What did the weight of sin and death feel like? Was it like feeling all the shame, rage, bitterness, envy, lust, and hatred of all humanity on His shoulders all at once? Was it like carrying all the greatest moments of pain that humanity had ever felt? Was it like holding all of the decay and rottenness of perversion, fear, and death inside the pit of His stomach?
We will never know what it felt like to take on all sin and death, to carry it, and defeat it once and for all. We can barely hold our own sins, our own pains, shames, fears, and hatreds. Sometimes, we can barely stomach the overwhelming brokenness and perverseness of our current world let alone the cruelty and pain of the generations before and after us. Can we even imagine what it would have felt like to carry all of that at once? To hold onto it on purpose so that something pure, lovely, and beautiful could be created?
What did Jesus see beyond the grave? Beyond the pain of the cross, beyond the crushing weight of sin? What was worth all of that? What could possibly be worth the nightmare that was dying, holding all of humanities dirt and brokenness, disconnected from the Father for the first time? What was worth it?
Perhaps, it was you. Perhaps the joy that was beyond the grave was you. Perhaps as He held all of your sin and my sin and the sin of every person that has ever lived and will ever live, He saw you. Perhaps, deep in His heart, untouched by the things He carried, was a love so deep, so passionate, so pure that all the weight was worth it. Every single second of torture was worth it. Every minute in hell, every painful breath, every scar, ever drop of sacred blood was worth it.
Because beyond it all, there was you. You, who He had waited thousands of years for and would wait for as long as it would take. You, who He had loved since before the beginning of time, before the first breath entered man’s lungs, before the Spirit hovered over the deep.
So today, on this Good Friday, we remember the pain, the suffering, and the sacrifice that Jesus made for us. We thank Him that He thought we were worth it. We praise Him for the audacious, brilliant, and painful plan to take on death and sin so that we could be together with Him always and forever. We are grateful that He knew and understood all the pain that He would have to take on and still thought we were worth it. That He looked beyond the grave and saw you and rejoiced.