Should We Weep? by Rene Milner

  Posted on January 11, 2018  by   No comments

Should we weep to see Jesus on the Cross?

Do we feel sorry for Jesus?

Wait for a minute, don’t crucify me yet.

What is it about the Cross that is so horrid? Well there is the pain and the suffering. A man taken to the absolute limits of physical and emotional suffering. Was that not the purpose of the Romans? To do everything they could to push the limits of human form in life while slowly removing that life. Yes, we see Jesus suffer unimaginable pain and we cannot imagine how we can endure it and we think, “Thank you Lord for enduring what I cannot”. Perhaps not many have gone through that kind of suffering. Perhaps there is even more to it. The separation from the eternal Father and the eternal relationship of the Trinity. And yet still I think we are merely looking at the Cross from a selfish Human perspective. We are still at the bottom of the Cross. We look up and say with the unbelievers, “bring yourself down”. But stop for a minute and consider what we ask. Yes it would be to leave us without the means to be reconciled to God. But we really don’t deserve that anyway. We all know that He could have come down at any moment. That would change things. In our heart we think that He had to go through it to pay for our sins and perhaps we are real enough to weep not because it is so horrendous but because we are the reason it ever happened. I would encourage you that there is another reason. Yes Jesus chose to endure the pain and the Shame of the Cross so that our sins would be paid for and we could be brought near to God, but there is so much more.

The method of the Cross was a sample of the worst man could do. I am sure we could all come up with something as evil if we tried. If Jesus outlived a death on the cross and magically lived through it and they could not kill Him it would only prove that He is a better stronger man. A superman of sorts that was just so much more than I could ever be. Dying proves that He is very much in human form physically. But living was not His goal. Showing the glory of God was. Throughout His life, He proved that He was master of all Human circumstances. Indeed all the books of the world could not hold the proofs of that. But the enemy that He was conquering through the Cross was not man and man’s evil nature. Man was only a tool in the hands of an evil power. If there is any power that is stronger than God then God is not God. We may acknowledge God but we fear some things worse I think. We look at the inhumanity of the Cross and the pain and suffering and the death and we cry out “NO!!” Why because we fear the pain and the suffering and the death. How could He prove to us that there is no need to fear these things if we are rightly thinking? All our being screams out that these are terrible and fearful. Calmly, quietly He goes through them and three days later He is God in front of our eyes. He is the Master over death. Not the human tools that cause death (Yes He is the master over these things as well) But the actual process of it all. In the Garden, He shows how He controls the start of it and at the Cross He shows how He can even control the end of it. It is a power that is minuscule in His sight. So why did the Cross have to be so horrific? Could He not have just slipped away into death and rose again a couple days later? Well, for one He predicted it the way He did it so we would know it was all Him, but I think perhaps it is our own unbelief that makes the Cross so horrid. He took the worst thing that we could conceive of and pushed us to our own limits of belief so that we would be forced to acknowledge that He is God. What I mean here is that we could have easily just believed when He said don’t eat of that fruit. Or we could have believed any of the hundreds of times He said “Do this”, or “Don’t do that”, but we did not. It is our sin that took Him to the Cross but the depth of our unbelief is what made it as cruel as it was. As we weep then, don’t weep because of the pain and the suffering, it is nothing to Him as God. But weep instead that the depth of our unbelief drove Him to give up His Father and His eternity to step into the confines of flesh and endure the cross so that He could take us to the end of our unbelief where we are forced to choose to believe or not. Perhaps during the Christmas season, we should weep more as we look on the babe in the manager. Our unbelief took Him there, our sins nailed Him to the Cross, but His Glory held Him there.