Jesus proves God’s love

Warning: some of this post is incredibly painful. Only read it if you feel you can tolerate being exposed to something horrible, excruciating, and pitiable. As we approach Palm Sunday, we do well to contemplate how Jesus proved God’s love for us on the cross.

When my son-in-law wanted to woo my daughter to marry him, he went to considerable expense, time investment, and trouble to convince her that “he was the one.” When God wanted to convince us that he loves us, desperately and completely, he went to considerable trouble in many different circumstances, the most extreme of which was the death of Jesus on the cross. The death of Jesus cost God enormously and unimaginably.

Consider three aspects of Jesus’s suffering on the cross:

Physical torture—Roman crucifixion was a form of slow, painful execution

Crucifixion began with the condemned carrying the crossbar, on which they will be pinned, to the place of execution. The upright shaft of the cross already was fixed in the ground, probably so it could be used over and over. The victim has been stripped of his clothing and his wrists will be bound to the crossbeam with outstretched arms. According to the New Testament, Jesus was bound to the cross with nails (John 20:20). The crossbeam was then lifted onto the upright shaft about 9 to 12 feet from the ground.

Next, the feet were tightly bound or nailed to the upright shaft. The victim’s hands and arms supported the victim’s entire weight. Over the criminal’s head was placed a notice stating his name and his crime. Death ultimately occurred through a combination of constrained blood circulation, organ failure, and asphyxiation as the body strained under its own weight. It could be hastened by shattering the legs (crurifragium) with an iron club, which prevented them from supporting the body’s weight at all and made inhalation more difficult, accelerating both asphyxiation and shock (Britannica). Death by crucifixion was physically appalling in the extreme.

Emotional torture—Jesus’s mental anguish before and during his crucifixion

Added to the unspeakably horrible physical torture of Roman crucifixion was the emotional torture of this form of execution. In a culture in which honor and shame were the dominating, overarching values, being hung and displayed naked on a frequently traveled thoroughfare into Jerusalem was itself an exquisite form of suffering. Jesus had, no doubt seen other victims of crucifixion during his many visits to the city and the fear and revulsion he would have experienced at the sight must have been at least as great as our twenty-first century minds can conceive. Added to this was the emotional trauma of knowing that he, when he suffered his agony, would be punished though completely undeserving. Such haunting thoughts no doubt plagued his mind in anticipation of the terrible event, only to have his worst nightmares come excruciatingly true. We know from the Gospel accounts that fears and disgust must have beset him, particularly as he anticipated his torture the long night before (Matthew 26:39; Mark 14:36; Luke 22:42).

Spiritual torture— “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

Uttered in Aramaic, apparently Jesus’s mother tongue (Matthew 27:45-46; Mark 15:34), I believe that these words were being recalled by someone who heard them, seared indelibly as they were into the memory of the hearer. Why else record them in Aramaic? I remember an incident in my parenting when I heard one of my children crying, distressed and disillusioned, beyond hope, an aching wail of disbelief and pain. I can still hear the moan in my mind to this day.

I am thinking that the writers of the Gospel accounts that contain these words could recall in their minds the very sound of their Rabbi and friend wailing them from the cross. Jesus had known the love of his Father from all eternity. No matter what rejection or hatred he had to face while on earth, he always knew that his Father loved him and was with him. The night before the awful event, he had told his disciples, “A time is coming and in fact has come when you will be scattered, each to your own home. You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me” (John 16:32). Even if his dearest earthly friends left him alone, he was saying that he would not be utterly alone; his Father would be with him. Now as the final horror of the nightmare came to fruition, Jesus would perceive that even his Father abandoned him. He was utterly, totally, achingly alone.

Another aspect of Jesus’s suffering on the cross comes with the biblical assertion that he somehow was bearing the punishment for the reality of our sin. To what extent did Jesus actually experience the sin of the world while he was on the cross? To what extent did Jesus mentally experience every theft, every abduction, every murder, every rape, every abuse directed toward a child? I do not know. The thought is too horrifying to entertain. Still, somehow the punishment for our sin was directed at Jesus, undeserving as he was.

Written hundreds of years before, the beautiful words of the prophet Isaiah sound as though the author was seated, marveling and awe-struck, at the foot of the cross:

Surely he took up our pain

and bore our suffering,

yet we considered him punished by God,

stricken by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,

he was crushed for our iniquities;

the punishment that brought us peace was on him,

and by his wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray,

each of us has turned to our own way;

and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. (Isaiah 53:4-6)

Since Jesus really did go to the cross to pay for our sins, this one fact alone, like a photo of the earth from the moon to prove that the world is round, is enough to overcome any qualifications that might seem to weaken the assertion that God loves us. Since he endured the worst loss and suffering imaginable, even if we add all kinds of qualifications, they don’t for a moment weaken the assertion that God loves us. God’s love is as certain as the shape of the earth. We can stake our lives on it.

This post is an excerpt from my book, Is Jesus Real?

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