Satan Opposed the Cross

We have seen how God in his great power and wisdom overcame the problem of human sin, but what about that older evil, Satan himself? How did Christ conquer Satan, the source of all evil, on the cross? How much did Satan know of God’s plans, and what was he trying to accomplish when Christ became incarnate?

According to the Gospel writers, Satan was at least somewhat aware of Jesus’ intentions in becoming incarnate, and tried to deter him. John Piper writes,

“Satan tried to turn him away from the path of suffering and sacrifice. In the wilderness, he tempted him to turn stones into bread and jump off the temple and get the rulership of the world by worshiping him (Matthew 4:1-11). The point of all these temptations is: ‘Don’t walk the path of suffering and sacrifice and death. Use your power to escape.’” – John Piper, Spectacular Sins and Their Global Purpose for the Glory of Christ (available here in its entirety), p. 100

Piper also notes Matthew 16:23. In this passage, Jesus announces that he must suffer and die, and Peter rebukes him and says this will never happen (16:22). Jesus responds to Peter by saying, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.” It seems, then that Satan was at work again to turn Jesus away from his set path to Calvary.

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The Cross as Revelation of God

We’ve come to answers of the three questions posed: where did we stand before God, what happened between God and man, and what happened within the persons of the Trinity when Christ died? Christ paid the price, he drank the cup of suffering, he received the wages of sin (Romans 6:23), and thus he satisfied the just divine demand for retribution, atoning for our sin and making us righteous in him. For Christ the greatest part of the price of taking up our sins, though, was being forsaken by the Father. For a moment God was, in a sense, not himself – the sinless Son was sin itself, he who was one with the Father in love was accursed by the Father.

And yet a deeper level, God based his actions on who he was – his nature and character –in every way and at every step in this great event. Even in the moment of God taking sin on himself and being accursed, the Son was fully obedient before the Father, faithful to the end, never once sinning himself. Even when the Son was cut off from the Father, both were acting according to the justice and love of their common divine nature, and thus testifying to their divine unity. Furthermore, in all these paradoxes which God has structured from eternity into redemptive history and the event of the cross – mysterious yet beautiful and elegant paradoxes – we witness another facet of who God is. We glimpse reflections of the deep wisdom, knowledge, and beauty that is inherent to his being, and with which he has imbued his Story. Perhaps most significantly, in the cross we have the supreme revelation of God’s love and justice – his love for us, so vast and endless that he would die for us (John 15:13), and justice, so strong and steadfast that he would deal it out at any cost to himself. We see God’s mercy, grace, forgiveness, righteousness, and holiness. We see Christ’s faithfulness and obedience, and his incomparable humility, as an example for us. Indeed, it is in the cross that we actually find out what love, justice, obedience, and humility really are. God has taken all that he is and poured it into his Story, and the cross in particular, so that his creatures might see him more fully.

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From Humiliation to Glory

Yet another instance of paradox can be glimpsed in the contrast between glory and humiliation on the cross. Before going to the cross, Christ said he would be glorified (John 12:23, 32). But how could this be if he was ridiculed, mocked and spit on by men?

“[N]ever did he suffer so much pain in his body, or so much sorrow in his soul; never was he in so great an exercise of his condescension, humility, meekness, and patience, as he was in these last sufferings; never was his divine glory and majesty covered with so thick and dark a veil; never did he so empty himself and make himself of no reputation, as at this time.” – Jonathan Edwards, The Excellency of Christ

It cannot be denied that Christ experienced great humiliation. He was mocked and scorned and spit on as he died. And death by crucifixion was, in the ancient world, a death of unspeakable shame and utter horror (see “The ‘Foolish’ Wisdom of the Cross”). Yet the cross was his glory at the same time (Colossians 2:15), and he despised its shame (Hebrews 12:2). It paved the way for his resurrection and victory and ultimately revealed more of who he was, as we will see. Also, Christ was one with the Father and shared the same divine nature, so if the Father’s righteousness was vindicated by punishing sin in Christ, the same event also vindicated Christ’s righteousness and showed him to be holy and just. That is, the glory of Christ was accomplished through his humiliation. Only by being slain as a Lamb did Christ reveal himself as the Lion of Judah.

