity is not much different from Judaism or Islam. Without realizing it, our messages have become sub-Christian.

The effect of this disappearing cross in the pulpit is felt with devastating force in the pew. In a previous church, I visited a man who was sick with a terminal illness. He was in his 80s and a pillar of the local church. He had served his church as a deacon, elder and trustee. Now he faced his own death, and he was concerned that he was not good enough to go to heaven.

Here was a man who had been in church every Sunday, yet he did not understand the cross. He had memorized the Catechism, the Apostles’ Creed and the Ten Commandments; but the assurance wasn’t there. How was it possible that he had missed the significance of the central event of the Christian faith?