Irony of the Cross #2

‘Along the way, they came across a man named Simon, who was from Cyrene, and the soldiers forced him to carry Jesus’ cross’ Matt.27:32

The second irony of the cross is the man who is utterly powerless is actually the most powerful. [Read Matt.27:32-40]. Jesus was slapped, spat on, beaten, flogged on the head and he was stack naked. And he was too weak to carry his cross. They had to call Simon to carry his cross. And in all of this they still mocked him. They said to Jesus ‘for us to know you are the savior come down’. Yet Jesus was saying ‘for me to actually save you I need to stay on the cross’. The irony here is that it was only by staying on the cross that Jesus could actually save the people. [Read Matt.16:21-28]. Jesus needed to explain the process to being the Christ to His disciples. How He was going to be crucified and before He got to how He was going to resurrect, Peter shut Him up. And said you can’t die, didn’t I just say you are the Christ [Messiah; Deliverer] and you confirmed it. So how can you say that you are going to die when you are destined to be the Savior? And Jesus faced Peter and said to Peter something that none of us would want Jesus to say to us ‘get thee behind me satan. For you do not savor the things of God’. This was actually a scene that had happened at the desert between satan and Jesus replaying. In tempting Jesus, satan took Him to the pinnacle of the mountain and showed Him the glories of the world. He then asked Jesus to bow to him in exchange for the wealth of the world. What satan was proposing to Jesus in essence was a crown without a cross. Peter was voicing out the same thing, Jesus you don’t need to go to the cross. You are the Christ. And Jesus says ‘no, there is a process. I need to go to the cross. There cannot be a crown without a cross’. The only person that offers a crown without a cross is the devil. And Jesus demonstrated to them as He is doing to us today that it was in His weakness that His strength was manifested. So in dying we live, in giving we have, in denying ourselves we find ourselves. The words of Jesus ‘if a man would not deny himself and take up his cross he cannot follow Me and be My disciple’.