I woke up with a very heavy heart today. Pain and sorrow is everywhere. Praying for the Kenyan students murdered. Thinking of my grandmother who came to America through Ellis Island 85 years ago and is now on her deathbed. The pain and brokenness in my own life is overwhelming at times. At times it feels like this wont ever get better. All this pain and today is the day we (christians) look back on the crucifixion of Jesus. Good Friday. Remembering the day the Son of God was brutally murdered. That's good! Right?
It’s natural for me to disregard the cross as just another piece of a large story. In a way, I think we focus on crucifixion too much in the church. The story of the cross isn’t unique because of ‘crucifixion’. Hundreds, if not thousands of people were crucified throughout history. The story of the cross is unique for other reasons.
People often ask, “Why doesn’t God do something about the suffering and pain in the world?” The answer is that God already has. He did everything that needed to be done with Jesus’ death.
The cross is God’s way of relating to us. God came down to earth to experience suffering and pain like we do. To say “hey, I feel ya’” to everyone who has felt the curse of suffering or pain. The prophecies of Jesus spoke of how he would be a man that knew suffering and was familiar with sorrow. Familiar with physical pain through the brutal death he endured. Familiar with a broken heart through having the very people he healed and preached to turn on him and shout “crucify him!”
Possibly the most personal and relatable aspect of Jesus death is his battle with fear and anxiety. The eyewitness accounts of Jesus in the garden before he’s arrested paint a picture of a man almost in physical shock over what’s about to happen. Jesus asks God multiple times “if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me.” He tells his disciples “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” That is incredible. The Son of God came to earth and was overwhelmed to the point of death for us. How relatable is that? God knows pain, he knows loss, and he knows stress, fear and anxiety.
Still all these sorrows pale in comparison to the abandonment Jesus felt during his suffering and death. The scriptures point out that Christ was with God since before the formation of the world. Christ has a closer relationship with God than any of us can imagine. John 1:18 states that Jesus was so close with God that Jesus is “in the bosom of the Father”. That is an intimacy that we will never know and that is the relationship between Jesus and the Father.
When Jesus suffered and died, he took on all the shame, wrath, guilt and sorrow that should have been directed at us. He literally took on the weight of the world. God turned his face away and for a brief moment, God was not with him. That is suffering. That is pain. Spending all of history in the bosom of the Father and then being completely abandoned. This is why Jesus cries out a quote from Psalm 22 on the cross when he says “my God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” The hopelessness and emptiness of living in a world without God, the world we all deserved to live in, was put on Jesus and he endured it for all of us. That is suffering.
So when people ask “why doesn’t God do something about evil or suffering in the world?” think of this. Think of what Jesus felt when He was on the cross, calling out to God and hearing nothing. Think of the heartache and physical pain He suffered. Think of the shame and guilt and the weight of sin He suffered so that we wouldn’t have to. God has done the only thing that could have been done about suffering in the world. He suffered with us and conquered death so that it doesn’t have the final say. Our suffering in the present world isn’t the end. Death doesn’t have the final say.
“Everything sad is going to come untrue.”
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