A Beautiful, Brutal, Beginning

The Cross in the Room

My wife loves winter.

I genuinely don’t understand it. I am really enjoying the pockets of spring that we are seeing breaking through at the moment, with flowers and sun returning. But in the middle of winter it’s tough isn’t it.

It’s dark when you wake up, dark when you finish work… it’s cold, and somehow everything is just slightly damp all the time.

Nothing quite feels alive.

And when you look around, the world kind of reflects it.

Trees stripped bare. No colour. No movement. Just branches and mud and grey skies.

And there’s a point in winter where it doesn’t feel like a season anymore…

it feels like something has ended.

It reminds me of that line from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:

“Always winter, but never Christmas.” Mr Tumnus

That sense that something is stuck, but without any real hope of change.

And I think most of us know what that feels like.

Not just out there in the world… but in here, in our lives, in our own situations that we face, day in and day out.

There are perhaps moments where something doesn’t just feel difficult…

it feels finished. I’ve definitely felt that, times in jobs, seasons of my walk with God.

A relationship that’s broken down and you don’t know how it comes back.

A prayer you’ve prayed for years… that still feels unanswered. It doesn’t just feel difficult to whisper that prayer again to God, it maybe feels pointless.

A situation that hasn’t just taken a knock… it feels beyond repair.

Maybe even something in your faith — something that once felt alive, but now just feels quiet… distant… cold.

…over.

And you might be wondering, Andy why are we starting with such a negative tone… well this is exactly where we arrive on Easter Sunday. It’s exactly where the story of Jesus brings us.

Because before we ever get to resurrection… before we get to new life, or hope, or victory…

we’re brought face to face with something that looks like the end of the story.

A cross.

Beautiful and brutal.

And at first glance, it doesn’t look like a beginning at all.

It looks like everything has come to an end.Just take a moment and look at it. There’s something about it that draws you in. It’s familiar. Recognisable. For many people, it’s even beautiful. It’s a symbol people wear, display, hang in their homes.

But if we stop and really think about it, that’s actually quite strange. Because the cross was not designed to be beautiful. It was designed to be brutal.

It was an instrument of execution. A public, humiliating, violent way to die. It was Rome’s way of saying, “This person is finished.”

And yet here it is, at the centre of the Christian faith.

How did something so brutal become something so beautiful?

And more than that, what if what looks like the end of the story … is actually a just the beginning?

The Brutality — What really happened

When we come to the death of Jesus, we have to resist the temptation to sanitise it.

Jesus was beaten. Mocked. Stripped of dignity. Nailed to wood and lifted up in public. Left there to suffer slowly, visibly, painfully. At the time of Jesus’ death, crucifixion was the Roman Empire’s most brutul and degrading form of captial punishment - a death so horrible it was reserved for slaves and vilest of criminals. No Roman citizen could be subjected to crucifixion.

At the cross, Jesus entered the struggle between God and the cosmic forces of evil, sin, and death. The cross wasn’t simply a tragic consequence of political opposition. It was the collision point where everything Jesus stood against made its final stand.

And what is striking is this.

Jesus walks toward the cross. He does not resist it. He does not escape it. He chooses it. As Jesus himself says, in John 10:18 “No one takes my life from me; I lay it down of my own accord,”

The gospels make it clear that Jesus knew his fate was to be crucified in Jerusalem.

Despite knowing his fate Jesus moves resolutely towards the cross because he is compelled by love. Jesus was not crucified as a naive, helpless vitim, but as a martyr of love. As he said in John 10:11 ‘The good Shepherd lays down his life for his Sheep’ From the moment Jesus began his public ministry he was headed for the cross.

Jesus was saving the world in the only way the world could be saved. For sin and death to be defeated, Jesus had to drink the bitter cup of death. Jesus goes to the cross, with his eyes wide open, and his heart full of love.

The Beauty — What it means

The brutality of the cross shows us something. It shows us that what is wrong with the world is not small.

