It is hard to go back and imagine the pain that Jesus suffered on the cross. Good Friday is good because the pain that Jesus bore meant our joy and our freedom from sin and death. The cross brought a redemptive element to suffering that was not there before. But it is easy to forget the real pain of the cross for Jesus. Much has been said about the physical pain that Jesus endured for us. The Roman cross was reserved for only the worst of criminals, among whom Jesus should never have been included. Jesus started His ministry standing in a long line of sinners waiting to be baptized, and He ended His earthly ministry in a line of crosses, between two of the worst criminals executed that day. The cross was designed to be the slowest death possible; it was designed to combine all the ways our body could die. Suffocation, blood loss, dehydration, shock; it combined all of our physical pains into one. And it had one purpose: to punish a criminal to the maximum amount of pain that his body could handle before dying and to make sure he paid well for his crimes against the supreme authority of the Roman Empire. It was a physical pain that few could imagine. But Scripture points to another pain of the cross that we can easily overlook amid the gruesome physical torture that Jesus went through. That is the mental and emotional anguish of soul that each one of our sins drives into the heart of our Father that now were laid on Jesus at the cross.
