For those who follow Jesus and the Way of Jesus, seeing an image of the cross is a sign of forgiveness, of hope, of death defeated.  But it wasn’t always that way.  Those that would know Jesus before his death would not have believed you if you were to tell them that the Roman cross would become an image of hope to billions.

Because the Roman cross was perhaps the cruelest instrument of death humanity had ever invented.  Roman soldiers were known in their day for competing with each other over the most tormenting way to kill a traitor to the empire.

Whoever created the cross won.

In fact, it was such a brutal way to kill someone, (someone subjected to this torture would relent through asphyxiation) that it was considered impolite to even speak of the cross in Roman society.  Best to think about something else over your glass of wine.  Best to look the other way and pretend your empire didn’t crucify people.  

And then Jesus comes along, chooses to die on this instrument of hell, and claims that he’s just forgiven the whole damned world upon it.  In a very short amount of time, millions of people saw the cross as God being for them in the midst of a world where the empires were mostly against them.

The cross became a symbol of God’s unconditional love breaking into the world.  It became a symbol, that at the core of reality, everybody swims in the waters of grace.

Or perhaps we could say that the cross, for the first followers of Jesus, was the age of grace.

Jesus transformed, not only the image of the cross, but the very image of God and reality: at the deepest strata of our existence lies the reality that grace is how the whole thing works.

Notice the language, again, that these first followers use when talking about this reality revealed in Jesus:

• In framing the teaching of Jesus, they said: “So was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet…‘I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world.’” 
• Jesus is recorded as saying, “…take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.”
• Which Jesus also talks about as being “…blood shed since the beginning of the world.”
• Which an early Jewish follower speaks of as “his works…finished since the creation of the world.”
• By which they mean this, calling Jesus “the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.”

Since the beginning.

Well, actually, they push us even further:

• “This grace was given us before the beginning of time.”
• “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world…”

Before the beginning.

Do you see what’s going on here?  Jesus, and later his followers, are claiming that this forgiveness that happened on the cross in 1st Century Palestine was nothing new.  It was not the beginning of an age of grace.  They are claiming that what Jesus did through his death on a cross was reveal how God has always approached and held us. 

It has always been true.

The age of grace hadn’t begun on the cross; the cross had revealed the age of grace to be ancient.  Infinitely so.

Older than you, or me, or time, or dirt.

In one document in the Greek Scriptures, an early teacher calls this “the mystery of (God’s) will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ…to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth.”

The word for “all things” there is the word in the ancient tongue, panta.

Which, literally translated, means “all things”.

All things.

Which has a whole other set of implications for what it means to navigate the world, the universe, the reality we find ourselves in.

Stay tuned…we’re just getting started.