163 Sermon Illustrations on Cross

A central statement in traditional Christian creeds is that Jesus was crucified “under Pontius Pilate.” But the majority of Christians have only the vaguest sense what the phrase represents, and most non-Christians probably can’t imagine why it’s such an integral part of Christian faith. “Crucified under Pontius Pilate” provides the Jesus story with its most obvious link to larger human history. Pilate was a historical figure, the Roman procurator of Judea; he was referred to in other sources of the time and even mentioned in an inscription found at the site of ancient Caesarea in Israel. Linking Jesus’ death with Pilate represents the insistence that Jesus was a real person, not merely a figure of myth or legend. More than this, the phrase also communicates concisely some pretty important specifics of that historical event.

For one thing, the statement asserts that Jesus didn’t simply die; he was killed. This was a young man’s death in pain and public humiliation, not a peaceful end to a long life. Also, this wasn’t a mob action. Jesus is said to have been executed, not lynched, and by the duly appointed governmental authority of Roman Judea. There was a hearing of some sort, and the official responsible for civil order and Roman peace and justice condemned Jesus. This means that Pilate found something so serious as to warrant the death penalty.

But this was also a particular kind of death penalty. The Romans had an assortment of means by which to carry out a judicial execution; some, such as beheading, were quicker and less painful than crucifixion. Death by crucifixion was reserved for particular crimes and particular classes. Those with proper Roman citizenship were supposed to be immune from crucifixion, although they might be executed by other means. Crucifixion was commonly regarded as not only frighteningly painful but also the most shameful of deaths. Essentially, it was reserved for those who were perceived as raising their hands against Roman rule or those who in some other way seemed to challenge the social order — for example, slaves who attacked their masters, and insurrectionists, such as the many Jews crucified by Roman Gen. Vespasian in the Jewish rebellion of 66-72.

So the most likely crime for which Jesus was crucified is reflected in the Gospels’ account of the charge attached to Jesus’ cross: “King of the Jews.” That is, either Jesus himself claimed to be the Jewish royal messiah, or his followers put out this claim. That would do to get yourself crucified by the Romans.

Indeed, one criterion that ought to be applied more rigorously in modern scholarly proposals about the “historical Jesus” is what we might call the condition of “crucifiability”: You ought to produce a picture of Jesus that accounts for him being crucified. Urging people to be kind to one another, or advocating a more flexible interpretation of Jewish law, or even condemning the Temple and its leadership — none of these crimes is likely to have led to crucifixion. For example, first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus tells of a man who prophesied against the Temple. Instead of condemning him, the governor decided that he was harmless, although somewhat deranged and annoying to the Temple priests. So, after being flogged, he was released.

The royal-messiah claim would also help explain why Jesus was executed but his followers were not. This wasn’t a cell of plotters. Jesus himself was the issue. Furthermore, Pilate took some serious flak for being a bit too violent in his response to Jews and Samaritans who simply demonstrated vigorously against his policies. Pilate probably decided that publicly executing Jesus would snuff out the messianic enthusiasm of his followers without racking up more Jewish bodies than necessary.

Of course, the Gospels also implicate Jewish religious authorities — specifically, the priestly leaders who managed the Jerusalem Temple under franchise from the Roman government. Many scholars, including E.P. Sanders in JESUS AND JUDAISM, conclude that the Temple leaders were likely involved in Jesus coming to the attention of Pilate. After all, the high priest and his retinue held their posts by demonstrating continuing loyalty to Rome. If they judged that Jesus represented some threat to Roman rule, they were obliged to denounce him. Also, it is not so difficult to grant a certain likelihood to the Gospels’ claim that the Temple authorities were at least partly motivated by a resentment of Jesus’ criticism of their administration of the Temple, as may be reflected in the account of Jesus overturning the tables of the money-changers who operated in the premises under license from the high priest. But Jewish leaders didn’t crucify Jesus. “Crucified under Pontius Pilate” points to where that responsibility lies, with the Roman administration.