“[He was] crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death.” – Hebrews 2:9

“Being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.” – Philippians 2:8-9

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Forsaken, But Still One with the Father

…At the same time, though, and here again perhaps there is paradox, the Father and the Son were in a deeper sense still one. Listen to how John Piper puts it:

“When the Father forsook the Son and handed him over to the curse of the cross and lifted not a finger to spare him pain, he had not ceased to love the Son. In that very moment when the Son was taking upon himself everything that God hates in us, and God was forsaking him to death, even then the Father knew that the measure of his Son's suffering was the depth of his Son's love for the Father's glory, and in that love the Father took deepest pleasure. The crucifixion of Jesus was a mysterious event…in the very moment when God’s curse rested most heavily on Jesus because of sin, the Father’s love for his Son reached explosive proportions. This is why Jesus, with his dying breath, could say, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” (Luke 23:46). Though he knew the wrath of his Father was being poured out on him, he also knew that he was bearing it for the Father’s glory, and that the Father loved him for it.” – John Piper, The Pleasures of God ch. 6

In the very moment of the Son being forsaken by the Father and the Father losing his Son, the members of the Trinity acted out their eternal plan together, working with one another for each other’s glory! For the glory of the Trinity.

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The Forsaken Son of God

But this triumphant atonement was very costly to God – the payment was very great. It was not just the horrific death by crucifixion and the unimaginably painful flogging. It was not just the humiliation of God being crowned with thorns and hung up on a tree to be mocked and ridiculed. It was in being forsaken by the Father. Jesus’ greatest suffering was expressed when he cried out “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me!” ¹ In this fallen world we have tasted the pain and grief of broken relationships, but “we cannot fathom…what it would have been like to lose not just spousal love or parental love that has lasted several years, but the infinite love of the Father that Jesus had from all eternity” (Tim Keller, The Reason for God, p. 29). We now come to the third question: what happened between the Father and the Son when Christ went to the cross? Here too we will find a paradoxical beauty in richly contrasting truths.

For a time, Christ emptied himself of many of his attributes as the eternal second person of the Trinity and became limited, dependent, as a creature. More than that, Christ became a sin offering (2 Corinthians 5:21), one accursed in God’s eyes (Galatians 3:13). In bearing sin (an offense against God and wholly contrary to his nature), did God become what God is not? It may seem so, but this is a contradiction in terms and therefore impossible. As described earlier, the wages of sin were imputed to Christ such that it was as if he was the sinner, but Christ himself was and is the definition of perfection and holiness. Yet he was accursed. It was as if the second person of the Trinity had been the worst of sinners, as if he had raised his fist in the face of God and rebelled! The Son, like the Father, is holy and worthy of glory, yet on the cross he is simultaneously a sin offering, worthy of ultimate suffering and death! You might say that God in Christ very nearly became all that is opposite to his nature and character, all that God is not! Very nearly a contradiction, but not quite – what a mysterious paradox!

God the Father, being just and holy, based his actions on his character when he turned his face on the sin that the Son took on and thus turned away from the Son himself. If God the Father had been near to the Son in his suffering, he would not have shown a just hatred and abhorrence of sin and evil for what it was, and thus he would not have been honoring to his own sinless and holy character. God could only be honorable and true to himself by deserting the Son on the cross. And thus, the Son was cut off from the Father, separated and forsaken as an object of wrath,² and this cutting and dividing of Father from Son within the Trinity is also against the very essence of his unity in the being of God.³ Again, God, although acting in every step from his own character, is for a moment almost not himself. For God to nearly become not-God is the paradox of all paradoxes. Again we see that strange mysterious tension or contrast between different facets of what happened on the cross.


