TRISTAN SHERWIN

THEME: Cruciformity, New Creation, and the Tearing down of divisions through the Cross

Here’s my longer notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre, Bury service (12th October, 2025), concluding our FREE TO GOD series which explores Paul’s letter to the Galatians.

You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).

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‘Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. Shakespeare wrote: “For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds | Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”’

―Martin Luther King, Jr.[i]

‘When we image borders, we fail in imaging God.’[ii]

READ: GALATIANS 6:11-18 (NIV)

LARGE LETTERS

As Paul closes his letter, he finishes with a personal flourish.

Until now, someone else has been writing as he dictates—a common practice in Paul’s world.[iii] But at this point, he stops speaking and grabs the ‘pen’.

In other letters, he simply signs his name, PAUL.[iv] But in Galatians, his most urgent and passionate letter, Paul, with large letters, doesn’t sign off; he sums up. It’s as if he is saying in these final verses, ‘Don’t miss this. This is the heartbeat of everything I’ve said. This is what matters most.’

There’s more in this passage than I will explore (there always is). But as I was reading this passage this week, thinking about the world in which we live, I felt drawn to two verses:

‘May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation.’[v]

Paul ends with emphasis—and his emphasis is the Cross.

In a world that boasted in strength, achievement, ethnicity, pedigree and power—things the Roman and Greek cultures held dear, and that Paul himself once held dear as a zealous Pharisee[vi]—Paul’s boast was scandalous to both ancient non-Jewish and Jewish cultures[vii], and to modern cultures today: Paul boasts in the cross!

Not a particular shape or symbol or icon, but an execution.

To be specific, the crucifixion of Jesus.

It’s a contradiction in terms to “boast” in the cross, as one writer notes.[viii]

Crucifixion was deliberately engineered to ‘obliterate honour’ and any sense of respectability; it was nothing to boast about. Crucifixion was a shame-inducing death sentence. Those who were crucified were stripped naked and hung out in very public places, their deaths slow and agonising. Many bodies were never claimed, left to rot and be eaten by wild animals, with their bones eventually being thrown into the trash.

The Romans didn’t invent crucifixion, but they knew how to use it as a statement of superiority—reserving it for those they conquered, slaves, and rebels. Basically, those the Romans saw as the dregs who plagued civil society. It was a slave’s death, a non-citizen’s death, an outsider’s death.

If you were Roman, you would not be crucified—your capital punishment would have some measure of “humane-ness”. But, for those who failed to qualify and measure up to the Roman ideas of conformity, it was a way of saying that we don’t acknowledge you as one of us.

Crucifixion was a dehumanising way to die that stripped the victim of all dignity and pity in the eyes of the world. For those passing by, a crucified corpse made a provocative declaration: Don’t think of ‘this’ as a human, don’t even think of ‘this’ as dung. ‘This’ is lower than that. At least with dung, you can fertilise your fields, but ‘this’ is worthless; nothing more than a rotten lump of meat, wild animal food and garbage.

Yet, Paul boasts in it—this symbol of weakness, alienation, dehumanisation, shame and defeat. The cross was the Roman instrument of humiliation and exclusion. But for Paul, it had become the shape of God’s victory over evil, sin and death, and an expression of God’s kindness, mercy and grace.[ix]

The offensive and scandalous message Paul had been preaching, and persecuted for, was that in Jesus Christ, God embraced this humiliation and exclusion, willingly accepting the disgrace and the pain of crucifixion to bring us into the freedom of being children of God.

As Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians, in Jesus, God chose to take on the position of a slave and die a slave’s death.[x] Paul wrote that God ‘made himself nothing.’ The Greek Paul used as he described this ‘becoming nothing’ was the word kenosis (κένωσις), which means emptied. That, when God enacted his plan to redeem us, a radical self-emptying love unfurled; that God, the highest of the high, poured himself into the extremity of human wretchedness, identifying himself with the lowest of the low. God was inhumanly treated like garbage—and chose to be so!

In the Roman world, the cross was about flexing your superiority over those you deemed worthless. But there is no superiority in God’s sacrifice of himself. Rather, there is solidarity with those judged worthless.

For the ancient world, the Cross was a way of saying, ‘No one wants you. You’re not worthy of life.’

But in Jesus, the Cross becomes the Good News announcement of, ‘God wants you, God is with you, and God has come to give you life.’

