Teaching the Cross: Helping Others See Its Meaning
He had watched men die before.
That was his job: supervise executions, maintain order, confirm death. The centurion standing at the foot of the cross on that Friday was not a seeker. He carried no knowledge of Isaiah 53 or Psalm 22. He had never heard the Sermon on the Mount. He was a Roman soldier doing Roman work, and when the man on the center cross finally breathed his last, this soldier looked up and said something that should stop every preacher cold:
“Surely this man was the Son of God.” (Mark 15:39)
Not a disciple. Not a rabbi. A professional executioner looking at a dying man, naming what the people who had walked with Jesus for three years had somehow missed.
Whatever the centurion fully understood by those words — scholars have long debated what a Roman soldier would have meant by “Son of God” — something forced them out of him. He had no theological category for what he had witnessed. The cross demanded a verdict anyway.
Every Holy Week pulpit faces the same question: if the cross could produce that confession from someone with no preparation for it, and our congregations — people who have heard this story their entire lives — sometimes leave unchanged, the problem is not the material. The problem is [Teaching the Road to the Cross] how we are teaching it.
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When Seeing Does Something
Luke tells us the crowd gathered at Golgotha came as spectators. They came to watch. But Luke 23:48 records what happened when it was finished: they turned and walked back toward Jerusalem,
“beating their breasts.” (Luke 23:48)
Beating the breast was a Jewish gesture of grief and self-examination. These were not people leaving with detached observations. They left undone.
That is the goal of cross-centered teaching. Not that people accumulate facts about the crucifixion. Not that they feel the appropriate emotions at the appropriate moments. The goal is that they walk away the way this crowd did — changed in the posture of the soul, not just the contents of the mind.
The preacher’s job is to create conditions for that kind of encounter. That is a different task than explanation.
The Cross Refuses to Stay Abstract
At some point during those hours on the cross, Jesus looked down and spoke — not to the crowds, not to the soldiers, not to the religious leaders who had orchestrated everything. He spoke to two individuals:
“Woman, here is your son”… “Here is your mother.” (John 19:26–27)
From the cross, Jesus doesn’t issue a proclamation. He makes arrangements. He gives a grieving mother a son and a confused disciple a mother. The cross is intimate before it is cosmic — attending to the particular people standing in front of it before it addresses the universal problem of sin.
This is the quiet failure mode of a lot of cross-centered preaching. We teach the cross the way we might teach a doctrine: carefully, accurately, and at arm’s length. We explain what happened and what it means. What we don’t do is let it speak to the person in the third row who has been holding everything together for two years and is about to break. Or the man in the back who still isn’t sure God knows his name.
The moment we abstract the cross — turn it into theology to be mastered rather than a person to be encountered — we move our audiences away from the place the centurion was standing. And that is exactly where Paul’s argument about the cross begins.
The Stumbling Block Paul Kept in the Road
Paul understood something we often smooth away:
“We preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” (1 Corinthians 1:23)
The Greek word translated “stumbling block” is skandalon — the trigger-stick of a trap, something you cannot walk past without responding to. Paul uses it deliberately. He is not embarrassed that the cross offends people. He is insisting that the offense is the point.
Notice what both reactions — Jewish stumbling and Greek dismissal — have in common. Neither group was reacting to a sad story about Roman capital punishment of a good man. Both were reacting to an identity claim. Jews stumbled because a crucified Messiah shattered their categories for what the Messiah was supposed to do. Greeks dismissed it because the claim that this dying man is Lord of the cosmos made no sense in their framework. The problem, for both groups, was never the suffering. It was the who.
That is what a cross-centered sermon must always bring people back to. Not only the what of the cross — though the what matters enormously — but the who. The cross only functions as gospel when it arrives as an identity claim that demands a verdict. The skandalon Paul refused to remove from the road is the question of whether this dying man is who he says he is.
The Two Failure Modes
Most preachers drift toward one of two failure modes when they teach the cross. Both of them, for different reasons, let the congregation leave without having to make a decision.
The first is the horror story. The teaching is historically rich and emotionally powerful. The imagery is vivid. But Jesus remains, by the end of it, a good man who suffered unjustly. The cross becomes tragedy — moving, perhaps even devastating. But not gospel. Tragedy does not require a verdict about the identity of the one who died. It only requires sympathy.
The second is the doctrine lecture. The theology is precise: substitutionary atonement, propitiation, the wrath of God satisfied. None of that is wrong. But the person of Jesus can get lost inside the categories. People learn about what the cross accomplished without ever being brought to the place where they must do something with who accomplished it.
Both approaches work against the skandalon. Both smooth the stumbling block out of the road so people can step around it comfortably. Both produce congregations that are either emotionally moved or theologically informed — but haven’t truly stood where the centurion stood.
The cross has not been preached, and it has been found unconvincing. It has been preached safely — and left powerless.
Practical Moves: Teaching Toward the Verdict
The following are not rhetorical techniques. They are disciplines for keeping the stumbling block where Paul put it: in the middle of the road.
Move 1: Don’t Let Jesus Become a Concept
Before you explain what the cross means, let your congregation see who is on it.
Read the passion narrative slowly. Let the details be specific: the soldiers casting lots for clothing, the darkness at noon, the words from the cross. Resist the preacher’s instinct to skip ahead to the theological explanation. The centurion confessed because he was watching a person die in a particular way. He was not processing a doctrine. He was standing in front of someone.
Start with observation before you move to interpretation. Let people say what they see in the text before you tell them what it means [observe, interpret, apply]. That discipline matters as much in the pulpit as in the small group.
Move 2: Let the Identity Question Breathe
Resist the instinct to resolve tension quickly.
The crowd in Luke 23 left beating their breasts. They didn’t have resolution. That discomfort was not a problem to be fixed. It was the beginning of genuine encounter.
Ask your congregation the question the centurion had to answer: Who is this? What do we do with what we’ve seen? Then let the question stand. Productive discomfort is not a pastoral failure. It is the cross doing what the cross does.
Move 3: Preach Toward a Verdict, Not a Feeling
The centurion did not leave moved. He left with a confession.
There is a difference. Feelings are responses to experiences. A confession is a response to a person. The goal of cross-centered preaching is not that your congregation feels the gravity of the crucifixion — though they should. The goal is that they arrive at the same place the centurion arrived: a decision about the identity of the one who died.
The skandalon demands a verdict. Not emotional resonance. Not theological comprehension. A decision: Is this man the Son of God or not?
Preach toward that question. Stay there until it cannot be avoided.
The Destination Is the Centurion’s Confession
This Palm Sunday, you will stand before people who think they already know this story. Some of them do. But knowing a story and standing inside it are not the same thing.
Don’t explain the cross into safety. Don’t rush the identity claim to get to the comfort. Keep the stumbling block where Paul put it — in the middle of the road, where no one can step around it without making a choice.
A Roman soldier with no theological framework stood at the foot of the cross and came away with the only confession that matters. That is your destination. That is the destination for every person sitting in your congregation this week.
Preach toward it.
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