It’s rather clear what St. Paul meant by saying that “the preaching of the cross is foolishness” to most people of his day. As Martin Hengel showed in CRUCIFIXION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD AND THE FOLLY OF THE MESSAGE OF THE CROSS, Roman-era writers deemed crucifixion the worst imaginable fate, a punishment of unspeakable shamefulness. Celsus, a Roman critic of Christianity, ridiculed Christians for treating as divine someone who had been crucified. A second-century anti-Christian graffito from Rome, well-known among historians who study the time period, depicts a crudely drawn crucified man with a donkey’s head; under it stands a human figure, and beneath this is a derisive scrawl: “Alexamenos worships his god.”

There was, in short, little to be gained in proclaiming a crucified saviour in that setting in which crucifixion was a grisly reality. Some early Christians tried to avoid reference to Jesus’ crucifixion, while others preferred one or another alternate scenario. In one version, in a Christian apocryphal text, the soldiers confuse a bystander with Jesus, crucifying him instead, while Jesus is pictured as laughing at their folly. This idea is likely also reflected later in the Muslim tradition that a person from the crowd was mistakenly crucified as Jesus escaped. Many devout Muslims believe that Jesus was a true prophet, so it is simply inconceivable that God would have allowed him to die such a shameful death. Clearly, at least some early Christians felt the same way.

In fact, Jesus’ crucifixion posed a whole clutch of potential problems for early Christians. It meant that at the origin and heart of their faith was a state execution and that their revered savior had been tried and found guilty by the representative of Roman imperial authority. This likely made a good many people wonder if the Christians weren’t some seriously subversive movement. It was, at least, not the sort of group that readily appealed to those who cared about their social standing.

Jesus’ crucifixion represented a collision between Jesus and Roman governmental authority, an obvious liability to early Christian efforts to promote their faith. Yet, remarkably, they somehow succeeded. Centuries of subsequent Christian tradition have made the image of the crucified Jesus so familiar that the offensiveness of the event that it portrays has been almost completely lost.

Today, on Good Friday, we remember, honor, and reflect on the God who entered the world of human suffering on our behalf.

“I thirst.”

Only John’s Gospel records these words. They were uttered by Jesus, we’re told, not as a guttural physical response, but with intention: “Knowing that all was now finished,” Jesus said, “I thirst” in order to fulfill the Scriptures (John 19:28). And yet, we ought not think these words are manufactured or insincere either.

Earlier in His ministry, Jesus had, on the last great day of the Feast of Tabernacles, “stood up and cried out, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:37). “The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13–14).

And now, on the cross, He who said these words was Himself thirsty. Why are we told this? Why is the fact that Jesus thirsted important?

The world changed on All Saints Day in 1755. In Lisbon, Portugal, a 10-minute earthquake, followed by a tsunami and fires, killed an estimated 60,000 people, many crushed by collapsing churches where they had gathered to celebrate that Christian holy day.

According to moral philosopher Susan Neiman, for many Western intellectuals this incident of natural evil proved that God could no longer be trusted. The French philosopher Voltaire offered scathing words in a poem:

“Are you then sure,” he wrote, “the power which would create

The universe and fix the laws of fate,

Could not have found for man a proper place,

But earthquakes must destroy the human race?”

And so in the modern era, trust moved from God to man. And it seemed to work: The next few centuries were marked by technological advances, scientific progress, and scholarly criticism of the Bible.

However, the peak of modernism was the 20th century, which revealed that trust in man was badly misplaced: the mechanized slaughter of millions in two world wars, Communism, Auschwitz, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. So where do we turn now if we can’t trust God or man?

The cross directly addresses this world of moral and natural evil: As the prophet Isaiah foretold, “He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed (Isaiah 53:5).

The cross proves that God is not aloof from human suffering as Voltaire had imagined, nor will human evil have the final say. Our God once thirsted, like we do. He bled, as we do, in this existence of fallen people and a fallen world. In Christ, God entered the world of human suffering, suffered Himself, defeated suffering and now has the scars to prove it.

Nearly two centuries after Voltaire, theologian Edward Shillito, offered a poem with a very different take on the suffering we experience. Here are two stanzas of that poem

“If we have never sought, we seek Thee now;

Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars;

We must have sight of thorn-pricks on Thy brow;

We must have Thee, O Jesus of the Scars. . .