Now sure, there’s more to the cross than this, but there is also no less than this: Jesus does not use the cross as a weapon of supremacy, a marker of dominance, but as a monument of sacrificial love, not a weapon of coercion, but a tree of communion with all those who have fallen short of the standard. [xi]

Again, in Paul’s world, this all sounds like nonsense—still does! His boast upends society’s ways of thinking in its desire for glory and supremacy. Paul wants his world to see and know God more fully. God is not a tyrant, inflicting his will on those who are inferior; God is a servant-hearted king, who pours out his life as a ransom for his people—even the worst of his people.[xii]

More than this, for Paul, the cross isn’t only how Jesus died—it’s the pattern of the Christian life.

This boast is crucial for Paul.

I use the word crucial intentionally—it means more than important. Crucial originally meant cross-shaped. Today, preachers and writers prefer the word cruciform to say the same thing.

Paul, using this crucifixion imagery, is saying that, because of Jesus, there is now a radical break between him and the value systems of the world around him. He’s living to a different set of values and different set of methods. He is now a round peg in a square hole. Or, as I said the first week, he no longer fits in, he fits out.[xiii]

He’s has been set free from his world’s obsession with strength, achievement, ethnicity, pedigree and power. He’s no longer involved in boasts of superiority and status.

‘The world has been crucified to me, and I to the world,’ Paul states.

He’s not anti-world, anti-Roman, anti-Jew, anti-Greek, etc. He has not become a people hater. On the contrary, he is refusing to find his central identity in his tribe, or nation, or any other idea or claim of ethnic superiority.

Paul understood what a lot of us forget, that the crucified Christ is not a mascot—’The cross challenges and disrupts every anthem of supremacy, every symbol of exceptionalism, and every notion of political purity.’[xiv]

He’s saying, ‘I no longer use the world’s playbook of pride, scaremongering, domination and ethnic division.’ Paul declares that he belongs to a different world—a new creation, the Kingdom of God that has come and is still coming.[xv] And the pattern of that Kingdom, reflecting its King, is cross-shaped, cruciform; it calls us out of self-preservation and our tribal mindsets and into a life marked by self-giving love and humility to all people—even its enemies.

God’s way, the way of the new creation, is not the way of domination and hate, a means of other-ing. It’s the way of humble, generous love that pours itself out for the sake of other.

THE CRUX OF THE CRISIS, THEN AND NOW

The church in Galatia was dividing, ideas of superiority and inferiority were beginning to play out, and the fellowship was fracturing along ethnic and cultural lines—Jew and Gentile.

And Paul will not have it. Not under the shadow of the cross. In Jesus, all the old markers of belonging—circumcision, law, heritage—have been crucified. The only thing that matters is new creation. Because the gospel doesn’t just forgive sins—it creates a new humanity. A humanity where old ethnic boundaries fall, where enemies become family, and where fellowship around the same table announces to the world that Jesus is Lord.[xvi]

Paul’s whole letter has been soaked with the language of kinship. He has been defending the parentage of God and the sonship of all believers. None of which is based on our cultural or ethnic identity, but solely upon the work of Christ.

From his opening address to his closing sentence, Paul has been addressing the divisions by reminding them that they are co-heirs in Jesus, brothers and sisters.[xvii] When Paul calls them brothers and sisters, it is not courtesy—it’s theology. The Greek word he uses literally means from the same womb.[xviii]

The Galatians should be eating together, seeing each other as born-again from the same womb of God’s act of salvation, but instead of eating like siblings they are ‘biting and devouring one another.’ (Gal. 5:15)

How easily those old divisions creep back in.

Today, in Britain, we too are facing deep fractures.

My concern in this current cultural climate is that Christians might be swept into the divisions of our world—or even willingly giving themselves to them and deepening them—when we are called instead to embody cruciform love.

All around us, suspicion and scaremongering grow. We see it in many places:

In the unjustified anger toward Jewish people because of the actions of Israel’s leadership.

In the rhetoric around immigration, where concern for borders too easily becomes contempt for, and paranoid hostility toward, the stranger.

In the poisonous caricatures and character assassinations exchanged between the political left and right—and even between the theological left and right within the Church.

This is the public biting and devouring of one another, and it’s everywhere.

