I am going to invite you to close you eyes in just a moment. And I am going to ask you to image something in your mind. And when I do, give yourself a bit of time to picture it - what aspects do you notice? What are you drawn to? Let your mind's eye play with the image in your head - to contemplate it. So, close your eyes now. The object that I want you to image is a cross. What do you see when you see the cross? Is there a corpus on it? What material is it made of? What do you notice, what are you drawn to, what do you see?...

Some see only the wounds. They are drawn to the scars and nail prints and blood and scourges - because their own lives are marked with that pain and suffering. Some are drawn to the face - to look into those eyes - hoping to find forgiveness or love or understanding instead of the judgement they have known from self or others. Some cannot picture a body there - but only the empty arms of the wood, because they know they are being invited to carry their own cross, to join Jesus on that wood. Some see the scandal there - the betrayal, the abandonment, the failure, the death -and they see what humanity has done to love incarnate.

But what do you see when you gaze upon the cross?

Newsweek magazine ran an article two years ago about what other faiths see when they look upon Jesus. What the author concluded with was stunning: He said: "Clearly, the cross is what separates the Christ of Christianity from every other Jesus. In Judaism, there is no precedent for a Messiah who dies, much less as a criminal as Jesus did. In Islam, the story of Jesus' death is rejected as an affront to Allah himself. Hindus can accept only a Jesus who passes into peaceful samadhi, a yogi who escapes the degradation of death. The figure of the crucified Christ, says a Buddhist, "Is a very painful image to me. It does not contain joy or peace, and this does not do justice to Jesus." There is, in short, no room in other religions for a Christ who experiences the full burden of mortal existence - and hence there is no reason to believe in him as the divine Son whom the Father resurrects from the dead. What they cannot see is a suffering God. What they do not see in the crucified one is the revelation of a new pattern for transforming the world.

So, what do you see, as you gaze upon the cross? What is there for you this year? Among the many things that might be there for you, let me add one more. When you see that cross - may you see a choice. May you see a choice.
You see, John's Jesus chooses the cross, the hour, this moment. It is not an accident, not something that he could have avoided if he had played his cards right. Nor was it a moment of passive resignation to a fate that was destined to be his. It was THE moment of his life. It was an active choice to set a whole different pattern for our living, a different pattern for the transformation of human suffering. On the cross Jesus chooses to carry the suffering of the world in himself. He transforms the world's pain and suffering in the only way you can without becoming what you are transforming - by bearing the suffering in his own body. You can't overcome hatred by more hatred. You can't overcome abuses of power by using more power. You have to transform it. And you do that by absorbing into yourself. That's what the cross says.

You want to talk about seeing something in the cross - there it is. You want to understand why even we Christians struggle with the message of the cross - there it is. If we really see what is there on the cross, then we must be willing to choose what Jesus chose - to bear the sufferings even of those whom have wounded and betrayed us. To bear within ourselves the world's pain as our own, and so transform it and redeem it. That is the choice that Jesus made upon the cross for us. And that is the choice that is before us who come to worship this day.

In a few moments, you will have the opportunity to come forward and reverence the cross. To bring there what you have come to know of love and God and the world. To bring there your sufferings and sinfulness and to have them be transformed by the one who chooses to lift all that from you - whose desire and choice is that he take that from you, absorb your pain so you'll be free. I pray this night that you and I will have the courage to bring also a choice to that cross - the choice to follow the pattern and life of Jesus. The choice to be willing to transform the world's pain rather than transmit it. The choice to let the cross - that stumbling block for so many religions - be the center of how we live and how we love.

What do you see, when you see the cross?