“The other gods were strong, but Thou wast weak;

They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;

But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,

And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.”

Today on Good Friday, we remember, we worship and proclaim this God, Jesus of the scars. To Him be all glory and praise forever and ever. Amen.

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Copyright (c) 2022 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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[The original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #1927]

Can it really be just three months ago we gathered with loved ones to celebrate Christmas? What joy we felt as we celebrated the birth of the baby Jesus. Emmanuel. God with us.

But today, on Good Friday, we reflect on how that beautiful babe in the manger came to fulfill a mission. A terrible and glorious mission! God invaded planet Earth. He became a human child, to live as one of us, to call us to repent, to love God with our whole heart, minds, and souls, and our neighbors as ourselves.

And today we should tremble and shudder as we remember the horrible climax of His mission. Beaten, scourged, mocked, and stabbed, Jesus mounted the cross, receiving the just punishment for your sins. For my sins. For the sins of the world.

This is why He came and died.

Yes, Easter is coming. The light is at the end of the tunnel. But that’s days away. Today, stop. Think about why He came and died.

He came because He knew that mankind was lost. He knew that we would kill our own babies in the womb by the millions. And that many would call this horrible evil good.

This is why He came and died.

He knew that hatred would drive men and women to strap bombs to themselves to kill innocent people in the name of religion.

This is why He came and died.

He knew that man would deny that God was his creator. That man would seek to remake himself in his own image, tamper with the genetic code, and treat human life as mere test-tube material.

This is why He came and died.

And He knew that His own bride, the Church, would grow cold and distant, forgetful of the faith given once for all. Comfortable with the world and its ways. Seeking relevance instead of love, pleasure instead of holiness.

This is why He came and died.

And He knew that you and I, covered with sin, could never stand before God, our all-holy Father, without His supreme sacrifice.

So today, don’t look ahead to Easter. Instead, reflect on the Passion. Examine your life. And repent! Repent of your sins, repent of your coldness of heart. Ask God to grant you the desire to serve Him, your Lord and Master, with all your strength.

And then, please, ask God for a spirit of repentance and revival to sweep down upon the Church — and upon the nations of the world. It is our only hope in these terrible, dark times.

We speak so often on BreakPoint about Christianity being not just a relationship with Jesus, but an all-encompassing worldview — a way to see and understand all reality. But the Christian worldview is brought into focus only by the cross.

Indeed, if the joy of Christmas and the glory of Easter are the light by which we see all reality, then the cross, Good Friday, is the lens through which we see it.

Allow me to recommend a wonderful resource to help you meditate on the depth and wonder of Good Friday — and how it defines all of reality. It’s called Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus, written by my dear friend, the late Richard John Neuhaus. You can learn more about it at BreakPoint.org.

May God bless you on this terrible, wonderful day.

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Copyright (c) 2010 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

A few years ago, I volunteered to be a counselor at a youth camp. During the bus ride to camp, I had a conversation with one of the other counselors. She told me the story of how she came to faith in Christ. “I grew up going to Catholic school and church,” she said. “I knew who Jesus was. I had an awe and fear of God instilled in me. I believed that Jesus Christ died on the cross for the sins of the world.”

Then she stopped, her lip quivering, “But I never really understood that Jesus died for me.” She went on to tell me about how she attended a Christian concert where she heard the message of the Gospel. All of her Christian knowledge about Jesus became personal. Her heart was captured by the glorious truth that Christ died for her. Martin Luther made much of the phrase “for me,” and rightly so. That phrase is at the heart of the Reformation, for God’s personal love for us penetrates our hard hearts and brings lasting change.

Interestingly enough, the summer in which I listened to this woman’s testimony was the summer in which I was having an epiphany that went the opposite way. Having grown up in evangelical churches all my life, I had always taken for granted the truth that Christ died for me. That truth was emphasized again and again, and it had gripped my heart long ago. What was becoming more glorious to me was the truth that Christ died for us. I was beginning to see in Scripture how Christ’s death purchased His church as a Bride. Furthermore, this action for us was ultimately for God and His glory. My epiphany was grasping the truth that Christ’s death for me was bigger and better than I had ever dreamed: It was also for us and for God.

