Quotes about Calvary

Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other.

Whatever else we may say about it, the atonement fulfills the Jewish principle that only one who has been hurt can forgive. At Calvary, God chose to be hurt.

It has been said there was a cross in the heart of God long before the cross was erected at Calvary. As we think about it we will be overwhelmed at the wonder and greatness of His love for us.

If I am perturbed by the reproach and misunderstanding that may follow action taken for the good of souls for whom I must give account; if I cannot commit the matter and go on in peace and in silence, remembering Gethsemane and the cross, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

When God becomes a Man and lives as a creature among His own creatures in Palestine, then indeed His life is one of supreme self-sacrifice and leads to Calvary.

At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice.

The meaning of the story is found in every detail, as well as in the broad narrative. The pain and tears of all the years were met together on Calvary. The sorrow of heaven joined with the anguish of earth; the forgiving love stored up in God's future was poured out into the present; the voices that echo in a million human hearts, crying for justice, longing for spirituality, eager for relationship, yearning for beauty, drew themselves together into a final scream of desolation.

His tears were not for Himself, though He well knew whither His feet were tending. Before Him lay Gethsemane, the scene of His approaching agony. The sheep gate also was in sight, through which for centuries the victims for sacrifice had been led, and which was to open for Him when He should be "brought as a lamb to the slaughter." Not far distant was Calvary, the place of crucifixion.

We are to engage in this behavior not out of duty to an abstract ethic, but because the life of the one who came under all humanity on Calvary is pumping kingdom life through our veins. We are part of the growing revolutionary kingdom he began and is continuing to grow. It is a kingdom that looks like him, a kingdom in which the greatest is the one who serves others (Matt. 20:26; Luke 22:26—27).

The Mass would be sterile and futile if it were locked and sealed inside one magic hour of the week. Like Calvary itself, the whole point of it is that it overflow. Our Lord's life (his Blood) was poured out, spilled onto the ground; and, says faith, from the soil on Golgotha it spread to cover the whole earth. Just so, you and I take our own place at Calvary so that our whole life may be spilled as an oblation to God for the life of the world.

The feebleness of the church is being criticized today, and the criticism is justified. One reason for the feebleness is that there has not been this focus on the true center of spiritual power. We have not dwelt enough on the tragedy of Calvary or on the meaning of redemption.

From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land.