There is a historical artifact that shows us the way that Rome looked at Christianity in the 200’s AD. A piece of graffiti carved into the plaster of an excavated room near the Palentine Hill in Rome shows a man raising his arm in worship of a donkey-headed figure on a cross. Words around the picture can be translated as “Alexamenos worships his god.”

From this, we can gather that the writer of the graffiti felt that the Christian allegiance to a man who was crucified as a criminal was ridiculous. Why would you worship a man who lost? Why would you worship someone who died on that era’s equivalent of the electric chair?

That question brings up another – what is it that we do normally worship? What sorts of things and people do we feel natural worshiping? The beauty of the person on the screen? The power of the bombastic political speech? The capacity of the brimming full bank account? The security of the perfect looking family life?

All of these things were things that Jesus denied Himself in His earthly life. Instead, He “had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him,” (Isaiah 53), He refused when people were going to try to make Him an earthly king (John 6), He had no place to lay his head (Matthew 8), and He was at odds with His own family at times (Matthew 12). Instead, He came to go to a Cross so that Alexamenos and we could worship Him lifted up on that device of torture.

It is the irony of the Christian faith – we worship a God who is powerful, but who showed us His power in coming to die for us. He may not be what the world would worship on its own, but in His weakness we find strength – in His powerlessness we find power – by His stripes, we are healed.

The world may increasingly scoff at us Christians, treating us as “Alexamenoses” and making fun of our crucified God. But that won’t stop our worship of Him, because we know that He was on the Cross for us.