I’m afraid we often take the glorious for me of the Gospel and separate it from the for us and the for God. We shrink the Gospel down until it is a message about our individual standing before God that no longer contains the Gospel community at the heart of God’s plan. Instead, we need to see the for me wrapped up in the for us, which is wrapped up in the for God. It all goes back to God and His glory being made manifest through the church that He has bought with the blood of His Son.

Emphasize the for me to the exclusion of everything else, and you wind up with an individualistic message about personal salvation; the church becomes an optional side-effect of the Gospel message. Emphasize the for us and for God aspects of the message and you never bring the Good News down to the personal level; you don’t challenge someone to trust in Christ. But put them together and you have the biblical understanding of the Gospel -- both individual and corporate. Once you grasp all three aspects, your personal salvation story is given eternal significance because it is caught up in the great, unfolding drama dreamed up in the heart of our good and loving Creator.

“Don’t Cry for Jesus” was one of the most memorable sermons I have ever heard. It was given by Dr. Lewis Smedes (1921-2002) at a Fuller Seminary chapel service. I was there as a student during Holy Week in hopes of being better prepared to fully appreciate Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. My prayers were answered that day. I heard a message that has stuck with me ever since.

What was Professor Smedes getting at that struck me as being so profoundly right? He wanted us to see as clearly and precisely as possible that Jesus was no victim and that he didn’t want us to pity him or feel sorry for him. I thought at the time, “What? How can we not feel sorry for him, after all he went through for us?” As Smedes developed the message I saw what he meant and how true it was. Professor Smedes had us consider two things: first, the way the story of Jesus is told to us by the New Testament writers and second, a comparison of Jesus with the Greek tragic heroes like the demigod Achilles.

Let me first briefly recount for you the upshot of that comparison. The Greek gods suffered often because of their own immoral activities and those involving the other gods. But their greatest sufferings were tragic because they were due to circumstances beyond their own control. These gods were born with their various strengths and weaknesses. No one of them “had it all.” They were always born into situations not of their own making and often involving jealousies, revenge plots and grabs for power between various other gods.

These tragic heroes were always victims of their circumstances as the inevitable wheel of fate turned against them at some point. It was their vulnerabilities that would lead to their most tragic suffering and defeat, like Achilles’ lamentable heel. Were it not for the fact that despite all his armor, Achilles’ heel was exposed and that his goddess mother was prevented by his unwitting mortal father from completing the daily rituals that would have made Achilles immortal, Paris’ arrow would never have found its fatal target. In some versions of the myth, the god Apollo, for his own reasons, intervened and guided that arrow to pierce Achilles just at that one and only tiny unprotected point. How can you not feel sorry for Achilles? The unfairness of it all. Through no fault of his own, the greatest of all Greek warriors was brought down.

Though we don’t think of Jesus as a Greek tragic hero, I realized upon further reflection that his cross is often described in tragic terms. Jesus is often portrayed as a victim of circumstances that go all the way back to the fall of humanity. Jesus is sent to be our Savior because humanity has rebelled and needs to be reconciled and regenerated if we are to share in God’s eternal and triune fellowship and communion and for God’s original intention at creation to be realized.

In the New Testament we find Jesus, the Son of God, living at a time when the Jewish nation is occupied by the pagan Romans. Among his own people, the Pharisees and Sadducees are involved in their own disputes with each other. Yet they manage to form an alliance to plot Jesus’ arrest and execution. Closer to him, there is a traitor among his own disciples, Judas, who betrays him — with a kiss, no less. Jesus is betrayed first into the hands of the court of the high priests and then into the hands of Pilate, who is himself caught between the rival forces of the Emperor and the potentially riotous crowds. Finally, Jesus suffers the brutally cruel treatment of the Roman soldiers who strip, mock and whip him, then lead him to Golgotha, where he is put to death on the machinery of Roman execution, a cross.

Given these tragic circumstances surrounding Jesus’ sacrifice, why should we not consider Jesus a tragic victim? Not because he didn’t pay an unimaginably high price for us and our salvation. Not because he didn’t actually suffer and die. But simply because he was no victim of those circumstances and because he had no fatal flaw!

