In his letter to the Galatian church, the Apostle Paul wrote, “But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Galatians 6:14)
The cross is so ubiquitous and such a familiar symbol of Christianity that it has lost much of its ability to shock us. However, the adoption of such a symbol by the early church was intentionally provocative. In the first century Roman world into which Christianity first emerged the cross was as ugly as an electric chair and as shocking as a noose, and so Paul’s statement that he boasted in the cross would have been an attention-grabbing claim.