Remembering The Cross

What comes to mind when you think about the death of Jesus on the cross?

Do you think about His suffering? His abandonment by His Father?

Do you think about the repeated beatings? Do you think about the whipping that He endured?

Do you recoil from the nails that pierced His hands and His feet?

Do you shutter at His pain?

Does the gross injustice of it all make you weep? Do you ache at the love that it took for the perfect, sinless, Son of God to choose to die by the hands of men that He had created?

Have you ever tried to wrap your mind around the amazing decision that He made to leave His Father and His home in heaven and come down to earth for the expressed purpose of dying on the cross for something that He had not done?

Do you shrink back in horror at the very thought that it was His Father Who chose to crush Him…for you? for me?

For those who love Him, the remembrance of His death is always somewhere deep inside us…you can’t forget–not if you know Him–not if you love Him–you simply can’t forget. You can’t allow yourself to, not even for one second, for this is the reason that we live.

You remember the ringing of the hammers, the pounding of the nails, sinless flesh pierced by sinful man, the agony of the wounds too numerous to count…

you think often of Jesus’ humiliation at being spat upon, of being blind folded, of having His beard plucked out by cruel hands until blood streaked His holy face…

You remember that He was struck repeatedly while being told to “prophesy, and tell us who it is who is hitting You?”

You remember His shame at being stripped of His clothing…

And of enduring a mock trial designed to convict Him of something that He had not done.

You remember His shame as He was mockingly dressed as a King and His tormentors pretended to worship Him…

The shame of being led through the streets carrying His crossbeam… the shame, endless shame of being paraded about like a common criminal, instead of being heralded with love as the Son of God.

You never really forget, do you, that God took on the form of man and they beat Him and they mocked Him and they placed a crown of thorns on His brow and forced it down, beat it down, until rivulets of blood ran down His holy face?

No, no, you don’t ever forget the back-lacerating scourge or the sound of the whip sailing through the air…the crack of it contacting with human, and Holy, flesh and ripping it to shreds…

You remember the blood, don’t you?

So much blood…too much blood…

His blood mixed with His sweat in the garden…blood running down His face from His pierced brow…blood dripping, pouring, from wounds to His mouth, His nose…blood from the beatings…blood from His whipping…the blood from the nails…

You spend time contemplating the heavy chills of shock and His feverish agony from simply enduring too much pain, too much trauma, to His body, don’t you?

Do you remember the darkening bruises…so very, very many of them?

Think on Him…does the rememberance of His cracked, dehydrated lips and tongue that craved water cause you to shutter?

Do you remember His agonizing walk through the streets in bare feet…of His body bent under the weight of a cross much too heavy for Someone Who had endured a night and a morning of intense suffering and humiliation at the hands of so many different men who simply didn’t care Who He was or what they were doing to Him?

Do you remember the sounds of the laughter…endless, mocking laughter…the Jews…the High Priests…Herod…

The laughter of the Roman soldiers who thought it was funny that this Man, this Jew, this Carpenter, this stripped, beaten and dying Man, believed Himself to be the King of the Universe?

Do you remember the love that Jesus showed from the cross? Love to His executioners as He pleaded with His Father to forgive them because they were blind, so very, very, blind and they didn’t know what it was that they were doing?

Do you remember the love that He showed to His mother as He gave her into the hands of His youngest and bravest disciple, John? John…the disciple whom Jesus loved…and the only one of His disciples who stayed with Him to the very end?

Have you contemplated the love that Jesus showed to the thief on the cross, a man who at the end of a twisted and sinful life looked beyond externals and saw the eternal hanging on the cross next to him and responded to it? A man who started off mocking Jesus as had everyone else but who, in observing how Jesus accepted His pain, didn’t fight against His execution, didn’t rail against the shame and forgave His enemies, put two and two together and realized that the placard above His head was true, that this really WAS the King of the Jews…that the accusations that He believed Himself to be the Son of God could only be true…because He was.

Even though Jesus was nailed to the cross just as he himself was, the thief saw something in Him and he knew that it wasn’t over, not yet…something was coming, something was going to happen to prove Him right. So against all odds and against all logical understanding of events, he placed faith in a Man Who had seemingly been defeated and was dying and Jesus forgave him and accepted him as the first fruits of His Kingdom?

Do you remember the love that Jesus showed on the cross to you…and to me?

Do you ever remember that He didn’t have to die…that He could have called thousands upon thousands of angels to come take Him down and defend Him and they would have been there instantly fighting for their King?

Then everyone at the execution, including the soldiers, the High Priests, the other thief, and everyone in Jerusalem at the time, including all of the Jews and weak-willed Pilate, would have known…instantly known…that He was Who He said that He was…and in fear and awe they would have fallen down before Him to worship Him and proclaim Him as the Holy One…the Christ of God…the blessed Messiah…the Son of God…the King of the Jews…as Lord?

But, they couldn’t have worshipped Him, they wouldn’t have been allowed to…not if Jesus had cared for Himself and His own needs instead of for the needs of the ones who were torturing Him, murdering Him.

If Jesus had called those angels, they would have come…and they would have fought and defended Him…and the people there….and everyone before and since…would have been lost forever because our only hope of salvation would have been shattered.

So, Jesus stayed on that cross…bound to it not by nails but by love…as His Father pored His holy wrath at our sin out on His only very holy sinless Son…

In enduring everything that He endured, everything that we deserved to endure and that He did not, He proved His love to and for us.

What greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for his friends?

That’s what Jesus did on the cross.

We remember that always…don’t we?

We never, ever forget…not for a day, not for a moment.

Or, is it, that you and I, instead of seldom forgetting…is it that we seldom remember?