The Man Who Bore the Mysterious
Curse of God,
and Yet Lived
Never before had the world seen such a
strange happening, neither has it seen anything like it since: a good
man was hanged on a cross where he bore the curse of God. And yet he
lived!
It was never Allah’s intention that
the cross should become the emblem of idolatry that so many people make
of it. Those who make an idol of the cross and bow down to it, or hang
it on their walls or set it up on steeples, or wear it around their
necks, misunderstand the meaning of the cross. Allah never intended that
wars should be fought under the symbol of the cross, or that it should
become an emblem of imperialism or injustice. Satan has become a very
clever enemy, and has perverted a necessary truth about Allah in order
to blind people.
What does the cross mean?
Long ago, the great Musa declared to
all mankind that anyone who is hanged on a tree (or a cross) is under
the curse of God; and everybody believed it:
If a man guilty of a capital
offence is put to death and his body is hung on a tree, you must not
leave his body on the tree overnight. Be sure to bury him that same
day, because anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse. 1
Everybody knows how bitterly the Jews
hated Jesus. He declared that he was the manifestation of I AM who had
led Israel out of Egyptian bondage; he declared also that he had existed
before the time of our "father" Abraham. This made the Jews so
angry that they took up stones to kill him. 2 They sent spies
hoping to catch him making some little mistake that they could use as an
excuse to condemn him. No man has ever been hated as was Jesus. In fact,
the nature of the opposition he had to meet was itself a miracle, and
says something important to us. It was human sin blossoming out after
thousands of years into its full fruit — "enmity against
God."
This ultimate opposition came when the
high priest of Israel angrily confronted him with a direct question:
"In the name of the living God I now put you on oath: tell us if
you are the Messiah, the Son of God."
Jesus answered straightforwardly, yes.
This does not mean that he claimed that God had slept with a woman and
produced him in that manner, for that would be a blasphemous thing. But
it meant that he claimed to be born of a virgin, the only man in all
history born in this way, and that he stood in an intimate relationship
to God, a relationship unique for all time. (In everyday speech we use
the term "son of" in a metaphorical sense. In Arabic, ibn
al haram means a bad man; we speak of "sons of thunder."
The term "son" here means like.)
The Jews were so angry that they
decided on the spot, "‘He is guilty and must die.’ Then they
spat in his face and beat him; and those who slapped him said, ‘Prophesy
for us, Messiah! Guess who hit you!’" 3
Why This Hatred?
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