The cost of our salvation was foreseen and anticipated before the foundations of the earth were even laid. God was not taken by surprise at the Fall nor by our subsequent need for costly deliverance. But our God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, counted the cost (as it were) from all eternity and agreed they were ready and willing to gladly pay the price for our deliverance from evil and for our reconciliation. So the plan for creation was carried out knowing full well the price to be paid to put things right, for God’s righteousness to be done.

Jesus knew why he had come and what his saving work would cost. His mission was freely chosen. He was freely sent and freely given by the Father out of their joint abounding love for the world. Jesus repeatedly told his disciples what he would have to go through, even though they could not imagine his being so completely rejected by their religious leaders and political authorities that it would lead to his death. Jesus was anything but unaware or naive about the path he would have to take to make all things new.

Jesus tells us that, like a good shepherd, when danger comes to his sheep, he lays his life down — and also takes it up (John 10:17). Jesus freely, voluntarily, not only gives up his life but also receives it back. When Pilate reminds Jesus that he has the power of life and death over him, Jesus reminds Pilate that he has no power except what has been allowed him by God, his Father (John 19:10-11).

In the garden, when one of his disciples takes it upon himself to defend Jesus with a sword, Jesus reminds them that all of his Father’s angelic hosts are available to protect him at any moment if he were to call on them (Matthew 26:53). Jesus is no victim of fate, of circumstances, or of powers greater than himself. He is in charge. He goes forth to Jerusalem only when his hour has come — not sooner, not later.

Jesus’ suffering is not the result of any large or small flaw in him. Far from it. There is not even a fleeting shadow of personal weakness evident in his confident exercise of divine omnipotence as he fulfills his redemptive mission. Rather, it is by means of his strength and authority operating in full concert with his Father that he arrives at the right moment to exert saving power over sin, evil and death itself. His act of self-giving is a work of deliberate might based on the strength of his holy love. Jesus is no tragic hero, but the willing, omnipotent, Lord and Savior.

Perhaps most astonishing are Jesus’ words spoken on the way to Golgotha, even as he bore the heavy weight of the cross-beam of his own crucifixion. Seeing the women standing by, no doubt exceedingly distraught and anguished, welling up from the depths of his compassion, Jesus found the strength to tell them something they and we need to know: “Daughters of Jerusalem, don’t weep for me” (Luke 23:28).

Jesus does not want us to pity him as a hapless victim who suffers because it couldn’t be avoided, because it was inevitable, destined by forces he could not resist. He is not looking for our pity — he trod that road, the Via Dolorosa as it is called, on purpose, by divine design. He intentionally took that journey and nothing, not even torture at the violent hands of human wickedness, could stop him. We may weep for ourselves, if we must, that is, be sorrowful for our sins. But Jesus didn’t come looking to gather our tears. Rather, his costly love calls for giving him our thanks, our praise, our gratitude, our love, our absolute trust and loyalty — indeed our very lives in eternal worship.

Jesus not only freely but also gladly gave his life that we might have resurrected life in him. So the author of Hebrews sums it up: “For the joy set before him, he endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2). For joy? Yes, for joy. But how can that be? In short, because Jesus was no fool. The price he paid was worth it and he knew it. He has no regrets! He did not enjoy the suffering. Not at all. It was excruciating. But he rejoiced in what he with the Father and Spirit would accomplish by means of his extravagant self-sacrifice. Jesus was no victim but the victor. The surety of his victory gave him a great joy that saw him through his agonies. Crucifixion would lead by the grace and power of God to resurrection and a new heaven and earth.

Jesus was no reluctant Savior, but the conquering Servant-King of all creation. That’s the good news that Professor Smedes preached, and from that moment on, I saw that I could no longer think, preach or teach as if Jesus was a victim that we should feel sorry for.

