October 23, 2019 – 1 Corinthians 2:8

None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
—1 Corinthians 2:8

Whatever else is to be made of it, everyone feels that the cross stands out as a hideous tragedy, a dreadful fact black as a splash of ink on our human records.21 They “have crucified the Lord of glory”! gasps Paul in horror. And as often as it comes in sight of Calvary, the human heart echoes that shuddering cry, stands rooted to the spot, staring incredulously at what can’t be true, yet there it really is!
How did it happen, this appalling thing? What sudden orgy of insanity overwhelmed for one mad day the kindly human nature that we know so well and swept it headlong into this? For we feel hotly that it must have been something monstrous, inexplicable, blown in from the darkness round us that was guilty of that horror. Yet the last haunting terror of it is that it was brought about by ordinary mortals like us, kind and likable in many ways, no doubt. Their children ran with happy shouts to father that day he came home from Calvary, well satisfied, as he kept telling his wife as he played with his little one, with the day’s admirable work—it was not something unthinkable and gross and obviously devilish that was responsible for our Lord’s cross, but it was set up by the quite ordinary, decent, and respectable little sins of decent and respectable people, by the kind of thing into which we are all apt to drift every other day. Let us remember that with a great shivering awe, lest in our lives, too, there rings out that sound of hammering as the nails run home.
“The past throws light on the future,” says Guicciardini, “because the world was ever on the same make, and all that is or will be in another day has already been, and the same things return, only with different names and colors. It is not everyone who knows them under the new face, but the wise know them.” And age by age the Lord Christ is crucified. And we too have crowded eagerly to Calvary and nailed him to his cross and laughed up into his face and watched him die and gone our way well pleased and much relieved that we have hustled him out of the way—yes, even we.
—Arthur John Gossip