"The Old Rugged Cross" Is Not "The Gospel Of Kindness"

The Church's One Foundation Podcast

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"The Old Rugged Cross" Is Not "The Gospel Of Kindness"

The word "kind" has become a buzzword in religious circles

D. Paul Thomas

Apr 01, 2026

Dear Friends,

Time seems to be compressed in Holy Week. Event after event sweeps down on Christ and his disciples, and the stakes of the drama playing out couldn’t be higher.

It reminds me how stage-time for an actor can seem like a lifetime—for it is a compressed two hours or so of emotions, protagonists & antagonists, entrances & exits, stumbling blocks, aborted actions, then purpose and sacrifice, even heroism, that lead ultimately to a satisfying conclusion—or so we hope! Such was Holy Week!

Wherever you may be, dear reader and listener, this blessed Holy week, and whatever complications and challenges you may be facing, you can face them with the assurance that the crucified and risen Christ will be there with you, and “will never leave you nor forsake you” (Deut 31:6).

And may this Sunday, April 5, 2026, we all join our brothers and sisters in Christ around the world in proclaiming…

Christ Is Risen! He is risen, indeed!

D. Paul

The Old Rugged Cross Is Not the Gospel of Kindness

The word “kind,” and its various parts of speech—kindness, kindliness, kindly, kindlier, etc., have become buzz words in religious and “spiritual” circles lately. If you’re orthodox, evangelical, and remotely conservative, you’re by definition intolerant and unkind. If you’re progressive, mainstream, and liberal, you’re a tolerant and kind person. Hardly a nuanced delineation. But last week, I pulled the car over and shot this picture of a local church’s welcoming sign:

Now in way of a preemptive defense, I like the word kindness. I like being kind and being treated kindly. I use it frequently when an attentive waiter or waitress brings me that extra ketchup: “Thank you kindly,” I’ll say, which immediately frames me, I would suspect, as something of an “ol’ fogey.” But Jesus, my dear friends, didn’t come to make humankind kind; the bar is much higher—he came to save us from our sins and make us righteous, not just to be kind to our neighbors but to love them, even as we have been loved by the “lover of our souls.” With that said…

Because Palm Sunday was right around the corner and Easter approaching when I took the above photo, I was hoping for something a little more specific to the season, like “Feast on the Mercy of Jesus,” or at least “Feast on HIS kindness,” not some generic, feel-good kindness. But Fairview Presbyterian is known for its “radical inclusiveness,” so the word “Jesus” might be off-putting to some, a red flag for the spiritual dilettante looking for a church home where the perceived rigors of repentance and redemption are off the table. What is on the table is a “Feast On Kindness,” a more welcoming, less threatening invitation. You see, my friends, there are “triggering,” verbal landmines out there and we need to know the ever-evolving nomenclature if we’re going to avoid multiple micro-aggressions, of which the name “Jesus” in the front yard of the church is, apparently, one of them!

But why should it be otherwise? Nothing has changed: the “offense of the cross” is still with us, perhaps more than ever, and the true believer who identifies with the Christ of the cross is by default an unkind person. But permit me, dear reader, “unkind” observer though I may be on occasion, to kindly, if possible, challenge this sugar-coated “gospel of kindness.”

If I were a congregant, “Why,” I would ask the church board or vestry, “are we to fast from evil? A fast, by definition, ends, does it not? Are we then to return to evil when we stop fasting? Flee from Evil, Run to Jesus seems to me more reflective of our desperate souls and their need for a Savior who forgives our sins and grants us eternal life.” As I look around the church boardroom, I see nothing but stony faces. No doubt, the church planning committee in charge of signage will reject my suggestion and maintain their signage-friendly “Feast on Kindness” aphorism—an anemic substitute for the transformative power of the crucified and risen Christ. But I get it: it’s so nice to be nice, isn’t it; so kind to be kind, which, of course, misses the Lent and Easter message totally.

There was a fierceness to Holy Week, which is why it’s also called “Passion Week” and the “Painful Week.” Though the accounts and timing of the trip vary, the journey from Galilee to Bethany was an arduous one in itself, but nothing could deter Jesus who “…set His face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51), not to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles but to cleanse it of its “thieves” and to consecrate himself anew to the agony of the cross—“sweating, as it were, great drops of blood” and humbly submitting his will to his Father’s will and accordingly “brought as a lamb to the slaughter” (Isaiah 53:7 KJV). Betrayal would accompany his every step: the disciples resisted his divine destiny, preferring a “revolutionary” Jesus who would presently bring God’s kingdom to earth; Judas, for a fistful of silver coins, betrayed his Lord with the kindness of a kiss; the Pharisees, whom Jesus called a “brood of vipers” (which they took unkindly to), plotted his death, with Pilate and Rome their acquiescing pawns; the vacillating crowd switched from “Hosannas” (save us, please!) to shouts of “Crucify him!” within days; Peter, the “rock” on whom Christ said he would build his Church, denied him thrice, even as Jesus had prophesied. And as we learned in Sunday School, they placed a crown of thorns on his head and whipped him mercilessly and nailed him to a rugged wooden cross where he shed his atoning blood between two thieves, the soldiers below “casting lots” for his seamless tunic. A few stayed, witnessing the agony of his death, among them Mary, the mother of Jesus, and John, the apostle whom Jesus loved, but the other disciples had fled in fear. The earth grew dark, the ground trembled, the rocks split apart, “the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom” (Mat 27:51 NIV), and the sign above his head read mockingly, “Jesus Of Nazareth The King Of The Jews!” (John 19:19 KJV).

We need not look around Golgotha—the place of the skull—for any other signage; we’ll find no sentimental nor trivializing “Feast on Kindness” there. We need look no further for a profound meaning than to look upon Him on the cross—the “man of sorrows, acquainted with grief,” who “…was wounded for our transgressions…bruised for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5 KJV), and who having “taken upon himself the iniquity of us all” cried out from the cross, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?…My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Has there ever been such a brutal separation? No, my brothers and sisters, there has not, and the endless depth of his matchless death was not to bring us “kindness” but to bring us redemption. “Father, forgive them,” he pleaded from the cross, and with those three, earth-shattering words the world was opened wide to the immutable mercy and love of God. And by repenting of our sins and receiving his forgiving grace—that unmerited favor—we simply don’t “feast on kindness,” we feast on him—for “he dwells in us and we in him,” our having become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).

This Easter Sunday, 2026, which is four days past the posting of this podcast, I pray, if it be your tradition, that you will join with millions of your brothers and sisters in Christ around the word in “praise and thanksgiving” as you partake of the bread (his body) and the wine (his blood) and proclaim with joyful certainty, “He is risen! He is risen, indeed!”

And as I finish writing and podcasting this episode on Holy Wednesday, also known as “Spy Wednesday,” commemorating, as it does, Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus, I pray I’ll forever be singing with you—his faithful saints—

“On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, The emblem of suffering and shame; and I love that old cross where the dearest and best, For a world of lost sinners was slain. So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross, Till my trophies at last I lay down; I will cling to the old rugged cross, And exchange it some day for a crown.” (written by George Bennard, 2012-2013.)

Amen