The Crucifixion

You may have grown up with a cross on a wall or around a neck, so familiar it stopped being strange. It is worth remembering how strange it actually was. A man was arrested at night, tried in a hurry, beaten, and nailed to a wooden beam to die slowly in public, and his followers went on to say this was the most important thing that had ever happened. Understanding why requires looking honestly at what happened, and then at what the New Testament says it meant.

## What Scripture actually says

After the last supper, Jesus goes to a garden called Gethsemane and prays in agony, asking that "this cup" be taken from him, while still submitting, "not my will but yours." He is arrested there, betrayed by one of his own disciples, and taken first before the Jewish high council, the Sanhedrin, where the charge that sticks is blasphemy — he has claimed identity with God. From there he is taken to Pilate, the Roman governor, since only Rome could carry out an execution. Pilate finds no legal fault in him but hands him over anyway, under pressure from the crowd and the chief priests, after offering to release a prisoner named Barabbas instead.

Jesus is then mocked, dressed in a purple robe, crowned with thorns, flogged — a punishment brutal enough that some prisoners died from it alone — and led out to be crucified between two convicted criminals. He is offered wine mixed with myrrh, a mild painkiller, and he refuses it, apparently choosing to face what comes with full awareness. The charge fixed above his head, intended as mockery, reads "King of the Jews."

The Gospels preserve seven sayings from the cross. He asks God to forgive his executioners, "for they do not know what they are doing." He promises the criminal dying next to him, who asks to be remembered, "today you will be with me in paradise." He entrusts his mother to the care of the disciple John. He cries out in the words of Psalm 22, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And near the end, he says, "It is finished" — a phrase that in the original language carries the sense of a debt paid in full, not simply the end of an ordeal.

Two other details matter. The temple curtain, which separated the innermost sanctuary from everyone else, is described as torn in two from top to bottom at the moment of his death — a detail every Gospel writer wants you to notice, suggesting the barrier between God and people has been dealt with. And a Roman centurion overseeing the execution, the least likely witness in the entire scene, says, "Truly this man was the Son of God."

## Why the New Testament insists this was necessary

It would be possible to read all of this as a tragedy — an innocent man crushed by corrupt systems, worth grieving but nothing more. The New Testament refuses that reading everywhere. Jesus himself, before his arrest, tells his disciples repeatedly that he "must" go to Jerusalem and suffer these things. Paul later writes that Christ died "for our sins according to the Scriptures," treating the cross not as an interruption of God's plan but as its centre.

The writers reach for several images to explain what the cross accomplished, and it is worth holding them together rather than picking a favourite. Sacrifice: the Passover lamb, whose blood once marked Israelite homes so death would pass over them, and the temple sacrificial system, are described as pointing forward to something Jesus' death fulfils and ends. Substitution: Isaiah, writing centuries earlier, describes a servant "pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities," bearing what others deserved. Redemption: the language of a price paid to free someone from slavery or debt. Victory: Paul writes that on the cross God "disarmed the powers and authorities," a claim about spiritual forces defeated, not merely sins forgiven. Reconciliation: enemies made friends, a relationship repaired rather than a legal ledger balanced. And example: Peter writes that Christ "suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps" — the cross as a pattern of self-giving love, not only something done for you but something shown to you.

## A death that makes sense of your own suffering

Consider someone who has spent years believing that pain is simply proof that no one is paying attention, or worse, that they deserve it. The cross does not erase suffering or explain away every hard thing that happens. But it says something specific: God did not remain distant from human suffering. He entered the worst of it — betrayal, false accusation, public humiliation, physical agony, and the disorienting sense of abandonment captured in "why have you forsaken me." Whatever you carry, you are not carrying something God has never known from the inside.

This does not mean every instance of pain is redemptive or purposeful in the way the cross was. The cross is unique — a once-for-all event, not a template that says all suffering accomplishes something if you endure it well. But it does mean that when you cry out in confusion or apparent abandonment, you are praying words Jesus himself prayed, quoting the same psalm. That is not nothing. It means lament has a place at the centre of the Christian story, not at its edges.

## What this does not mean

The cross does not mean God is a vengeful figure who needed to punish someone before he could love people — as though the Father and the Son were at odds, one demanding blood and the other reluctantly supplying it. The New Testament consistently presents the cross as something the Father and Son accomplish together, out of love, not against it: "God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son." It also does not mean suffering is inherently good or something to seek out; Jesus himself asked, in genuine anguish, for another way. And it does not mean the cross is only a moral example to imitate, stripped of its power to actually deal with sin and death — the New Testament resists reducing it to inspiration alone, insisting instead that something was truly accomplished there, not merely illustrated.

## What was finished

The word Jesus speaks near the end, "it is finished," is not resignation. It is completion. Whatever needed to happen to deal with human sin, to break the hold of death, and to open a way back to God, the New Testament says happened there, on a Roman execution device, in public, witnessed by soldiers and a handful of grieving women who stayed when almost everyone else had fled.

The cross is not a tragedy the resurrection reverses, as though it were a mistake later corrected. Scripture presents it as the very thing that was accomplished — the place where love and justice met, where the worst human systems and the deepest divine purpose intersected, and where, against every appearance, something was finished rather than merely ended.

## Simon of Cyrene and the shape of shared suffering

One detail easy to skim past: as Jesus is led out to be executed, too weakened by the flogging to carry the crossbeam himself, the soldiers seize a passerby named Simon of Cyrene and force him to carry it instead. Mark bothers to name Simon's sons, Alexander and Rufus, apparently because his early readers would have recognised them — this random man conscripted into someone else's suffering became part of the story that got told and retold. It is a small, human moment inside an enormous one: an ordinary person pulled unwillingly into carrying a weight that was not his to carry, and somehow becoming part of how that weight was carried at all.

There is something here for anyone who has found themselves bearing a burden they did not choose — caring for someone dying, walking alongside a friend's collapse, absorbing the fallout of another person's crisis. Simon did not volunteer. But Scripture remembers him not as a footnote but as someone whose forced participation in Christ's suffering became meaningful precisely because he did not walk away from it. Your unchosen burdens are not proof you have been abandoned by God. They may be, without your ever intending it, part of a larger story you cannot yet see the shape of.

## The women who stayed

While most of the male disciples scattered after Jesus' arrest, the Gospels are careful to record that a group of women — including Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and Salome — stood watching from a distance at the crucifixion, and later some drew closer to see where he was buried. In a culture where women's testimony was often considered legally unreliable, their continued presence, recorded plainly in every Gospel, does not read like flattering fiction. It reads like memory. They stayed when staying cost something and offered nothing in return, and their faithfulness in the worst hour became the reason they were the first to encounter the empty tomb.