Gospel, good news, besorah--no matter the terminology we might use, we tend to think of the account of the life, death, and resurrection of Messiah as the initial message, what we might call the gateway message, to the life of faith. The besorah is proclaimed, and if one hears and responds in faithful obedience, he or she enters a new life in Messiah.

When Paul writes the believers in Rome, however, he says that he is eager to "proclaim the Good News" (CJB) or "preach the gospel" to them. Now, he has just declared that the faith of these believers is known throughout the world (1:8), so that they must be well established group, but they need to hear the besorah anew from the mouth of Paul. It is not just a gateway message for them, nor just a corrective to some error. Rather, Paul implies that the simple message of the life, death, and resurrection of Messiah provides ongoing sustenance and strength to the follower of Yeshua. Paul makes a similar statement in his first letter to the Corinthians:

For the Messiah did not send me to immerse but to proclaim the Good News--and to do it without relying on "wisdom" that consists of mere rhetoric, so as not to rob the Messiah's execution-stake of its power. For the message about the execution-stake is nonsense to those in the process of being destroyed, but to us in the process of being saved it is the power of God. (1 Cor. 1:17-18, CJB)

Now, I suppose you could interpret this passage to mean that the good news once proclaimed to the Corinthians as the gateway message came through the power of God, or brought the power of God into their lives, at some point in the past, but the language here seems to be emphatically present-tense. The good news, which in the opening of 1 Corinthians centers on the execution-stake, or the cross (more on that in a moment), is now the power of God to those in the process of salvation. It is not just a gateway message, but an ongoing message that the believer needs to hear and believe consistently.

Barry Horner (whose book Future Israel I discuss in two recent blogs) writes that the proclamation of the good news to others must begin with a sort of inner proclamation: "the first need is arousal in our own souls for the gospel of the wonderful free grace of God. . . . it is first the gospel of the Lord Jesus that has astonishingly saved me!" ("Encouragement Proclamation of the Gospel to the Jewish People," Dr. Barry E. Horner, www.lcje.net/papers/2009/horner.pdf, pp. 4-5). Before I tell the good news to someone else, I need let it have its impact upon me.

Note that the good news in 1 Corinthians is the message of the cross. Again, whether we translate the Greek word stauros as cross, execution-stake, or tree is not the main issue. And certainly the visual icon of the cross is not in view here at all. Rather, the issue is how much our teaching and preaching reflect the centrality of the sacrificial death of Messiah-a death that was humiliating and even repulsive to human eyes, but which accomplished God's victory over death and all the death-dealing powers of this present age. Furthermore, how much do we accept the idea that we need such an atoning death to reverse our alienation from God? Along with everything else that the execution-stake of Messiah reveals is my own desperate spiritual condition apart from God's mercy. This point is so essential that Paul tells the Corinthians, "I was determined to know nothing among you except Yeshua the Messiah, and him crucified" (2:2). Apparently, a cross-centered narrative needs to be told among us repeatedly, and I am struck by how far from this practice we are in the Messianic Jewish world.

As I was contemplating these issues raised by the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians, I came across this statement based on the writings of 16th century reformer John Calvin:

We must never forget that there is no tribunal so magnificent, no throne so stately, no show of triumph so distinguished, no chariot so elevated, as is the cross on which Christ has subdued death and the devil. . . . The cross of Christ always contains in itself the victory. But like the disciples at Golgotha, we flee the cross-both Christ's and our own. ("The True Prosperity Gospel," in Christianity Today, April 2009, p. 58.)

Rather than fleeing the cross, we need to hear an ongoing gospel, the repeated telling of Messiah's death and resurrection, which accomplished for us and for all Israel the return to God that we could never accomplish on our own. Horner writes, "It is fresh encounter with the gospel that will enliven our witness as will nothing else" (p. 8). "Fresh encounter" means we hear the good news not just as a gateway message, but as an ongoing message that reminds us continually of God's undeserved kindness toward us in Messiah-and of our need to practice gratitude and kindness in response.

I am aware of how Christian all of this language is. It would be a worthy pursuit for us to find a more Jewish way to tell the same story, but tell it we must, among ourselves as well as among the wider Jewish community.

I am writing this during Passover, the season of our deliverance. Messianic Jews retell the Passover story in a way that embraces the besorah of Messiah, which reached its climax during this same season. We often say how much the background of Passover and the Jewish traditions of Passover bring to life the story of Messiah's final days. Perhaps in our enthusiasm for the background, we have downplayed the foreground, the victorious cross of Messiah without which the resurrection that we celebrate during these days would have been impossible.