Teaching Summary: The Way of the Cross - Part 2

Teaching Text: Colossians 2:13-15

There’s a word in ancient Greek that has always fascinated me: pharmakon.

You might recognize the root. It’s where we get our word pharmacy. But in ancient Greek, pharmakon carried a striking double meaning. It meant both poison and cure. The same substance. The same word. Depending on the dose and the context, it could kill you or heal you.

The cross is a pharmakon.

To the world, it looks like poison. Weakness, defeat, foolishness. A dead man on a stick. But to those being saved, it is the cure. The very thing that looks like death is the thing that defeats death. The poison becomes the remedy.

There’s a strange foreshadowing of this in Numbers 21. The Israelites are in the wilderness, dying from venomous snakebites. God tells Moses to make a bronze serpent, the image of the very thing killing them, and lift it up on a pole. Anyone who looks at it lives. Jesus references this directly in John 3:

“Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life.” — John 3:14–15

The instrument of death becomes the instrument of life. The thing that looks like poison is the cure.

Before we can understand what the cross frees us from, we need to sit with the weight of what the Apostle Paul describes in Colossians 2.

Paul uses a vivid legal image: a cheirographon. A handwritten certificate of debt. In the ancient world, when someone owed a debt they couldn’t pay, the full list of what they owed was written out on a document like this. A record of every obligation unmet, every failure to pay.

Paul says we all carry one. Not financial debt but moral and spiritual debt. The accumulated weight of who we’ve been, what we’ve done, what we’ve left undone. Guilt. Shame. The record of every way we’ve fallen short.

And then he says something extraordinary: God canceled that charge. Took it away. And nailed it to the cross. The very thing that condemned us was pinned to the instrument of Jesus’ death.

When Christians talk about how the cross saves us, what theologians call atonement, the Church has never settled on a single, definitive explanation. Not because the question doesn’t matter, but because the cross is so large, so rich, that no single image fully contains it. There are several, and they all orbit the same extraordinary event like planets around a sun.

Liberation from the Powers. The oldest understanding sees the cross as a battle and a victory, sometimes called Christus Victor. This is what Paul describes in verse 15, using the language of a Roman military triumph: the victory parade where a conquering general marches his defeated enemies through the streets in chains. Paul says that is what Jesus did to the powers of darkness at the cross. They thought they had won. But in crucifying him, they were disarmed. The cross wasn’t their victory it was their defeat. For us, it means the enslaving powers like sin, death, fear, shame, have been disarmed. Their hold has been broken.

Forgiveness of Debt. This is the cheirographon image Paul uses at the beginning of the passage. Our sin creates a real moral debt, not just a feeling of guilt, but an actual brokenness in our relationship with God and one another. Jesus doesn’t wave a wand and pretend the debt isn’t real. He pays it. He takes it on himself. The record that stood against us is nailed to the cross.

Healing Through Solidarity. A third image sees the cross as the ultimate act of divine solidarity with human suffering. God doesn’t liberate us from a distance. He enters the very worst of what it means to be human. Betrayal, torture, abandonment, death. And transforms it from the inside. The pharmakon image again: God takes the poison of human suffering into himself, and through the resurrection, transforms it into life.

None of these is the whole story. They’re more like facets of a diamond, each one catching and refracting light, each one true, each one incomplete on its own.

Sometimes the cross gets domesticated. We turn it into a lesson about humility: Jesus was humble, so we should be humble. Jesus served, so we should serve. And while those things are true, that is not what this passage is about.

This passage is about freedom.

Paul is not calling us to be humble about our sin. He is calling us to recognize that we have been liberated from it. There is a difference between being told to manage your guilt better and being told that the record of your guilt has been nailed to the cross and canceled. There is a difference between being told to try harder against the powers that enslave you and being told that those powers have been disarmed and publicly defeated.

The gospel doesn’t say try to be free. It says you have been set free. Now live like it.

Here’s the diagnostic question: Where do I still live as if I’m not free?

You can be objectively free and still live like a prisoner. Most of us have heard about soldiers in remote parts of the Pacific who kept fighting for years after World War II ended because no one told them the war was over. Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier, continued his mission in the Philippine jungle until 1974, decades after the surrender. The war was over. He was free to go home. He just didn’t know it.

I think many of us are living that way spiritually. The cross happened. The debt was canceled. The powers were disarmed. The war is over. But we are still fighting battles that have already been won. Still dragging around a debt certificate that has already been nailed to a cross.

Here are four specific ways this tends to show up:

In the way we carry shame as though God hasn’t called us his Beloved

In the way we perform for God’s approval as though we still need to earn what has already been given

In the way we let fear drive our decisions as though the powers of darkness haven’t been defeated

In the way we hold other people’s sins over them as though the God who canceled our debt somehow hasn’t canceled theirs

Let me be honest about one of these.

I grew up in a hyper-critical home. And what that environment planted in me, slowly, over years, the way a weed takes root before you notice it, was a lie. The lie said: you are on your own. No one is coming to help you. And no matter what you do, no matter what you achieve, it will never quite be enough.

I carried that lie for a long time. I still bump into it.

The cross doesn’t just say you are forgiven. It says you are beloved. Those are not the same thing. And for some of us, the second one is harder to receive than the first.

For each of the four areas above, here is a concrete step.

If you are carrying shame, the cross says the record has been canceled. You are not defined by it.

This week, write it down: the failure, the label you’ve accepted about yourself, and then destroy it. Burn it, shred it, tear it up. Not because the ritual saves you, but because sometimes we need our bodies to do what our minds haven’t fully believed yet.

If you perform for God’s approval, the cross says you already have it. You are not auditioning.

This week, cancel something religious. Take a nap instead of a devotional. Do something purely restful and practice receiving it as a gift from God rather than a theft from him.

If fear is driving your decisions, the cross says those powers have been disarmed.

Name the fear. Write it down. Then ask yourself: what would I do this week if I genuinely believed this fear had been defeated? And do that thing.

If you’re holding someone else’s sin over them, the cross says the same God who canceled your debt has canceled theirs.

Think of the person. This week, do one thing that moves toward releasing them, not for their sake, but for yours. Maybe it’s a conversation. Maybe it’s a letter you never send. Maybe it’s simply saying out loud, alone: “I release you.”

Finally, take a moment of freedom before the Lord and pray:

Jesus, show me where I am still living as a prisoner.

Help me to receive the freedom you purchased.

Teach me to live as someone who has been set free.

Amen.