All those illustrations of the cross that I had heard in both liberal and conservative Christian contexts that made it seem that Jesus was a victim, I had to forswear. These made Jesus out to be anything and everything — from a mother rabbit frozen in a blizzard to save her little bunny child, to an innocent toddler run over by a train or ground up in the gears of a drawbridge — all this occurring while his helpless father looks on in horror from a distance. Somehow caught off-guard and facing a horrible dilemma, this father-victim had to choose between his son and humanity. And so he pulls the lever that seals their respective fates. In these illustrations both the Son and the Father are depicted as victims of circumstances and of their own limitations that call for our pity. As tragic characters they match, if not exceed, the sorry state memorialized in the myth of Achilles.

Perhaps more theological than these misguided analogies are certain interpretations of the cross that pit the Father against the Son. The Father is sometimes said to be taking his wrath out on the Son — punishing him to satisfy his righteousness. In this case, the tragedy occurs between the Father and the Son (some, who have rejected the idea of the cross altogether, have gone so far as to claim that if so, the Father is the victimizer and the Son the victim!). Or the Son is depicted as having to overcome the resistance of the Father to being merciful and forgiving by appealing to his own suffering to gain the Father’s pity and so get him to relent of his wrath. From these perspectives, the wills, attitudes and aims of the Father and the Son are at odds and can be resolved only by the Son’s suffering. How tragic! “Only that it wasn’t so!” we reply out of pity.

Sometimes we imagine a modern adversarial court scene where the Father is represented as the judge who wants to condemn the guilty party, and Jesus is the defense lawyer hoping to help the defendant avoid the penalty required by the law. Fortunately, Jesus figures out a way to keep us from the punishment we deserve. It’s a plan that the Father can’t argue with since it doesn’t seem to involve any violation of the law. Finding no grounds for objection, the Father-Judge has to concede: Jesus wins the court case for us.

But the biblical revelation shows us the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are of one mind, one purpose, united in being, acting for the one and same end: our salvation. The Father sends the Son in the power of the Spirit. The Son freely comes and serves out of love for the Father and with joy in the Spirit. The Holy Spirit empowers the Son to overcome temptation and undo evil itself in order to set free the captives, open the eyes of the blind, set at liberty those who are oppressed and bring in the Lord’s promised Jubilee (Luke 4:18-19).

At the cross, no exception is made. Our sin is judged and condemned in Jesus. The wrath of God aims to burn away evil and the sin in us that has corrupted our very natures. Dying in him, we are separated and rescued from the evil in us for eternal life. We are given a share in Christ’s restored and sanctified humanity. God’s wrath serves his mercy. His righteousness serves his love. There is no tension between the attributes of God nor between the Father and the Son. There is no tragic relationship at the heart of the gospel. At the cross the Son “through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished [without flaw] to God” (Hebrews 9:14). Our salvation is the united work of the whole Triune God, our Savior — Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

At the foot of the cross, Christ doesn’t call us to join him in a great pity-party: the Father feeling sorry for the Son, the Son feeling sorry for the Father, Jesus feeling sorry for us and we feeling oh so sorry for him. For Jesus was no tragic victim. Rather, we gather at the foot of the cross to worship in unspeakable awe, with adoration, thanksgiving, praise and prayer for the costly victory of Christ. By his joyful and freely given life, he righteously restored us to fellowship and eternal communion with God our Triune Redeemer.

As if there hasn't been enough ink spilled on the subject, forgive my humble effort at engaging the cultural phenomenon known as, “The Passion of The Christ.” Mel Gibson's controversial film is now in theaters after months of media attention and Christian curiosity that have made the movie one of the most anticipated works to come to the big screen in years.

More precisely, I wish to address a narrower question -- one that has been prompted by Gibson's movie -- “Who killed Jesus?” The question has been asked repeatedly in recent weeks, even garnering the cover story in the Feb. 16 issue of Newsweek. The question is prompted by concerns from some Jews that The Passion may foment anti-Semitism because of Gibson's attempt to retell the Gospel accounts, which report the historic fact that first-century Jewish leaders were at the center of Jesus' crucifixion.

To be sure, Jews have suffered persecution from Christians -- more accurately, those who claimed to be Christian -- who assert that the Jewish race bears a particular burden for Jesus' death.

