Beauty of the cross

This afternoon I got to go to the Fort to buy halo-halo for the people in the house. I wait at the car as Nette orders inside.

I looked around me and I noticed two construction cranes in the skyline, one of which is the up and coming Shangri-la hotel rising in 2014. Once in a while I like looking at different skylines of cities in photos and I know that a cityscape with awkward construction cranes does not look good. It’s an eyesore, a reminder that something is not yet complete. But it represents progress and development. They are important in building high towers.

Then I remember about the cross of Christ. When you try to picture it, a wooden cross, rough, flaky one might get saludsod by just touching them. It’s bloody, from the man hanging on the cross. His body beaten, bruised and wounded. A crown of thorns pressed on his head cutting his flesh and blood stinging his eyes. A man in agony, in pain. Who would dare look to such a painful scene and not cringe at the sight.

“The stone that the builders rejected, has now become the cornerstone.” (Acts 4:11, NLT)

But it is in this place, in this moment, that Jesus utters his victory call, not with a triumphant shout, but with a faint last breath, “It is finished.” Mission accomplished. He chose the way of the cross. The way of suffering, and death for you and me so that we “will not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). Like holding your wife’s wrinkled hand and looking through her eyes in old age, we find a new meaning of beauty at the cross, a beauty that is beyond aesthetics. And far be it that this completion in the chapter of our universe is the end of all things. Endings always give way to new beginnings, new hope and new life, through a risen Christ, our Savior.

May we find the beauty in what Christ has done for us. May we recognize our need of Him and receive it as ours. May it speak true to our lives, that there’s new hope and new life through Christ.