¹ Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34. These words are a quotation of Psalm 22:1. In this psalm, which has often viewed in some sense as messianic, the psalter cries out in sorrow and anguish amidst his sufferings and persecution, but he ends in hope, praising God. One would expect the Jesus of the gospels, who knew the Old Testament so thoroughly, to know the context of the verse he was quoting. “Jesus probably has in mind the remainder of the psalm as well, which moves on to a cry of victory (Psalm 22:21-31)…surely he knows why he is dying, for this was the purpose of his coming to earth” (Michael J. Wilkins, commentary on Matthew 27:46, ESV Study Bible). Furthermore, “Jesus knows why he is experiencing God-forsakenness, just as he knows his death will not be the end of his story” (Hans F. Bayer, commentary on Mark 15:34, ESV Study Bible).

² This does not mean that the Father’s wrath replaced his love for the Son. With a being as great and incomprehensible to mere human minds as the Triune God, we must leave open the possibility that the Father still loved the Son in some manner, despite directing his wrath towards him and his hatred towards the sin he bore, and that the Son still loved the Father, despite feeling forsaken by him. We would be hasty to assume that God’s emotional life is like ours. On the contrary, we should expect that the Triune God would experiences emotions (and thought) on a wholly different level, beyond our understanding. See John Piper, “The Infinitely Complex Emotional Life of God, The Pleasures of God, p. 72.

³ What this may mean for the Spirit, whom Scripture seems to describe as the personification of the love and union between the Father and the Son (see “The Trinity in Redemptive History”), I am not sure. Perhaps the Spirit too suffered in some way because the bond between the Father and the Son from which the Spirit proceeded was under strain for a moment. Indeed, it would seem that the whole Trinity must participate in the Son’s suffering because the whole Trinity very nearly becomes that which it is not, namely, persons divided from one another rather than united in love.

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Solving the Problem of Sin

Man had sinned against God and was bound and trapped, unable to save himself. Only God could save us, but it was God to whom we owed a debt. And yet God in his unstoppable love made a way, solving the problem of our sin. We have now seen more fully how the wages of sin (death) were paid, not by us but by God himself. In C. S. Lewis’ words,

“Humanity must embrace death freely, submit to it with total humility, drink it to the dregs, and so convert it into that mystical death which is the secret of life. But only a man who did not need to have been a Man at all unless He had chosen, only one who served in our sad regiment as a volunteer, yet also only one who was perfectly a Man, could perform this perfect dying; and thus (which way you put it is unimportant) either defeat death or redeem it. He tasted death on behalf of all others. He is the representative ‘Die-er’ of the universe: and for that very reason the Resurrection and the Life. Or conversely, because He truly lives, He truly dies, for that is the very pattern of reality…Because Vicariousness* is the very idiom of the reality He has created, His death can become ours.” – C. S. Lewis, Miracles, ch. 14
*That is, interdependence throughout creation (see Miracles, ch. 14), and specifically, our dependence on God and our death and new life through his death and resurrection.

In this way of redemption we see “that perfection of moral wisdom which found a way to preserve the integrity of heaven and yet receive us there” (A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, ch. 19), a perfection and wisdom rooted in the Trinity.

There on the cross justice was dealt to us for our sins – through Christ. God the Father acted as the Judge of God the Son, who was judged and rightly condemned as the bearer of sins. The just wrath of God fell upon God himself (more paradox) – judgment in proportion to the sin committed, and sin (born by Christ) committed in proportion to the One offended, God himself. The punishment at the cross was in proportion to the magnitude of the punisher (and the one punished) – the weight of judgment in proportion to the worth and dignity of the Judge – God himself. There is no thing greater than God himself and thus no greater punishment than that of proportional weight – punishment for rejecting and insulting the Most High. And there is no greater love than that of the One who would pay such a price for those he loves.

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The Paradoxical Riches of the Gospel, con’t

We disobeyed and turned away from God, but Christ was “obedient to death” (Philippians 2:8), faithful to God just as we were unfaithful – a theme that stretches throughout God’s story in the Bible. Yet obedience cost him the price of punishment for disobedience. Faithfulness brought upon Christ the wrath of God towards the unfaithful. Again we see that mysterious irony that the Gospel truth is so rich with.

