The Scandal We Refuse to Become

When the Cross Is No Longer Outside Us

“We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block…”

1 Corinthians 1:23

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The Cross has not ceased to be a scandal.

We have only learned how to step around it.

We know how to venerate it without being pierced by it.

We kiss it, we lift it up, we sing of it.

But we do not become it.

And so it remains outside us.

An object.

A symbol.

A memory.

Not our life.

The scandal of the Cross is not that Christ suffered.

It is that He reveals what love is.

A love that does not defend itself.

A love that does not preserve itself.

A love that gives itself into the hands of those who misunderstand, reject, and destroy it.

This is what we cannot accept.

Not in the world.

Not in the Church.

Not in ourselves.

We want a love that is strong, but not humiliated.

Generous, but not emptied.

Faithful, but not crucified.

We want resurrection without resemblance to the Cross.

And so we remain scandalized.

Not by the world’s rejection of Christ,

but by the demand that we share in it.

The Cross stands before us still.

Not as an invitation to admire,

but as a form to be assumed.

And we hesitate.

Because to take it up is not to carry a burden for a time.

It is to lose the right to yourself.

To no longer defend your name.

To no longer secure your place.

To no longer insist on being seen, understood, or justified.

It is to allow your life to be spent without recognition.

Your love to be poured out without return.

Your truth to stand without protection.

This is why the Cross remains a stumbling block.

Because it strips us of everything we use to live.

And unless a man consents to this stripping,

he will forever circle around it.

Religious. Devout. Faithful in appearance.

But untouched.

The only way not to trip over the Cross

is to become it.

To let it take shape in the mind, in the heart, in the body.

To let it determine how you speak, how you love, how you suffer.

To become a man or woman who no longer resists being broken.

Not out of passivity,

but out of union.

Then something terrible and beautiful begins.

You become a scandal.

Not because you seek it,

but because your life no longer makes sense.

You do not answer accusation with defense.

You do not meet injury with retaliation.

You do not grasp for what others fight to keep.

You remain.

You endure.

You love without measure.

And the world will not understand you.

Nor will many within the Church.

Because a crucified life exposes everything that is false.

It reveals how much of what we call love is self-love.

How much of what we call faith is self-protection.

How much of what we call service is the preservation of identity.

The crucified man cannot be used.

He cannot be flattered.

He cannot be manipulated.

He cannot be controlled by fear or promise.

He has already lost everything.

And in that loss, he becomes free.

This is the scandal.

Not that the Cross is hard.

But that it is real.

And that Christ does not remove it.

He places it within us.

And waits.

Not for admiration.

Not for devotion.

But for consent.

For the moment when a man stops trying to save himself

and allows his life to be conformed to the One who did not come down.

Until then, we will continue as we are.

Careful.

Religious.

Untouched.

Standing near the Cross,

but never upon it.