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In the name of Jesus, Amen.
First, we want to distinguish between three kinds of suffering that Jesus accomplished for us on the cross. The first is physical. The agony of the cross is an excruciating agony. So bitter is the death on the cross that as soon as there was a Christian who was emperor of Rome, Constantine, he immediately outlawed it. Crucifixion was such a cruel death that it was illegal to crucify a Roman citizen. Only slaves, aliens in the land, could be afflicted with that kind of death. And it was a long death. Normally, when someone was nailed to the cross, they would hang there for days, a week, more. When you were crucified, you died because of asphyxiation. Your shoulders were out of joint, and your body cavity, especially your lungs, began to fill with fluid and had pressed in on your heart until you finally had a heart attack. So you were drowning inside of yourself. You were nailed or tied by your hands or by your feet, and to get a breath you would have to press up, get a little gasp of air to keep you alive.
This is why, when it was time to kill the men, they didn’t want them hanging on the cross anymore. They went and broke their legs, the men on the right of Jesus and the man on the left, so that they couldn’t lift themselves up to get a breath. And this physical torment of the cross came after, for our Lord Jesus at least, after he was whipped, after he was scourged and had his back torn apart, after he was beaten and had his beard pulled out, after he had been struck on the head with a reed and crowned with thorns and struck on the mouth by the fist of the soldiers and by the guard of the high priests. This was an incredibly painful death.
But the physical pain, the physical suffering is not what saves us. If this is what rescued us and delivered us, then the man crucified on the right of Jesus or on the left who suffered the same kind of pain could have been the Savior. No, it’s not the physical pain. The second kind of suffering that Jesus experienced on the cross was the shame of the cross. And I think it’s very interesting, of all the three different kinds of suffering Jesus endured, the shame is what the Gospel lessons focus most on.
The shame comes from the spitting on the face, for example. The shame comes as they struck Jesus, but they didn’t just strike him; they blindfolded him and then they struck him on the face and they said, “Prophesy, who struck you?” The shame comes as the people were wagging their heads as Jesus was being crucified by the door of the city. They were wagging their heads at him saying, “He saved others, why can’t he save himself?” In fact, even at the beginning of the crucifixion, the two thieves on either side of him were mocking him until one came around, saw that this was no ordinary man, it was God suffering on the cross.
But there was mockery from the soldiers, there was mockery from the Sanhedrin, there was mockery from the crowds passing in and out of the street, even as the shame of His condemnation was above His head: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” And He was stripped, or at least mostly stripped. They were gambling for His clothes below the cross. Hebrews tells us that Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame. This was a true and profound suffering for Jesus. It is the humiliation of the cross. As Paul says that he didn’t consider equality with God as something to be grasped, but he humbled himself, taking the form of a servant, and being found in likeness of men, he humbled himself to the point of death, even death