“Christ never so greatly manifested his hatred of sin, as against God, as in his dying to take away the dishonor that sin had done to God; and yet never was he to such a degree subject to the terrible effects of God’s hatred of sin, and wrath against it, as he was then.” – Jonathan Edwards, The Excellency of Christ

“Christ’s holiness never so illustriously shone forth as it did in his last sufferings, and yet he never was to such a degree treated as guilty.” – Jonathan Edwards, The Excellency of Christ

Can you see the tense contrasting truths, the beautiful paradoxes in the cross? The Gospel is rich not only with revelation of God’s love, but with this paradoxical beauty as well! It seems to me that it is this depth of beauty that underlies the power of God to raise Christ from death, completing our salvation through his payment and triumphing over the evil that we succumbed to. Surely here in God’s demonstration of his love and justice we encounter a deeper wisdom and a greater strength, strong enough to overthrow the power of evil.

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The Paradoxical Riches of the Gospel

“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.” – 2 Corinthians 8:9

This Gospel truth is so deep and filled with treasures that it is worth probing more. We forsook God and chose our own way, and yet he sought to bring us back to himself. We broke God’s perfect law, and yet he, the designer of that moral law, the law which is inherent to his very being, was punished and suffered as one who broke that same law. We brought death on ourselves justly by sinning, yet God alone experienced the full effects of sin. We spilled his blood on our hands, yet it was the same blood that washed us clean of our sin. We are the killers of the Author of life (Acts 3:15), and he is our lover and the giver of life to us. What a rich contrast between truths! It was we who were under the curse of sin, yet it was God in Christ who became accursed – for us (Galatians 3:13). He made himself who was perfect and beautiful to be sin (2 Corinthians 5:21), to be an object of scorn and revulsion, of just hatred and destruction. He made himself to be a hideous sight, and made our wretched faces to be bright and beautiful. He took us, filthy objects of disgust and just hatred, and made us to be without sin – holy, righteous, and beautiful, objects of love, purchasing for us and transferring to us his righteousness and holiness. He took up our filth upon himself and made us white as snow. Our righteousness is not our own – it is Christ’s. Christ is our righteousness – he is the reason for the just life and joy poured out on us. We are his sin – we are the reason for the just suffering that fell upon him. We are the killers of God and the reason for his just death, and he is our Giver, the reason for our eternal life. We threw ourselves into the pits of pride and he raised us up. He dug deep into our souls and remade us, transformed us. Through his sacrifice and because of the power of his resurrection, we too were raised and brought back to God, restored to be his children and lifted out of the sin and death that Christ trampled down.

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Atonement

God did not send some mighty emissary to reconcile man to God. He himself came! How great a mystery it is that God, who alone is eternal and transcendent and uncreated, above all, should himself enter this fallen world in order to redeem his children, taking upon himself the humblest and lowliest form. How unexpected and paradoxical that the Creator should become as a creature!

But stranger still is the final goal of this incarnation, that God, who defines perfection and holiness, should take on himself the sin of man. Let’s look at the second question: how did the cross change our relationship to God? In sinning against God, each person had brought upon himself a debt: “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). This burden of sin was transferred from the redeemed to Jesus Christ, who then paid the debt through death and thus accomplished the “substitutionary atonement” of all those who would believe. He “[canceled] the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross” (Colossians 2:14). Thus, Christ was “regarded and treated” (Scott J. Hafemann, commentary on 1 Corinthians 5:21, ESV Study Bible) as if he was the sinner, indeed, the worst of sinners, and we who are “in Christ” are regarded and treated as pure, righteous, and holy:

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” – 2 Corinthians 5:21

“He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth…He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.” – 1 Peter 2:22, 24

“We like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned – every one – to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.” – Isaiah 53:6

“…Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.” – Romans 3:24-25

This act of love and grace was his set plan from eternity – it was in accordance with his infinite, incomprehensible wisdom. He chose to forgive. To us who deserve death, he gave life. How strange, how unexpected, yet how beautiful, true and perfect – for such is the way of love, and God is love (John 15:12-13, Ephesians 3:19, 1 John 4:16). He is the “Being for others” (see “The Love of God”). So high, so deep, so great is his love for us that he gave nothing less than himself for us. In the cross we see clearly the nature of God’s incomparable love, an essential part of who he is.

