Jesus could have chosen a more comfortable cross—but He didn’t. He could have worked a deus ex machina, summoning the hand of God to smite His captors and shield Him from injustice. He could have pleaded with the Romans to use ropes, not nails… But He didn’t.
Jesus knew, I think, that wherever He could go and whatever He could do, He would only find the same cross: His cross. He knew that the only true escape from the cross is victory over the cross, and the only true victory is love. Eighteen centuries later, Nietzsche (the most Christian of Antichrists) writes:
“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different—not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
How often do our eyes scan the horizon for a more comfortable cross to die on? How often do we think “If only…” and ask “Why me?” Even Jesus died with that question on His lips:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
(Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34).
Falling short of greatness, as Nietzsche would have it.
But love requires more than greatness; it requires victory even over victory itself—until love is all that remains.
May we know our cross and love it,
Simeon
My love she speaks softly
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all
—Bob Dylan, Love Minus Zero/No Limit
Suggested Reading
The Crucified God by Jürgen Moltmann
What does it mean that God’s answer to suffering was to suffer? In The Crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann refuses to treat the cry of dereliction as an embarrassment to faith and makes it the centre of it — a God who does not rescue from the cross but enters it.
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Jesus Christ's Answer to Suffering
Christ’s moral teachings, His parables, His mystical sayings… These are all profound and inspiring, like those of other great sages. But what good is all that on days when you “watch the things you gave your life to, broken”, days when you find yourself a plaything in the hands of fate, when the world’s indifference slaps you in the face?