Crucified preaching only can give life. Crucified preaching can come only from a crucified man.
Judas is neither a master of evil nor the figure of a demoniacal power of darkness but rather a sycophant who bows before the anonymous power of changing moods and current fashions. But it is precisely this anonymous power that crucified Jesus, for it was anonymous voices that cried 'away with him! Crucify him!'
Is the world crucified to you or does it fascinate you?
Was the majority right when they stood by while Jesus was crucified? Was the majority right when they refused to believe that the earth moved around the sun and let Galileo be driven to his knees like a dog? It takes fifty years for the majority to be right. The majority is never right until it does right.
Even the disciples of Jesus all fled from their master's cross. Christians who do not have the feeling that they must flee the crucified Christ have probably not yet understood him in a sufficiently radical way.
Mission begins with a kind of explosion of joy. The news that the rejected and crucified Jesus is alive is something that cannot possibly be suppressed. It must be told. Who could be silent about such a fact? The mission of the Church in the pages of the New Testament is like the fallout from a vast explosion, a radioactive fallout which is not lethal but life-giving.
The church is the cross that Christ was crucified on.
There is only one door, one bridge, one ladder, between earth and heaven - the crucified Son of God.
Sometimes it is hard not to say, 'God forgive God. ' Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn't. He crucified Him.
In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.
The people who crucified Jesus were not able to see his godliness at all; they could only see the mischief in him.
God Himself was crucified with Christ, for Christ was one with the Father.
However much we suffer for the love of Jesus Crucified, it is but little.
True gospel authority, the authority to heal and renew things and people, is not finally found in a hierarchical office, a theological argument, a perfect law, or a rational explanation. The Crucified revealed to the world that the real power that changes people and the world is an inner authority that comes from people who have lost, let go, and are re-found on a new level.
I have my own opinion that there is no such thing as preaching Christ and Him crucified, unless we preach what nowadays is called Calvinism. It is a nickname to call it Calvinism; Calvinism is the gospel, and nothing else.
Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love; it has forever cursed and expelled and crucified the one passion which sweetens and smiles on human life, which makes the desert blossom as the rose, and which glorifies the common things and common ways of earth. It made of this, the angel of life, a shape of sin and darkness. . . Even in the unions which it reluctantly permitted, it degraded and dwarfed the passion which it could not entirely exclude, and permitted it coarsely to exist for the mere necessity of procreation.
By Baptism we are made flesh of the Crucified
The 'flesh' is too bad to be cleansed; it must be crucified.
However much we do to avoid them, we shall never lack crosses in this life if we are in the ranks of the Crucified.
Forgiveness is not a result of our efforts, but is a gift. It is a gift of the Holy Spirit who showers us with mercy and grace that pours forth unceasingly from the open heart of Christ crucified and risen.