Losing is unpleasant.

If you have been following the post-season of professional baseball you are most likely disappointed, unless you cheer for the Yankees or the Dodgers, who are set to face off in the upcoming World Series. Even then, one fan base will come away disappointed at the end of that contest. If you are following American politics, election day is just under two weeks away. Regardless of the outcome in the presidential, state, or local elections, one side will end the day in complete disappointment.

In a world where disappointments come in all shapes, sizes, and settings, losing is particularly unpleasant. Losing loudly declares that someone or something else was more desired, more loved, more equipped, more powerful, more intelligent, more… than you. Losing is unpleasant. We much prefer the powerful feeling of victory over the humiliation of defeat. Yes, we, human beings, like to win.

Yet, when I think of the cross, the gospel, and the only Messiah the world has ever known, I see a gospel of the voluntary “loser”. Matthew’s account of the crucifixion spares no detail to show the reader just how humiliating the cross was for Jesus and his followers.

Matthew 27
27 Then the governor’s soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him. 28 They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, 29 and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand. Then they knelt in front of him and mocked him. “Hail, king of the Jews!” they said. 30 They spit on him, and took the staff and struck him on the head again and again. 31 After they had mocked him, they took off the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him.

The ancient viewer of the scene would stand in awe, disgust, or jeers at the purported God-Man, dressed in royalty, being mocked and put to death by the only government that generation had ever known. The casual followers of Jesus would have known the bitterness of losing. Losing their influence in a new rising kingdom, their hope in a better tomorrow, their promise of freedom, peace, and wholeness. Yes, for the followers of Jesus, the cross was the ultimate symbol of loss. Rome had won. Jesus and the kingdom had died. It wouldn’t be until the resurrection and ascension that twelve disciples would be able to reinterpret the cross, not as loss, but as the most incredible victory the world has ever known.

Writing on the crucifixion, the Christian scholar, Reinhold Neibuhr once wrote,

“The crux of the cross is its revelation of the fact that the final power of God over man is derived from the self-imposed weakness of his love. This self-imposed weakness does not [take away] from the majesty of God. His mercy is the final dimension of His majesty. This is the Christian answer to the final problem of human existence. The worship of God is reverence toward the mysterious source and end of all of life….”

Neibuhr continues,

…A truly "holy" God must be both powerful and good. Impotent or limited goodness is not divine. It can not be worshiped. Its weakness arouses pity rather than worship… …But power without goodness cannot be worshiped either. It may be feared, or possibly defied; but reverence must be withheld¹.

The Gospel of the Loser is just this. The voluntary submission of the most powerful being the universe has ever known in order to exercise the greatest power the world has ever experienced. The cross became the paradox through which the majesty of god was displayed through apparent “loss” to the empire of Rome. It was the creation of God purportedly usurping the power of God. Yet, this loss became the most powerful tool to move even the hardest of hearts into a posture of humble submission reorienting creation to the heart of the creator.

This reorientation is seen most dramatically in the words of the battle-hardened Centurion when he was moved by the selflessness of Jesus hanging on the cross.

Matthew 27:54

When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!”

Power and Weakness

Modern Christians are called to demonstrate the same weakness and power in their lives. The weakness of humility, love, and Christlikeness stands in stark contrast to the abusive, coercive use of power by which our world is run. Yet, the Christian’s humility of actions, words and example exercises the greatest power in the most unexpected ways. This power of cross-like weakness cuts through every defense put up by the most hardened of human hearts. It penetrates much deeper than any law or statute going far further than modifying behavior through threat of legal penalty. This power of cross-like weakness mingles with the divine breath of life to change its recipient from the inside out at a level that can only be described as recreation in real time.

The Gospel of the Loser

This fall regardless of what competition toward which you had staked your interest, your hopes, your desires, your reputation and your future, remember that cross-like humility, weakness, self-emptying benevolence is a more powerful change agent than any human win could ever accomplish.

^{1. Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1987. The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr : Selected Essays and
Addresses. New Haven: Yale University Press. Accessed October 21, 2024. ProQuest
Ebook Central.}