And it works—because nothing gathers a following faster than a banner of rage. Shared outrage can feel righteous; it feels like clarity. We believe, in that heat, that we finally see what needs doing to put the world right. But shared doesn’t heal; it hardens.

As one writer put it:

‘As cathartic as shared outrage may be, it’s not conducive to finding viable solutions. If anything, it drives us deeper into our tribes… Anger is not a sophisticated emotion; it’s a prism that distorts nuanced situations into misleading binaries, and complex characters into pantomime heroes or villains.’[xix]

And here lies the danger: in our anger, our eyes and ears and thinking gets gunked up with venomous filters. We make scapegoats, distilling our outrage into hatred toward a particular person or a group. We start to believe that old poisonous whisper: ‘Find someone to blame. Someone who is the dregs of our world, the source of its decay. If we can lay all the evil on them, we will finally put an end to evil itself.’

It’s the old Roman logic—the “logic” of crucifixion.

It’s not merely that we disagree with what they are doing and their motives for what they are doing—after all, it is ok to disagree. The problem is that we disagree a with them.

The way we speak about our opponents begins to echo the same message the Romans made through crucifixion: ‘They are garbage and worthless—not even human.’

And so, within social media and newspaper headlines our language is flooded with toxicity. Suspicion is amplified, and with it, symbols of ethnicity—flags, slogans, and chants—are recharged with new meanings, twisted into badges of superiority and weapons of exclusion.

And inevitably, something snaps. Violence erupts. Someone is killed upon some perceived altar of supremacy.

Now, I know these are vast and complex issues. I wouldn’t attempt to unravel them or pretend there are easy answers. These are hot, tangled conversations full of viewpoints that must be carefully waded through.

And I understand the anger—I feel it too, especially when innocent lives are trampled on.

But, as one wise person observed, all evil needs to do to survive, to find new life, is simply to be reflected.[xx] And in our anger—even what some might mistakenly call “righteous anger” toward violence and hatred—we can end up mirroring the very methods of violence and hatred we claim to resist.

We think we’re standing against the darkness, but if we’re not careful, we’re only helping it shine back through us.

This doesn’t mean silence in the face of injustice. But it does mean that I should never devalue another human being.

An American pastor, Eugene Cho, wrote a book back in 2020 wonderfully titled, Thou Shalt Not Be a Jerk. He was writing into the deep political division of the church in the US, the biting and devouring he witnessed going on, and the consistent approach of vilifying each other. He writes:

‘To devalue the life of another, to be a jerk, is counter to the kingdom. To be a jerk, to revel in earthly shouting matches, sells short the radically different way of Christ. It’s a poor representation of Christianity—and a foolish political move. Before all of our best arguments, let’s first show love. That’s what we’re supposed to be known for, after all.’[xxi]

Or, as Paul put it,

‘God forbid that I should boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.’

THE SCAPEGOAT & THE AGNES DEI

The thing is, if we’re honest, we prefer to boast in the cross of the Roman Empire—the one that punishes them whilst vindicating us. The instinct to scapegoat—to find someone to blame—is as old as humanity itself, and it is the same spirit that nailed Jesus to the cross.

Hate blinds us.

Martin Luther King, Jr., preaching into his own volatile context sixty years ago, said that nothing is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. He goes on to say:

‘Jesus was right about those men who crucified him. They knew not what they did. They were inflicted with a terrible blindness.’

They didn’t believe that they were acting in accordance with some evil scheme. They meant well. The acted with “good” political, religious and nationalistic motivations.[xxii]

Martin Luther King, Jr. goes on to say:

‘Every time I look at the cross I am reminded of the greatness of God and the redemptive power of Jesus Christ. I am reminded of the beauty of sacrificial love… But somehow I can never turn my eyes from that cross without also realizing that it symbolizes a strange mixture of greatness and smallness, of good and evil. As I behold that uplifted cross I am reminded not only of the unlimited power of God, but also of the sordid weakness of man. I think not only of the radiance of the divine, but also the tang of the human. I am reminded not only of Christ at his best, but of man at his worst.’[xxiii]

The point Martin Luther King, Jr. was making is that Jesus did not die on a cross to endorse crucifixion, but to expose our inhumanity, and to express to us the path of God.

On the cross, the world did what it has always done: It took its fear, its confusion, its anger—and it put it onto someone else.

