14. What did the terrible crucifixion do for us in our suffering?

Jesus, the son of God, made it possible for us to walk intimately with God. That was not possible until that son paved the Way. We now have an ability to make a close relationship to the Father. God had tried it before, but that had seemed impossible with a nation. The curtain in the Temple had made a division between God and the people, and now, broken down, it revealed a God who needed not the national obedience, but the obedience of each individual who would approach Him. No one previously could touch the representing articles of God, like the ark. No one had seen God face to face because of His seeming remoteness there. They did not hold Him in any intimacy, until He sent His son, Jesus, who came to heal and to raise hope again. Jesus’ own response to his suffering was one of tears, crying to God to remove the cup. After this, the despair of others fades significantly - Job’s despair, the anguish in Lamentations, the pleading by the prophets for the nation’s healing. But then Jesus said, “Thy will be done”. So the son provided a new way of holding things together, healing the sinner’s alienation from God and restoring those who failed, opening the Godly relationship again. It was Jesus Christ the son of God, the suffering servant, the forsaken one, the crucified one who understood the struggles of everyman, who provided this new way, and when he rose from the tomb where they had laid him, on the third day, their faith was made whole and they believed. To this day, we make remember him with our memorial celebrations. And then the wonderful promise that this wounded, dead, and then risen Lord made, was that he would return after his ascension to fulfill all righteousness and be a king at last.

The trials and torments go on, for millennia, and still saints live under the promise of his return. That he has not yet returned, feeds the disappointment, the same long apparent silence of God, the same Face seemingly hidden from those who love Him. But hope over rides the feelings we have of abandonment with the questions that the world is unfair, that evil thrives and is not quenched, and that so much goodness is apparently unseen. God might have promised to put everything under the feet of Jesus, “Yet we do not see everything subject to him”, Hebrews 2. Do we, as well, really believe that good triumphing over evil will ever happen? We do in hope.

If Jesus had not suffered, but rather used his power to disable his enemies, he could not be now one of us. He would have failed in his mission to be one with us, to redeem us. Somehow, someway God needed to provide a means by which we can return to the purity we were at the Creation, before the freewill He had given us led us to the Fall. And He did. We too can now identify intimately with God through the sufferings of His son. Not only does God know about our pain, but because we now know God intimately, He shares in our pain. God has a concern with His love for us for He hates the evil that we do, but He mercifully forgives us.

God loved His people and wanted them to strive for goodness, but the evil that reigned within their hearts which produced the evil deeds, disappointed Him and quenched His love for them. . So He sent His son to soak up evil deeds. It happens for us, like when the stab is made, or when the spear is thrown into our heart. So we now know that evil can be absorbed in those who love Him. Evil can be transformed into goodness and love. When the evil is all soaked up, asking for blessings on the evil one, might also just turn away the evil intent.

“Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” Forty days the risen Lord had walked the earth in his resurrected self and able now to convince some of the deniers and the doubters. Surely now was the time to overcome the Romans and bring in the longed for Kingdom? But one day he rose in the air and was never seen again on the earth.

Only then did they understand that he had come not only to show them, and future believers, how to deal with injustice, but to show us all what God is like. He gave us all instructions in how to grow a church full of believers as a new dwelling place for God, where he is head, and where every heart breathes in faith about him. Is that enough for us?