The Father’s grief and infinite love

“When I see Jesus, the Son of God, on the cross, I see infinite love.”

BY MAJOR GRANT SANDERCOCK-BROWN

The Cross is a mysterious and profound place. I have puzzled over it often. It’s not that I don’t know anything about it, I do!

I know that it was a real death; that on a Friday afternoon one spring morning in ancient Palestine, the broken body of Jesus died.

I know that he was beaten and weak and suffering.

I know that as he died, he cried out a prayer of forgiveness to his killers, I have no doubt that his mother wept for her son, that his female followers also wept, and that Joseph of Arimathea was so moved by what he saw that he declared himself a Jesus follower that day in word and action.

I know that Jesus’ death that day shattered a hundred dreams, that his followers didn’t understand, that for them, Friday night was joyless and desolate.

I know that the sky went dark, and the earth shook as my Christ died.

Perhaps all of heaven was weeping; a legion of once-rejoicing angels now poised to save him, stilled in grief and awe as the Godhead took corruption and death into its very being.

I know that sometimes we say the Father turned his face away, but I don’t think that. After all, the Son was and is God, undivided in essence with the Father. No, I think God never took his eyes off his beloved Son.

Jesus didn’t just quote a Psalm; he cried out the name of a Psalm, a deliverance Psalm, a Psalm that begins with the agonising question, “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?”, but also declares that “from my mother’s womb you have been my God”; a psalm that says “God has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted, he has not hidden his face from him, but has listened to his cry for help”.

Yes, this deliverance would have to wait three days, but Jesus’ cry of desolation is also a cry of hope. And hope was needed at the cross.

How do you causally fight over a man’s clothes when he is dying right beside you? I don’t understand this indifference to brutality and suffering. How can passers-by mock a dying and beaten man? But even in their mocking, ironically, here is truth. “He saved others,” they said, “Let’s see if he can save himself”.

Little did they know that it was his refusal to save himself that would save others; that somehow through Jesus’ obedience, the sons and daughters of men could believe, and in believing, find life and salvation.

And you see, that is the bit I don’t understand. I don’t really understand how it affects me. I don’t understand how my Christ’s death saves me. But it does.

And so, with an ironic inscription above his head, with the truest confession on the lips of a foreign centurion, the Son absorbs sin and death, overwhelms it with love. And my heart cries out to God, for I know that here, here at the Cross, is love unimaginable.

No, I don’t understand why this sacrifice moves me to tears. I can’t explain the cross in any meaningful way except by pointing to Jesus and saying, “Here is love.”

When I see Jesus, the Son of God, on the cross, I see infinite love. I can’t tell you how it works, but I know it does. The mystery of the cross shows me love because God in Christ died there, for me.