“An apostolic report can be forgotten or contested. A communal memory can grow dim or be reinterpreted or seem strange. That one event way back there is so specific and so local. Can we really go on celebrating it as the hinge of history? It is to this that the authors or the poets behind the high points of the New Testament witness respond when they proclaim that what happened on the cross is a revelation of the shape of what God is, and of what God does, in the total drama of history. They affirm as a permanent pattern what in Jesus was a particular event. The eternal Word condescending to put himself at out mercy, the creative power behind the universe emptying itself, pouring out itself into the frail mold of humanity, has the same shape as Jesus. God has the same shape as Jesus, and he always has had. The cross is what creation is all about. What Jesus did was local, of course, because that is how serious and real our history is to God. But what the cross was locally is universally and always the divine nature.”
–John Howard Yoder, He Came Preaching Peace (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1998), 84-85.
Perhaps the two best “shapes” of Christ are “Behold the Lamb of God!” And, Pilate saith..”Behold The Man!” But both are Christ in and toward “cruciform”!