The brokenness we see around us, and in us, is not just surface-level. It runs deep. It shapes how we live, how we love, how we hurt one another, and how we distance ourselves from God. But we’re not just broken individuals struggling with personal sin. We’re caught in something larger. We’re trapped under powers of domination and death—systems of evil woven into the fabric of our world, holding creation itself captive. The Bible calls this sin, yes, but also principalities and powers, cosmic forces that enslave us. We see this in Ephesians 6 & Romans 8

At that moment, everything looked finished.

Jesus dies.

The disciples scatter. (Or at least the men do).

Hope collapses.

If you had stood there that day, you would not have called it beautiful. You would not have called it victory. You would have called it over.

And many of us know what that feels like. Moments where something falls apart. Moments where hope feels out of reach. Moments where we quietly think, “This is it.”

This Christmas my dad, went into hospital with an infection on his heart. Now my dad is a really strong man, I’ve seen little to no emotion from my dad through most of my life, he raised seven kids, pretty much built the house we grow up in himself, ran his own company and led a church. He could do anything, he was - at least in a very natural sense one of the strongest people I knew. But here he was, lying in a hospital ward - no longer in control, strong and stable. But weak, sick and needing to rely on God and the medical staff that were looking after him. I sometimes wonder if this is how the disciples might have looked at Jesus - before they left. The one that had healed the sick, stilled the storm, taken on the devil in the wilderness and cast out the demon spirit, had finally met his match! who is this Jesus. He’s not strong, filled with power. He’s dying, defeated, hanging on a tree.

This is where the cross meets us, in our weakness, in our emptiness, where it looks like there is no hope.

But the story of the bible tells us that it was not the end.

In Luke 24 the story shifts.

Luke 24:1–8 “But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel. And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.” And they remembered his words,”

The tomb is empty.

Jesus is alive.

And suddenly, everything that looked like defeat is revealed as something else. what looked like weakness is the strongest act of all .

It’s beginning of something entirely new.

God does not stand at a distance from your brokenness.

He steps into it as a warrior, not a victim. Jesus does not come to point the finger at the brokenness in your life or mine. He comes to defeat what holds us captive. He takes on the full force of evil—absorbs it into Himself—and emerges victorious. The cross is an act of beautiful self-sacrifical love.

The brutality of the cross shows us the seriousness of evil’s grip on us. The beauty of the cross shows us that God has broken that grip.

That God would rather step into the darkness and defeat it than leave us enslaved to it. Easter proves it: the victory is real. We are liberated. And we’re invited into that liberated future, where God is reclaiming all creation as His own.

The resurrection is not simply Jesus coming back to life as before.

It is the start of a new creation.

As if, in the middle of a world marked by decay, death and winter, God has planted the first sign of a new world. The seeds of a kingdom of life. A new kind of life. A new future.

The cross was not the end of the story.

It was the doorway. And the resurrection is the moment that a new world begins to break in.

What looked like the end, was actually a beautiful, brutal beginning.

What it means for us

So what does that mean for us?

It means that forgiveness is real, because sin has been dealt with.

That the guilt and the shame that you have lived in is gone.

It means that death does not define your future, because it has been defeated.

But it also means something more. It means that new life is available now.

You have been adopted into the very family of God. No matter what you do, you cant be separated from the love of God.

You receive not just life after death, but life before death. A restored relationship with God. A new identity. A new beginning.

NT wright Says ‘The resurrection of Jesus is the beginning of Gods new project - not to snatch people away from Earth to heaven but to colonise earth with the life of heaven

The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is at work bringing life into places that feel empty, stuck, or finished.

And it all comes back to that cross.

Brutal, because sin is serious.

Beautiful, because God is love.

And through the resurrection, there is the beginning of something entirely new.

Invitation

So the question this Easter is simple.

When you look at the cross…

What do you see?

Do you see just a symbol?

Do you see just a story?

Or do you see what it points to?

The love of God.

The cost of sin.

The beginning of a new creation.