Why Jesus Offends

“For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”  (1 Corinthians 2:2)

This, it seems, was the beginning and the end of the Saint Paul’s message – Jesus Christ – and not Jesus as some vague spiritual figure, but Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, saviour of the world, and, crucially, … the one who was crucified!

We forget how scandalous the crucifixion is. Lenny Bruce used to say that if Jesus had been born in the 20^th century, we’d all be wearing little nooses around our necks, and if He’d been born a century earlier, we might all be wearing guillotines!

We forget how horrific the image of the cross was in the first century. It wasn’t an ornament but a form of torture reserved for terrorists. If Jesus had died in a gutter, kicked to death by a mob, it would have been a more dignified way to go.

The most notorious use of the cross, to my mind, followed the rebellion of Spartacus, the gladiator, who led a slave uprising against the Empire that ended in 71 BC with Spartacus defeated and six thousand of his rebel comrades crucified – their crosses lining the Via Appian outside Rome for a distance of more than 100 miles!

I find it hard to imagine what a horrific scene that must have been, but if you were a resident of first-century Judea, crucifixion would have been constantly in your face! You couldn’t go out to the market without passing a gauntlet of dying bodies. The cross was not a metaphor. It was a horror, and it carried a message from the Empire: “This is what happens to those who stand up to us.”

Crucifixion wasn’t just execution — it was humiliation, degradation, and public shaming. It was never inflicted on Roman citizens because it was considered too degrading for a full human being. It was for slaves, rebels, subhumans … and Jesus.

We preach Christ crucified, says Paul, “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). Yes, it’s a crazy message, and, quite frankly, it was very poor marketing!

I remember many years ago hearing a sermon on this verse from someone who was something of a ‘Prosperity Gospel’ preacher—big on teaching that God wants us all to be happy, healthy and wealthy! It was an odd choice of verse, but the preacher claimed that Paul’s ministry in Corinth didn’t get big results because of this—because Paul focused too much on Christ crucified. According to that preacher, Paul learnt, over time, to focus less on Christ crucified and more on the victorious, resurrected Jesus, and that’s when his churches began to grow!

That makes a lot of sense. It’s also a lot of nonsense! Paul did not change his message. He preached Christ crucified at the beginning of his ministry, and he preached Christ crucified at the end. He only knew one Jesus—the suffering, rejected, humiliated Jesus. The Jesus who meets us not at the top of the ladder but at the bottom—in the gutter.

And that’s a problem for the ‘Prosperity Gospel.’ If your message is that God wants to make us all healthy, wealthy, and successful, what do you do with Christ crucified?

The answer is that you dumb Him down or you polish Him up. You turn the cross into jewelry, and you take Christ off the cross. You avoid the crucifixion, and you focus instead on the resurrection, the miracles, the glory—anything but the shame.

But Saint Paul refused to look away.  “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2)

Why? Because Paul knew that if we are going to meet Christ—the real Jesus Christ, and not the Christ of our fantasies or the Christ of self-help culture—we must meet Him where He actually is – not on a throne, not in a boardroom, not at a self-improvement seminar, but at the bottom, in the gutter, on a cross.

Of course, I’m not denying that Christ can deliver us and provide for us. I’ve seen miracles too. But as one man once said to me, “I’m sick of people telling me how Jesus solved all their problems. My problems didn’t start until I met Jesus!”

Christ crucified did not promise to make life easier. He promises to make us new!

When I work on these reflections each week, my practice for some months now has been to finish up by asking AI to design an appropriate graphic for me, displaying the key verse I’ve been working on so that I can use the image in our Sunday worship.

This week I gave AI today’s verse—“For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified”—and asked for it to be printed on an appropriate background graphic. AI started working on what I could see was quite a realistic depiction of Christ’s crucifixion as the backdrop to the verse, and then it suddenly stopped, and the image disappeared, and I got an error message:

“I’m sorry, I’m having trouble responding to requests right now.”

I asked AI where the image had gone and received an unexpected response:

“Unfortunately, that specific image style triggered a safety block due to its graphic depiction of suffering. I can’t regenerate it exactly as it was, but I can create a visually powerful alternative that still honours the verse and your message.”

I thought, ‘there you go—Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews, foolishness to gentiles, and unsafe to AI!’ 

As promised, AI did then offer three alternatives:

• A symbolic crucifixion scene with a silhouetted cross and dramatic sky?
• A painted sunrise over Calvary with the verse in bold?
• A modern liturgical design with a stylised cross and warm tones?

Say no more!

Christ crucified is not easy to come to terms with—a stumbling block to Jews, foolishness to Gentiles, and unsafe to AI. “But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God.”  (1 Corinthians 1:24)