The Cross Creates the Community We Need

Jesus offers the surprising remedy for our loneliness.

As the surgeon general of the United States, Vivek Murthy encountered a variety of medical problems throughout his career. Yet, when reflecting on his time as a doctor in an article in the Harvard Business Review, Murthy claimed, “During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes, it was loneliness.” Murthy in fact says our society today is experiencing a “loneliness epidemic,” which most can identify with based not on years of research but on their own personal experience.

How can our longings for relational intimacy be satisfied? The digital age has led not to deep relationships but to shallow connectedness. Contemporary pop spirituality attempts to fill the void, but a me-centered spirituality based on preference does not end up producing authentic community. Has the church been able to fill this void? Unfortunately, much of American Christianity reflects the individualism of our age, with the church seen as a dispenser of spiritual goods that exists to prop up “my relationship with God.”

If our longing for community is to be satisfied, we must look to the most unlikely person: a man who never married, was abandoned by his closest friends, and died one of the loneliest and most shameful deaths imaginable. The atoning death of Christ on the cross is the answer to our isolation because it creates a community bound together by something stronger than DNA. Jesus died for our sins, but his death accomplished much more than individual forgiveness. Through the blood of Christ we are saved into the church, adopted into a family, and rescued into the kingdom. Just as Christ’s cross had a vertical and horizontal beam, the sacrifice of Jesus ...