Philippians 2:8: Why Jesus Had to Die on a Cross

INTRODUCTION

When we lived in Japan we saw many beautiful images of Buddhist gods and goddesses.

When we visited museums in Italy we saw handsome statues of Greek and Roman gods.

But the most common representation of our Lord Jesus is ugly. It is the image of a dying man hanging on a cross. Sometimes the artists falsify the crucifix by making it decorative. But in the ancient world a criminal hanging, dying on a cross was just the ugliest thing imaginable.

Ordinary people who lived in the Roman Empire, no matter what their crimes, were crucified. Slaves or rebels or bandits were crucified. Crucifixion was invented with the intention of subjecting the condemned man to unimaginable pain and shame. There has never been a method of execution that combined more gruesomely these two elements—agonizing pain and the ultimate humiliation.

I’m going to tell you some gruesome things now—not to shock you or to gross you out, but because it is important to know what crucifixion meant in the ancient world if we are to understand why it was necessary for Jesus to die on a cross and not in some other way.

Here are some of the things a man experienced when he was crucified.

After the trial and sentencing, the condemned man was tied to a post to expose his back, and he was flayed with a whip. The whip, or scourge, consisted of leather strips that were tipped with pieces of bone or metal. As the soldier lashed the victim, the leather strips would circle his body and the metal pieces would tear away his skin, exposing the muscles and bones of his back and chest. The blood would gush out and the victim would experience excruciating pain. (Our word “excruciating” is based on a Latin word that comes from the word crux, which means “cross.”)

After the scourging, the criminal was paraded through the streets, carrying the crossbeam of his cross. The post was already in the ground, and this crossbeam was attached to the post when they arrived at the place of execution.

The pictures of Christ on the Cross don’t accurately show us the utter shamefulness of that kind of death. For one thing, the pictures always show Jesus wearing a loincloth or some kind. But there was no loincloth. We read in the gospels, “They divided his clothes among them.” We know from ancient records that criminals hung on their crosses naked.

The dying man would have no control over his bodily functions.

Because he hung by his arms, every breath he took was an agony. He would have to hoist himself up to take a breath. His torn back would rub against the wood of the cross. Insects would crawl over him and feast on his wounds. Birds would peck at him.

Crucifixions were in public places, so that all could see. They were spectacles; they were entertainment. Everything about a crucifixion was intended to exhibit the dying man as the scum of the earth.

People were encouraged to mock and taunt the dying men. They threw things at them.

According to Mark’s gospel, Jesus hung on the cross from nine o’clock in the morning until three o’clock in the afternoon before he died. Sometimes the crucified person hung for days, ravaged by thirst and pain. Jesus’s suffering was so intense that his death occurred quicker than the death of the bandits who died on either side of him.

I used to wonder why the gospel writers told us so much about the shame of the cross and so little about the agonizing pain.

There are two reasons. The first reason is that the first readers of our gospels would have seen crucified people hanging on crosses. They would have known first-hand how painful such a death was. The other reason was that the shame of the cross was even more awful than the pain.

I. The first Christians were very much aware of the shame of the Cross of their Savior.

A. We read in Philippians 2:5-11:

“Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,

did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,

but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant,

being born in the likeness of men.

And being found in human form he humbled himself

and became obedient unto death—

even death on a cross!”

B. Paul wrote in another letter—the one to the Romans—“I am not ashamed of the gospel: it is the power of God for salvation…” (Romans 1:16). To unbelievers, the fact that the Savior of the Christians died on a cross should have been a shame. But Jesus’s shameful death was his greatest glory.

And again, in 1 Corinthians 1:22-25: “The Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called…the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

Again in Galatians 3:13-14: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us—for it is written ‘Cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree.”

C. Archeologists have dug up a bit of graffiti scratched in plaster on the wall of a room in Rome. It dates from about A.D. 200. The image shows a young man worshiping a man with the head of a donkey hanging on a cross. The inscription (in Greek) reads: “Alexamenos worships his God.” Evidently, the image was intended to mock a Christian named Alexamenos.

But in spite of the ridicule poured on them by their unbelieving neighbors, the Christian believers weren’t ashamed. They gloried in their Savior’s ignominious death.

