The Crucifixion

Crucifixion as a Roman execution method did not exist when these words were written, and that is what makes them worth reading closely. Psalm 22:16-18 describes a death with a specificity that outruns the poet's own century: "they pierced my hands and my feet... they part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture." Isaiah 53, centuries earlier, describes a servant who suffers in the place of others: "he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5). "He was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken" (53:8). "He was numbered with the transgressors" (53:12), which Luke reports fulfilled in the two criminals crucified on either side of Jesus (Luke 23:32-33).

The Gospel writers point to this directly. John, describing the soldiers gambling for Jesus's clothing rather than tearing it, writes plainly, "that the scripture might be fulfilled, which saith, They parted my raiment among them, and for my vesture did they cast lots" (John 19:24, citing Psalm 22:18). The connection is not read back into the text after the fact by later theology. The Gospel writers name it as it happens.

All four Gospels narrate the crucifixion (Matthew 27:32-56; Mark 15:21-41; Luke 23:26-49; John 19:16-37). Jesus was led outside the city to Golgotha, "the place of a skull" (Matthew 27:33), and crucified between two criminals around the third hour (Mark 15:25), roughly nine in the morning. Pilate had a sign placed above him reading "THE KING OF THE JEWS" (Mark 15:26), in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin (John 19:20), and refused the chief priests' request to change the wording: "What I have written I have written" (John 19:22).

From the sixth hour to the ninth, roughly noon to three, darkness came over the whole land (Matthew 27:45; Luke 23:44). At the ninth hour Jesus cried out, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46), the opening line of Psalm 22 spoken from the cross itself. He then said, "It is finished" (John 19:30), Greek tetelestai (τετέλεσται), a word used on completed commercial receipts of the period to mean a debt paid in full, and gave up his spirit. Matthew records that at that moment "the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom" (Matthew 27:51), the curtain that separated the Holy Place from the Holy of Holies, the place where only the high priest entered, once a year, with blood (Hebrews 9:7).

Scripture records seven statements Jesus made while on the cross, drawn across the four Gospels. "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). To the criminal who asked to be remembered: "Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). To his mother and John: "Woman, behold thy son... Behold thy mother" (John 19:26-27). "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34, quoting Psalm 22:1). "I thirst" (John 19:28). "It is finished" (John 19:30). And last, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke 23:46, quoting Psalm 31:5). He did not die overtaken. He gave up his spirit deliberately, with a word of trust, quoting the Scriptures he had lived by until the end.

Scripture does not present the cross as a tragedy that God turned to good after the fact. It presents it as the plan. "Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain" (Acts 2:23), Peter tells the Jerusalem crowd at Pentecost, holding both truths at once: real human guilt, and a purpose fixed before it happened.

Paul states the exchange plainly: "For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him" (2 Corinthians 5:21). "For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 6:23). The death owed was paid by one who did not owe it, so that what belonged to him, righteousness, could belong to those who did. This is worked out further under propitiation, what the cross accomplished toward the wrath of God, and under Satan, what the cross accomplished against the enemy who held the power of death (Hebrews 2:14). To the world, Paul says, this is not obviously good news: "the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God" (1 Corinthians 1:18).

Every verse a Spiritborn carries into battle in the Sanctum answers a lie with something true, and the truest thing any of them can say is that the war was already decided at Golgotha. Colossians 2:15 says of the cross that Christ, having disarmed the rulers and authorities, "made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it." The Spiritborn do not fight to win that victory. They fight from inside it.