This time, though, the one we put it on was God himself. And Jesus, in that moment, did not retaliate. He did not lash out and destroy his enemies. He takes upon himself the rage of the crowd; he absorbs their violence, their hatred, their sin. He becomes the scapegoat.

But, instead of cursing his accusers, he forgives them. He breaks the cycle.

That is the cruciform pattern — the self-giving love of God in action.

He will not reflect evil, he does not add to the hate, the rage and the sin. Jesus may be the world’s scapegoat, but more fundamentally, he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

The cross says, no more scapegoats.

‘WHO IS MY NEIGHBOUR?’

I won’t boast in anything else but the cross of Jesus.

To say those words is a cry of allegiance.

To say those words is to recognise that my identity is not in what tribe I belong to, not in the flag I wave, not in the boundaries I defend — but in the cross of Christ. My identity is no longer shaped by who I’m against, but by the One who gave Himself for all.

I’m proud to British (and I hope you are proud about whatever nationality you are, too), but, because of the cross, I will not weaponise my British-ness. The flag will never come before the cross. I will not give in to hate and instead I will let my heart be shaped by the cruciform pattern of Jesus

In this divided moment—when our culture is marked by anxiety, suspicion, and anger—we, the church, are called to be different. The church is called to live as a preview of that coming Kingdom—the “already and not yet” of God’s new creation.

This means we do not mirror the world’s contempt or fear. We refuse to collapse political critique into personal hatred. We mirror the cruciform love of Jesus and let it shape every part of our life — our politics, our speech, our online presence, our relationships, our posture toward those who are not like us.

It means we carry our national symbols, our identities, even our convictions, through the filter of the cross — always asking: Does this reflect self-giving love or self-protective fear?[xxiv]

At MCC, I don’t want anyone to think that they are second-class parts of the family of God. None of us are superior, nor are any of us inferior. We have all been born-again out of the womb of God’s mercy.[xxv]

And beyond our walls, as Christians, we need to model something better. Our world is wrestling with that age-old question of ‘Who is my neighbour?’

When Jesus was asked, ‘Who is my neighbour?’, it was really a question of limits: ‘Who do I have to care about?’ ‘Who can I ignore and reject?’[xxvi]

Jesus answers with the story of the Good Samaritan — a story where the outsider, the enemy, becomes the example of mercy. And then Jesus spins the question around and asks, ‘Who behaved as a neighbour?

In the Greek, the word Jesus uses for neighbour (plēsion) doesn’t mean ‘someone who qualifies.’, or someone of shared ethnicity—there were other words for those things. The word Jesus used means the one who is near.[xxvii]

So, when Jesus says, ‘Go and do likewise’, he’s saying: ‘Be a neighbour to whoever is near — even the one you’re told to fear.’

Brothers and sisters, in a Britain that is anxious, divided, and searching for identity, in a world asking, ‘Who is my neighbour?’, let us show the way. Let us be the people of the cross, the people of self-giving love; the people who refuse to scapegoat; the people who see every human being as neighbour; the people who live as citizens of the new creation.

Closing Prayer:

Lord Jesus, crucified and risen, teach us to see the world through Your cross.

Crucify our pride and our fears. Heal our divisions and our blindness.

Make us a people of new creation—who love even our enemies, who stand with the suffering, who refuse to scapegoat, and who boast only in You.

Amen.

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‘Don’t let evil get the best of you, but conquer evil by doing good’

— Romans 12:21 (NLT)

‘When I survey the wondrous cross | on which the Prince of glory died, | my richest gain I count but loss, | and pour contempt on all my pride.’

— Isaac Watts, When I Survey The Wondrous Cross[xxviii]

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ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES

[i] Martin Luther King, Jr., Love in Action, from the collection A Gift of Love (Penguin Random House, UK, 2017), p. 41

[ii] Tristan Sherwin, Living the Dream? The Problem with Escapist, Exhibitionist, Empire-Building Christianity (Black Coney Press, UK, 2019), p.133

[iii] As Keener notes, ‘Paul often used an amanuensis [a secretary, a scribe]; this is explicit in Rom. 16:22 … This was common practice, including among the literate elite. Many ancient documents include closing greetings in a handwriting style distinct from that of the rest of the letter.’ Keener then goes on to give reasons why Paul may be doing this before exploring proposals behind Paul’s ‘large’ handwriting (Poor eyesight, damaged hands, or pure emphasis). See Craig S. Keener, Galatians: A Commentary (Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2019), pp. 560-563, along with his helpful footnote references

