The triumph of Christ

This is how the great nineteenth century preacher Charles Spurgeon began a sermon on the triumph of Christ.

To the eye of reason, the cross is the centre of sorrow and the lowest depth of shame. Jesus dies a criminal’s death. He hangs upon the cross of a felon and pours out His blood upon the common mount of doom with thieves for His companions. In the midst of mockery, jest, scorn, and blasphemy, He gives up the ghost. Earth rejects Him and lifts Him from her surface, and heaven affords Him no light but darkens the midday sun in the hours of His extremity. Deeper in woe than the Saviour dived, imagination cannot descend. Satanic malice itself could not invent a blacker calumny than was cast on Him. Jesus hid not His face from the shame and spitting, and what shame and spitting it was! To the world, the cross must ever be the emblem of shame: to the Jew a stumbling block and to the Greek foolishness.
How different, however, is the view that presents itself to the eye of faith. Faith knows no shame in the cross except the shame of those who nailed the Saviour there; it sees no ground for scorn, but it hurls indignant scorn at sin, the enemy that pierced the Lord. Faith sees woe, indeed; but from this foe, it marks a fount of mercy springing. It is true it mourns a dying Saviour, but it beholds Him bringing life and immortality to light at the very moment when His soul was eclipsed in the shadow of death. Faith regards the cross, not as an emblem of shame but as a token of glory. The sons of Belial lay the cross in the dust, but the Christian makes a constellation of it and sees it glittering in the seventh heaven. Man spits upon it, but believers, having angels for companions, bow down and worship Him who ever lives though once was slain.