Paul wrote at the end of his letter to the Galatian believers: “Far be it from me to glory, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6:14).

II. The words in the Bible that take us most deeply into the meaning of the cross is the prayer Jesus uttered at almost the end of his life. It is the only saying from the cross that is recorded in two gospels—Matthew and Mark.

A. Just before he died, Jesus cried out to God in desperation: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

This is the strangest saying in the Bible. The New Testament teaches us that Jesus Christ was not only fully human, but he was also fully divine. So in that saying, God is crying out to God, “Why have you forsaken me?”

No mere human could die to pay the penalty for another man’s crime. But Jesus was no mere human. He was also God incarnate. And the Bible teaches—though I can’t explain it—that the God-Man—Christ Jesus, as both God and Man—could absorb into his own person all the sin of the world.

At the beginning of John’s gospel, John the Baptist sees Jesus coming toward him. He points to Jesus and says to his disciples, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1.29).

Probably the saying in the Bible that takes us deepest into the meaning of the Cross of Christ is in 2 Corinthians 5: “For our sake God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (verse 21).

B. When God the Father sent his Son into the world to die for our sins, it was necessary that his death should be an infinite death—infinite in its painfulness and infinite in its shamefulness and infinite in its consequences. That is why Jesus must suffer and die on a cross.

A great theologian wrote: “Never before or since, in the whole range of being, has anyone felt as Christ did, all the sin of man with all the conscience of God” (George Adam Smith).

In some mysterious way that we can never fully explain but that we can feel to be true, Jesus, God’s Son took upon his own self at Golgotha all the sin that has plagued the world from the beginning to the end of time.

CONCLUSION

Jürgen Moltmann was a German soldier who fought in Hitler’s army. Moltmann had not been raised in a Christian home and church was not important to him.

He tells this story in his book, Jesus Christ for Today’s World (pp2-3).

“In 1945 I was imprisoned in a wretched prisoner-of-war camp in Belgium. The German Reich had collapsed. German civilization had been destroyed through Auschwitz. My home town Hamburg lay in ruins; and in my own self, things looked no different. I felt abandoned by God and human beings, and the hopes of my youth died. I couldn’t see any future ahead of me.

“In this situation an American chaplain put a Bible into my hands, and I began to read it. I began with the psalms of lament in the Old Testament.

“Then I was drawn to the story of the passion, and when I came to Jesus’ death cry—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I knew: this is the one who understands you and is beside you when everyone else abandons you.

“‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ That was my cry for God too. I began to understand the suffering, assailed, and God-forsaken Jesus, because I felt that he understood me. And I grasped that this Jesus is the divine Brother in our distress. He brings hope to the prisoners and the abandoned. He is the one who delivers us from the guilt that weighs us down and robs us of every kind of future.

“And I became possessed by a hope when in human terms there was little enough to hope for. I summoned up the courage to live, at a point when one would perhaps willingly have put an end to it all.

“This early companionship with Jesus, the brother in suffering and the liberator from guilt, has never left me since. The Christ for me is the crucified Jesus.”

The gospel isn’t just good advice or the knowledge that God loves us “just as we are.” The gospel is the good news that God, in Christ Jesus our Savior, has come beside us to become our sin-bearer and to bring us to God.

St. Peter expresses it this way: “Christ himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls” (1 Peter 2:24-25).

When we get hold of that, we are different people. As St. Paul writes, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. See, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5.17).

PRAYER

I remember Gethsemane.

I remember how Judas betrayed him.

I remember how Peter denied him.

I remember how they all forsook him and fled.

I remember the scourging.

I remember the crown of thorns.

I remember how they spat upon him.

I remember how they smote him on the head with a reed.

I remember his pierced hands and feet.

I remember his agony on the Cross.

I remember his thirst.

I remember how he cried,

“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsake me?”

Grant, O most gracious God, that we who now bow before thee

may be embraced in the great company of those to whom life and salvation

have come through the Cross of Christ.

Let the redeeming power that has flowed from his sufferings

through so many generations flow now into our souls.

Here let us find forgiveness of sin.

Here let us learn to share with Christ

the burden of the suffering of the world. Amen.

(John Baillie, Diary of Private Prayer, 16th Day, Evening, adapted)