Holy Week Thoughts, Part 6: The Reality of Crucifixion
In our modern time, it’s easy to find ourselves removed from the thought of crucifixion. It’s an abstract thing, even as real as we believe Jesus’ death on the cross was.
It’s tough for us to imagine what the crucifixion was really like: the sights and sounds of that day, as well as what the people who witnessed it experienced.
It’s hard to fathom because we don’t see public executions carried out in our world today, especially to the extent that the Romans used crucifixion.
I was reminded this week how we can distance ourselves from the cross and how we can make it so abstract. Throughout the last half of Holy Week, I’ve been listening to the audiobook of N. T. Wright’s The Day the Revolution Began, and he brings a fascinating refresher into the reality of the crucifixion.
Wright reminds readers (or in my case, listeners) that Jesus grew up probably seeing crucifixions on a regular basis. So did His followers.
When Jesus told them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24, ESV), it wasn’t just a clever turn of phrase. Jesus’ followers knew that to take up one’s cross meant to suffer and die.
Crucifixion was gruesome. If you’ve watched the Eastridge Good Friday video devotion, you’ll catch a glimpse of how horrific it was. It was meant to be painful and torturous, not just to punish the guilty, but also to discourage others from committing similar crimes.
The Romans also used crucifixion to humiliate offenders. Soldiers mocked the condemned before and during their execution, and affixing the criminal high on a cross was meant as a dig at their attempt to raise their own standard in society by violating the law.
These are the conditions to which Jesus subjected Himself for our sake. Jesus was innocent: He had never sinned and hadn’t committed any crimes. God could’ve redeemed His people any other way, but He chose to gave His Son.
It’s important that we understand the crucifixion and what it means, not as knowledge that can puff us up or even go in one ear and out the other. Making the cross real helps us appreciate what Jesus did as well as to help us share the good news of redemption to the world.
As N. T. Wright asserts:
“The point of trying to understand the cross better is not so that we can congratulate ourselves for having solved an intellectual crossword puzzle, but so that God’s power and wisdom may work in us, through us, and out into the world that still regards Jesus’s crucifixion as weakness and folly.”
I encourage you to take time today to reflect on the cross. Understand it. Make it less remote. And thank God for it.
Almighty God, thank You for the cross. It sounds so strange to thank You for the death of Your Son, but His experience on the cross means life for us. May we never take the cross - or the empty tomb - for granted. May we live in the knowledge that Jesus paid the price for us.
Photo by eberhard 🖐 grossgasteiger on Unsplash