It was the best of days. It was the worst of days.
It just depends on who you are. If you’re a Heavenly being – divine or angelic – it was the best of all days ever.
If you’re a being in the kingdom of Hell – Satan or one of his angels – it was your worst nightmare. If you’re a being of the human variety, it was the best of all possible days. The most painful day anyone has ever experienced proved the most beneficial anyone could ever imagine.
Jesus hung on the cross a relatively short amount of time. In comparison to other Roman crucifixions, that is. He was on the cross a mere six hours, ending far short of the typical full day or more. The reason His time was shorter is because of the circumstances around His cross experience. There are three major factors. First was His fatigue. He got no sleep the night before and was taken through such torturous treatment that he was utterly exhausted, so badly that he collapsed while carrying His cross to the crucifixion site. The second – and this intersects with the first – was His extreme anxiety and emotional stress.
The night before, in the garden of Gethsemane, His stress was so intense that He bled through the pores of His skin, this after pleading with the Father to make a path to atonement different from the cross, ultimately knowing and accepting that the cross was the way, as they’d decided, planned and begun prophesying millennia before. And what must’ve been the most stressful of all was the sense that His Father had turned from Him and left Him to be tortured to death by malicious, godless terrorists. The third factor, the spiritual one, which also overlaps with the first two, was the burden of sin He carried while hanging by three nails driven through His extremities. Considering the load of guilt we each carry because of our sin, imagine the weight of all of everyone’s sins – throughout human history, past, present and future, from Eve’s bite of the fruit to the last transgression before the end of time. Jesus boar that entire burden on His cross. All of these huge factors combined to intensify His pain.
Since the sabbath was only three hours away (It’s now 3:00 and He was nailed up at 9:00.), and those on the crosses had to be dead, taken down from the crosses and placed in their graves before dark, the Roman soldiers went around breaking their legs, disabling them from lifting themselves to prevent asphyxiation, thereby bringing about their deaths more quickly. But when they came to Jesus, they found Him already dead. They, therefore, didn’t need to break His legs (This fulfilled the prophecy that He would have no broken bones.), so they confirmed that He was indeed deceased by piercing His side (fulfillment of yet another Messianic prophecy) and seeing the mixture of blood and water pour from His torso.
This day on which the Messiah was crucified was pivotal because it redirected everything from law and judgment to grace and freedom.
I titled this blog Time’s Pivotal Day. I don’t mean, by that, that the calendar pivoted from one era to the next. That happened some thirty-three years before, at the birth of Jesus. This day of atonement on a cross was pivotal, not for the calendar, but for our destiny. Not for time, but for eternity. Not for something new to do, but Someone in whom to believe.
For some it was the best of days, for others the worst. For Jesus Christ it was both.
