I think you and I can agree that God created a world that included suffering as part of it. Before our parents had us as children, they made a decision to sacrifice and, indeed, suffer on our behalf. Love requires sacrifice. Procreation, an amazing privilege granted to us by our Creator God, in the world He designed, certainly included suffering in birth, countless sleepless nights for our parents when we were ill, cloth diapers (well, at least for my Mom), carpooling to soccer or basketball games, postponing their social lives to make sure we had one, and on, and on, and on. Early on they counted the cost of suffering to raise us and found it both necessary and welcome.
To anyone who may be “kicking the tires” of Christianity, we worship a God who, like our parents, “was willing to come and suffer alongside us—a God who would not remain comfortable seated on some far-off heavenly throne as we suffered. He could not bear to. As a caring parent, He came alongside His children in the person of Jesus Christ, and he suffered with us.”[1] The Bible says that God (Jesus) wept with us. The Bible says that in Gethsemane, (God) Jesus told his friends, “[m]y soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.”
Whatever you or your friends are dealing with, deep depression, grief, unexplainable loss, Jesus is right there alongside you. “There is no depth of agony and helplessness . . . that He doesn’t understand. The loving parent is not the one who never allows suffering in a child’s life. The loving parent is the one who is willing to suffer alongside his children. In creating this world, God didn’t merely accept the cost, but He suffered the cost.”[2] To me this is why JESUS had to die on the cross.
I went to the Doc recently and he confirmed that my back and leg pain is likely a nerve issue due to a very slight inflammation in my backbone near the nerve source. I could go somewhere else and ask for a second opinion, even though I trust my Doc. But if he were to tell me that I needed emergency surgery for bone marrow, I might ask for a second opinion, because my back hurts, an aspirin takes care of the pain, and I never really envisioned needing back surgery for this. But if my Doc were to offer up his own bone marrow as part of the procedure, because his was the only match, then I might be more inclined to believe him as he would be more than personally invested in my health. In fact, he would present to me so loving an act as to take care of my ailment, that I would be foolish to turn down his gift to me and be more inclined to believe him.
Dear friends, this is precisely what God has done for each of us. “When He saw us hurting and in need of healing for our sins, He provided His own blood. He chose to join us in our suffering and to take on Himself whatever suffering was necessary for us to be healed. He displayed His love in such an extravagant way that we have strong reason to trust Him, even when we don’t fully understand His ways.”[3] So extravagant was His sacrifice for our sins, because we needed more than a transfusion of blood—our sin required all of it. To me this is why Jesus HAD to die on the cross.
Love is the foundation. The supreme ethic in the universe is love. God loves us too much to require us to love him, for that would not be love. God loves us too much to create a world where we are not free to choose for Him or against Him.
But He did create a world where we can freely choose to love Him. We can choose against Him, but we do so at our own peril. That is why evil exists. We are free to choose for or against Him, but we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions. The criminal who asked for mercy on the cross next to our Savior’s received mercy. But he didn’t exactly come down off of his cross. There are consequences to our actions to be sure. Still, Christ had a far greater, dare I say extravagant paradise awaiting him.
Why did Jesus have to DIE on the cross? In our very “real world of pain,” how could we “worship a God who was immune to it?”[4] Our Muslim friends would think this to be “nonsense.” A god who suffers is perceived in Islam as “weak.” To me Buddha seems detached from the agonies of the world. The Bible says that Christ sets us free from the shackles of sin, so that we might freely choose for Him and for God. Christ did not set us free from sin to do whatever we want, but rather free to do as we should. We could choose against Him, and He would still die for us. That’s called unmerited favor, or grace. Christ did not come to make bad people good. He came to make dead people alive—even those who deserved death on a cross, like that criminal.
This is why Jesus had to die on the CROSS. God picked the most heinous, malicious, shameful and cruel method of execution in that culture. He endured our shame on the cross. When it seems as if we’ve been “shamed” by our fellow parishioners at Church, or a Christian culture that tends to “shoot its wounded” or blame the unmarried pregnant teen, or your friends struggling with their identity, or an unjust or unfair or bullying experience in our collective pasts, God hangs naked on a cross to take our “shame” on Him. That’s what the Bible says. “On the cross, Jesus proclaimed that when you put your trust in Him you don’t have to be ashamed of whatever you’ve been through, because He has been through it, too. . . The cross was God’s public proclamation to the whole world that you are deeply loved and eternally desired.”[5]
“There is a depth of relationship that is possible only between people who have been through the worst together—those who have been there in each other’s darkest times, those who have fought through disaster side by side, those who have sat beside each other in devastation with nothing left to say. Because of Jesus, and because of what Jesus accomplished on the cross, that depth of relationship is possible with God.”[6]
Dear readers, I cannot adequately express why Jesus had to die on a cross. But He did it to suffer alongside us when we suffer, to offer forgiveness for our sins, and to offer us freedom from our shame.
If our mothers who have suffered in birth, through sleepless nights of our illnesses, subjugating their schedules for ours, worrying through our nights out on dates—who can “bend down” over my sick bed for me and “suffer herself, [then she] is a parent who can be trusted amid suffering.” And when we follow the evidence to the full story of Christianity and where it leads—to the foot of the cross, “we find a God who has bent down and done precisely that.”[7]
That’s why we call this day “Good Friday.”
He is a God of love, and a God we can trust.
Thanks for reading.
[1] Zacharias, R., and Vitale, V. (2014). Why Suffering? New York: FaithWords, p. 82.
[2] Ibid., p. 83.
[3] Ibid., p. 86.
[4] Ibid., p. 91.
[5] Ibid., p. 101.
[6] Ibid., p. 102.
[7] Ibid., p. 104.