John 19:18

There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them.

Here at last is the very scene of scenes; it’s the moment that Isaiah wrote of…”But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed.” 

John doesn’t tell us much about the crucifixion. The other gospels fill in some of the details.  He has said that Jesus carried His cross but this likely meant that he carried the cross-beam as it was Roman custom to already have the vertical piece in the ground, awaiting the condemned.  Then, when our Lord reached the place at last, He was likely laid down and nailed to the very piece he’d previously tried to carry (as we also know from Luke’s gospel that having been beaten so severely, Jesus was too weak and another man had to be enlisted).  Sometimes they drove the nails through the hands, other times through the wrists.  We don’t know for certain which it was, but either way, then they hoisted him up and nailed his feet too.  A small platform would have been just below his feet so that he could push himself up and gain a breath here and there.  This wasn’t a measure of mercy, though.  It was to prolong the agony.  The Romans were masters of their craft.  Death by crucifixion was long – sometimes taking days – and it was ghastly.  

Such was the fate of Jesus.  Such was the place He consented to go in our stead, and for us.  And, be sure, all throughout the ordeal, it was never forgotten by Him that this whole thing was for us and our salvation.  Whenever we have a bum day or feel the weight of a crushing blow from life, before we lapse into self-pity, we should pause and consider our Lord hanging on the cross for our sake and in our place.  This is the length that God has gone to in order to redeem the elect.  Therefore, nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God.  This is the truest and grandest expression of love ever and nothing Shakespeare or Hugo could ever write could compare.  No words of a poet could soar so high as Scripture does in the recording of this fact: Jesus Christ, the sinless lamb of God, crucified for us and our transgressions.  And no novelist could ever hope to craft a drama like this one either; all of us writers are toiling in the fertile fields marked out already by our God.  He could have thought of some other way to declare us not guilty, perhaps.  But He did it this way, with Jesus consenting to this treatment, being hung on a tree, gasping for air, left to open scorn between two criminals.  This is the length of the journey that began when Adam’s righteousness collapsed in the garden and this is how God crushed the head of the serpent. 

And He’s numbered with the transgressors.  We know that one of the condemned mocked Jesus as they all hung dying on that Friday.  And yet, even there, when the one asks for mercy, despite our Lord’s horrific sufferings, He tells him that he’ll be that day in paradise. Again we see it – the utter simplicity of the gospel.  We shall either believe on the Lord Jesus or trust ignorantly in our own righteousness.  And all that’s required for entrance into heaven is recognition of this fact…naming the name of Christ and putting one’s hope of eternity in Him and Him alone.  How embarrassing it must have been for a dying man to ask another dying man for mercy and name Him as God, but that man didn’t care what anyone thought of him.  He had the strange privilege of knowing that his death was near and, therefore, all of life’s great truths were crystallized.  Repent or perish.  At the cross we see the fullness of great theology in the simplest, barest of terms.  

Many religions and philosophies, like Buddhism and Stoicism, try and make sense of suffering.  Perhaps they say it is all an illusion or the result of certain habits that we can train away from ourselves.  The Bible will have no such nonsense and it’s at the cross that we see the primary separation of Christian truth from the pretenders.  Jesus embraces suffering and death so that His followers may never ultimately die and suffer.  Suffering is completely real and there is nothing we can do of ourselves to escape that reality.  There’s no seven fold path, no set of virtues, no anything.  But don’t think that this is hopeless; don’t be a fatalist.  This isn’t the end of the story.  It’s Friday…on Sunday there’s the empty tomb, my friends.  What looks hopeless – death and suffering – is defeated right here, right now.  The Jews were looking for a conquering king – a political one; God sent them the One they, and we, needed – a King that conquered death and sin.  This is how He did it.