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. (Paul to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 1:18).
I grew up in a small southern town. Like so many small towns in the south, it owed its origin to the railroad. Our house was on Front Street which ran alongside the tracks, while the downtown stores were on the other side. When the train came through, you knew it. There was the blast of the locomotive’s horn and the vibration of the ground around you..
But there was another, newer technology we experienced that made the trains seem, well, juvenile by comparison. That was the Saturn Five Rocket that was being developed by Werner Von Braun and his team at the nearby Marshall Space Flight Center.
The Saturn V rocket was used on all six of the Apollo missions that took 24 astronauts to the moon between 1969 and 1972. Twelve of those astronauts walked on the lunar surface. It also launched Skylab, the first space station.
The Saturn Five Rocket was taller than a 36-story building and weighed in at 3,000 tons. To get something that size off the ground and into the air you needed power and lots of it. The rocket’s five Rocketdyne F-1 engines did just that. They were 18 1/2 feet tall and weighed over 18,000 pounds. They generated almost eight million pounds of thrust (about 5.5 million horsepower—the equivalent of 10,000 pickup trucks). It shot the Saturn Five Rocket through the air at a top speed of over 1,300 mph. We lived about five miles from the test site and when they fired up the engines, the ground beneath our feet shook, the windows in the house rattled, and the good dishes in the hutch clattered. These engines were (and still are) the biggest, baddest, most powerful single-chamber engine ever made.
Jesus’ cross was minuscule compared to the Saturn Five—somewhere between 7-9 feet tall, 5-6 feet across and weighing at most 300 pounds. No, it wasn’t the size that made it special.
There also wasn’t anything special about the materials used to make the cross. It wasn’t plated with precious metal or embossed with a special design. It was simply two pieces of wood joined together.
Yet there was more power in this cross than all the Saturn Fives combined. And truthfully, the cross’ power isn’t even comparable to anything we can come up with. The power of the cross is that “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 1:19-20).
And we understand all this like a child understands their parents’ love for them—they know it’s true, but they’ll have to reach a different stage in life before they fully grasp it. In the same way, we understand the cross, but our understanding is limited and it will soar to an entirely different level one day when we see Jesus.
Until then, we have God’s gift of the Supper and it is vital to our well-being. Some of the disciples at Corinth had mishandled it and as a result were weak, sick, or had fallen asleep. But the opposite is also true that when we rightly discern the body of Christ that hung on the cross and the body of Christ that is the church for which He died—it becomes what our Father intended communion to be—a celebration that gets us off the launchpad and powers us into the new week. It centers our lives and helps us to live as citizens of heaven.
That’s the power we need!
A Taste of Grace with Bruce Green 