It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it
Writing in the first century, the writers would not have had to explain crucifixion to his audience. But we don’t live in a time where this is a commonplace event. After being forced to carry the horizontal cross-beam through the streets, Jesus collapses, requiring a random stranger from the crowd named Simon to carry it the rest of the way.
At the top of the hill, Jesus is thrown down on his back, exacerbating his already open wounds. They grab his hands, place iron stakes over his wrist joint, and drive these giant nails into them. He is lifted up and affixed to the vertical beam, now forming the familiar “T” of the cross, where his feet are now nailed as well.
The cause of death in a crucification was typically suffocation. With the entire weight of your body hanging by your wrists, you cannot properly exhale. Suffice it to say that for the next six hours, every single breath Jesus takes is literally excruciating. The cumulative physical suffering and pain Jesus endures throughout this execution is some of the worst imaginable in human existence. It’s important for us to understand the flesh and blood reality of what Jesus went through, because the first readers would have intimately familiar. And yet, there is a pattern of psychological and emotional suffering in this text that is perhaps even worse.
The Cross was the manifestation of Divine love without reserve or limit; but it was also the expression of man’s unutterable malignity. It helps us to see in His crucifixion and resurrection an example of how to endure and seemingly to die in the agony and conflict of daily life, so that we may live more fully and creatively. He accepted patiently and humbly the rebuffs of human life, as well as the torture of the cross.
He Helps us to accept the pains and conflicts that come to us each day as opportunity to grow as people and become more like him, it makes us realise that it is only by frequent deaths of ourselves, and our self entered desires that we can come to live more fully, only by dying with you that we can rise with you.
Calvary’s cross and the crucified Christ surely speak, ‘God does care, God does want to share, God does want to bear your sins and your sorrows.