In his new book, “The Passion of Jesus Christ: Fifty Reasons Why He Came to Die” (Crossway), John Piper eloquently answers this anti-Semitism: “It is not Christian to humiliate or scorn or despise or persecute with prideful putdowns, or pogroms, or crusades, or concentration camps. These were and are, very simply and horribly, disobedience to Jesus Christ. Unlike many of His followers, He prayed from the cross, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do' (Luke 23:34).”

Piper, pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, goes on to write, “The denial that Christ was crucified is like the denial of the Holocaust. For some it's simply too horrific to affirm. For others it's an elaborate conspiracy to coerce religious sympathy. But the deniers live in a historical dream world. Jesus Christ suffered unspeakably and died. So did Jews.”

The historical fact is that the terrible execution of Jesus was a conspiracy of human agents - both Jewish and gentile - who sought our Savior's death for various illicit reasons. Nevertheless, there's no getting away from the reality that the Jews cried out, “Crucify Him!” in response to Pontius Pilate's question, “Then what shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?” (Matthew 27:22).

Still, the theological reality is that I am as responsible for Jesus' crucifixion as is Caiaphas, the high priest, or any other Jew who declared, “His blood shall be on us and on our children” (Matthew 27:25), and I am as responsible as Pilate and his brutal Roman executioners.

Every Christian knows -- and it is a basic element necessary for genuine conversion -- that it is my sins that put Jesus on the cross. This foundational truth of Christian doctrine has been a central subject of hymnists throughout Christian history. Charles Wesley's “And Can it Be?” (1738) -- my favorite hymn -- declares in bewilderment:

“And can it be that I should gain

An interest in the Savior's blood?

Died He for me, who caused His pain?

For me, who Him to death pursued?

Amazing love! How can it be,

That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?”

In a poignantly powerful symbol of the truth of all of humanity's culpability, Gibson plays a cameo role in the film he has bankrolled, produced and directed. His hand holds the nail that was driven into Jesus on the cross. In this way, Gibson has helped us all understand our role in the death of God's only Son.

Yes, I put Jesus on the cross. But the staggering theological truth is that in addition to His willingness to go to that dreaded tree (Matthew 26:36-46), Jesus' crucifixion was part of God's decree before the dawn of creation that the Son should make this sacrifice (1 Peter 1:18-21; Revelation 13:8). Therefore, it would not be inaccurate to say, God, the Father, killed God, the Son.

The Apostle Peter declared at Pentecost that Jesus “was delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23) and in his second sermon Peter further underscores the divine role: “But the things which God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets, that His Christ would suffer, He has thus fulfilled” (Acts 3:18). Later, Christians in Jerusalem in their prayer after Peter's release from prison acknowledge their understanding of the Father's role in Jesus' death by noting that the human agents of His crucifixion did “whatever Your hand and Your purpose predestined to occur” (Acts 4:28). Further, in the prophet Isaiah's prediction of the Suffering Servant, he writes under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit: “But the Lord was pleased to crush Him, putting Him to grief” (53:10).

Jesus' death did not take God by surprise -- it was part of His plan to save sinners.

Not having yet had the opportunity to see The Passion of The Christ, I'm not able to comment on its biblical accuracy. Virtually every evangelical leader who has seen the movie commends Gibson for following the Gospel accounts faithfully, while allowing little of his devotion to Catholic dogma to find its way into the film.

Still, evangelicals should be careful not to make more of the movie than can be reasonably expected from a dramatic depiction of Christ's death, nor should we be open to any compromise of the core Gospel message. For example, Gibson told Christianity Today, “Jesus could have pricked his finger, but he didn't; he went all the way.” Is this accurate -- could Jesus have accomplished His work as Savior by simply expending a drop of blood?

The biblical witness is clear -- Jesus' death was necessary to conquer the grave for sinners. Because Jesus was resurrected from the dead (which, reportedly, is only briefly addressed in The Passion), our resurrection is possible. “But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep. For since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:20-22).

With a deep sense of trepidation and gratitude, I look forward to seeing Mel Gibson's portrayal of my Savior's death, knowing that in His death and resurrection my salvation was accomplished because it was the Father's good pleasure. “Amazing love,” indeed!