Crucifying The Creator
By Hans Zeiger (03/24/05)
An old American hymn asks, “What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss / To bear the dreadful curse for my soul?” It is a love so high and so vast, so “deep and wide” as I sang in Sunday School many years ago, that no other concept in all of eternity could possibly be of greater significance. No quantity of words could document the extent of Love.
John ends his Gospel by noting that “there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.” I was recently asked if by that John meant something figurative. But I thought of the Cross and what He endured there, and I decided that my sins alone could fill books the world over. The burden that Christ bore is noteworthy: it is the human condition.
The pain of the human condition being enormous, the sum total is unbearable. Only Divine Grace could take on pain and triumph. Only a Love that is greater than sin could have conquered sin.
No one has ever suffered like Christ did. It was agony far beyond physical, for at Calvary the wrath of God was poured out. It was poured on Christ, for sure, and it was poured on the sins He carried. The violence of Divine Wrath was unspeakable, but not so gloriously unspeakable as its origin in Love. His hatred for sin, so agonizing and tormenting, was combined with love for sinners, so delightful and overwhelming.
His suffering is evidence, not that he despised the task, but that he cherished it. The sin – that He hated. To do His Father’s will – in that He delighted. It was “for the joy that was set before Him” that “He endured the Cross.”
Christ was more willing to go to the Cross to die for us than we are willing to go there to be died for. That is Love. That is to say that we rest in His Love, not He in ours. So far as our behavior is concerned, Good Friday is the negation of love. On Good Friday, we gave to our Savior nothing but hatred. You and I killed Jesus. No man came to His rescue; no man looked on Him with sympathy that day. He was “despised and rejected of men.”
But even in that our very greatest sin, even in putting to death the Son of God, even in crucifying the Creator, the blame is lifted. It is the awesome paradox: though we are responsible for the death of Jesus, we are forgiven for it in the very act in which He was killed. In the moment humanity sinned its worst, humanity was given its best hope.
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