The Culture of the Cross

At the hardware store the other day I exchanged glances with a shopper standing in the next checkout line. We nodded politely to each other, but I sensed that like me he was wondering, "Where have I seen this guy before?" He was wearing a suit and tie—not the garb you usually see in a hardware store—and while I couldn't think of his name, his face and thinning red hair looked vaguely familiar.

Suddenly I realized: he's a jogger who follows the same route my wife and I travel in our evening walks. I've seen him numerous times trotting through the neighborhood in his T-shirt, running shorts, and sneakers, and we've exchanged passing hellos. But dressed in a suit and tie, and standing in the less-familiar context of the hardware store, he looked like a different person.

Familiar things seem strange when you see them from a different perspective. Did you ever visit a school building during the summer? The halls and classrooms take on a different mood during the quiet month of July—as if the lockers and desks were taking a breather before the noisy throngs return in late August.

Did you ever step into a church building alone late at night? Shadows darken empty pews that are filled with worshipers on sunny Sunday mornings. Instead of cheerful greetings and songs of praise, somber, creaky silence fills the air. It's the same place. But the building doesn't seem the same when you look at it from a different perspective.

After the apostle Paul came to Christ, his entire perspective changed. He now promoted what he formerly had persecuted. A cause he had despised, he now loved. People he had harassed and imprisoned, he now considered brothers and sisters, coworkers and friends. Paul wrote, "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation." And if anyone is not in Christ, he is a person we implore on Christ's behalf: "Be reconciled to God" (2 Corinthians 5:17, 20). From this redeemed vantage point, Paul saw everyone he met either as a missionary or a mission field—either as a member of God's family or a potential adoptee.

The biggest barriers separating people are not the walls of race, nationality, personality, or economics. They are spiritual walls built stone by stone, person by person, sin by sin—chips off the old block of another barrier that separates sinners from a holy God. But Christ himself "is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility." In him Christians from any culture are "no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household" (Ephesians 2:14, 19).

To be cross-cultural Christians, we must adopt as our mind-set the culture of the cross. Christ died on the cross for all: rough-cut Galilean fishermen, proud smirking Pharisees, scourge-wielding Roman soldiers, oft-married Samaritan women, leprous outcasts, demon-possessed cemetery dwellers, searching Ethiopians, intellectual Athenians, trembling jailers, doubting Thomases. "But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself," Jesus said (John 12:32).

When we replace the values of this world with the culture of the cross, we'll quit evaluating people by their skin color, clothes, accent, or job title. We'll see them through the eyes of Jesus.

That red-headed jogger at the hardware store? I wonder if he knows the Lord.