[iv] 1 Corinthian 16:21; Colossians 4:18; 2 Thessalonians 3:17; Philemon 19

[v] Galatians 6:14-15 (NIV)

[vi] Philippians 3:4-11, and Galatians 1:14

[vii] 1 Corinthians 1:18-25. For some great books exploring the Crucifixion and it’s scandal, I’d highly recommend: Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology; Martin Hengel, The Cross of the Son of God (Containing The Son of God; Crucifixion and The Atonement); Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.

[viii] Nijay K. Gupta, Galatians: The Story of God Bible Commentary (Zondervan Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2023), p.258

[ix] Cf. Galatians 1:3

[x] Philippians 2:6-8

[xi] Romans 3:22-24

[xii] To quote Jesus, Matthew 20:25-28

[xiii] Using the quote from the film Home—see:  FREE TO GOD | TENSION IN THE OVERLAP

[xiv] To borrow an amazing sentence by Graham Hill, https://grahamjosephhill.com/good-friday/

[xv] I talked about the ‘dual-status’ of the Kingdom of God in the first session of this series—see the link above, Ibid xiii.

[xvi] See Paul’s argument in Ephesians 2:14-21, 3:10-21. The thrust and motivation of many of Paul’s letters is his keen passion to see Jew and Gentile united as one family, as one household of God, with neither erasing the cultural distinction of the other. It’s also why Paul consistently chooses to address those he writes to in such familial terms.

[xvii] Galatians 1:2; 6:18

[xviii] ἀδελφός (adelphos), brothers and sisters. He uses this word again at the end of his letter, in Galatians 6:18—which is apt for the central message of this letter, as the root word Adelphoi literally means from the same womb.

[xix] David Robert Grimes, The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts us all at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World (Simon & Schuster, UK, 2020), Kindle Edition, pp. 16-17

[xx] A. T. Robinson, as noted in Eugene H. Peterson, Traveling Light: Modern Meditations on St. Paul’s Letter of Freedom (Helmers & Howard, Colorado Springs, 1988), p.188

[xxi] Eugene Cho, Thou Shalt Not Be a Jerk: A Christian’s Guide to Engaging Politics (David C. Cook, 2020)

[xxii] It’s important to stress that the New Testament never hangs the act on the shoulders of one ethnic group. As the believers declare in corporate prayer, in Acts 4:27 (NLT), ‘For Herod, Pontius Pilate the governor, the Gentiles, and the people of Israel were all united against Jesus…’

[xxiii] Martin Luther King, Jr., Love in Action, from the collection A Gift of Love (Penguin Random House, UK, 2017), pp. 43-44

[xxiv] Author and pastor, Brian Zahnd, mentions Karth Barth’s motto, ‘Christ cannot serve, he can only rule.’ As Zahnd clarifies, ‘In this pithy quote, Barth doesn’t mean that Christ cannot assume the role of a humble servant; rather he means that Christ cannot serve a political interest apart from his own kingdom. There can be no syncretism of the kingdom of Christ with the kingdom of the world. Barth said this in response to the German Christian Movement of the 1930s that had aligned itself with the political interests of the Nazi party. The German Christian Movement was a faith-based political movement born of a conviction that German greatness was God’s will. This is what Barth, Bonhoeffer, and others spoke out against, but not many had ears to hear. Christ cannot serve the politics of any Christian nationalism—he can only rule his own kingdom. And Christ always rules from the cross—never from the worldly throne of Caesar. Thus in Revelation what do we find at the center of the throne of God? Not an emperor clad in purple, but the slaughtered, yet still standing, Lamb of God.’ (Instagram, 29^th August 2025, https://www.instagram.com/p/DN7wH4GjRx2/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==)

[xxv] I have mentioned this before, but, as others have noted, the Hebrew word for divine compassion is the same used for womb.

[xxvi] Luke 10:30-37

[xxvii] I talk about this in the chapter on Service in my book, LOVE: EXPRESSED (I’m not saying that so you will buy the book. If you want to read this chapter, I can send a pdf of the chapter to you. Just message me on the contact page).

[xxviii] Isaac Watts, When I Survey The Wondrous Cross, 1707