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The Justice and Love of God

God’s way is love – a selfless and sacrificial love, love that gives oneself for others (see “The Love of God”) – and the way of love in the face of sin and rejection is forgiveness. Because of the justice of God, the price had to be paid (sin, being offense against God, could not go unpunished), and because of the grace and mercy of God, that price was forgiveness – longsuffering love. For him to love us – to love you and me – was to empty himself, to give his very being, to suffer fully, to drink the cup to the last drop. There is no love greater than this.

It may seem unjust that God should pay for what we did, but that is because God’s love is present there on the cross along with his justice – it was his sovereign will to give himself freely for us. Christ’s death must be seen as an act of justice and an act of love. The cross is just because God, who is just, declares it just. That is, it is just for our penalty to be paid by God out of love because God the just declares it just. “For God the just is satisfied to look on him and pardon me.”

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The Weight of Sin

We have come to the point of identifying the cross as the place where God’s victory was won, which was made complete in the Great Eucatastrophe of the Resurrection. Death and Rebirth, wrote Lewis, is “the very formula of reality,” and thus “in the mystery of Death the secret of secrets lies hid” (Miracles ch. 14). It is into the “mystery” and “secret” of the cross that I want to dig deeper in the next few posts. In order to understand more fully the deep riches of the Gospel and the beauty of God’s victory, it is helpful to consider what the situation was, and what was at stake, when Christ went to the cross. Let’s consider three questions:

1. Who were we – each individual and all of humanity – in relation to our Mediator Jesus Christ, God the Son, and who was Christ in relation to us?
2. How did the Christ’s death and resurrection change this?
3. What was Christ’s relation to God the Father? What happened within the Trinity when Christ died on the cross?

Let’s tackle the first question first. Who are we in relation to Christ in particular, and to the Triune God in general? We are God’s creatures, he is our Creator. We bear his image and are reflections of the One who is prime and original. But we fell. Each of us can say truly of ourselves: “I am his offender and debtor. I am a sinner against him – I am a criminal. He, God, is the victim of my horrific crimes. In breaking his perfect law I insulted him and defied him. I raised my fist in his face and set myself on high. I nailed his hands to the cross. I killed him. I joined the rest of humanity to slay the Son of God.” Each day we may wake and eat and live our lives, driving to work or watching TV or talking to friends, but this greater reality cannot be ignored. We are murderers. We are the killers of God. How did we kill God? We sinned, and the just wages of sin are death (Romans 3:23) – wages that could only be paid and a death that could only be defeated by the suffering and death of God himself.

Could we ourselves have paid these wages to earn our way back to God? No. Offense against an infinitely holy God is an infinite crime, and thus could be atoned for only by eternal punishment (hell) for sinners, or through God himself, the infinitely worthy One against whom we sinned, paying the wages. The first of these options offers no salvation or redemption, and the love of God would not allow for universal eternal hell for his creatures. Furthermore, choosing to sin and reject God bound us to all the effects of sin (particularly death) and trapped us in a state of depravity from which we could not possible earn our way back to God (Romans 8:3,7-8; 3:10-12, Ephesians 2:1-3, 1 Corinthians 2:14, John 3:19, 8:34, Jeremiah 17:9). Only a perfect person could die to sin perfectly (see C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, pp. 59-60), and only God himself could be a perfect person. God alone, then, could bring us back to God.

This is where we stood in relation to God – we had a debt to pay that God, being just, would not ignore. Because sin is against an infinitely worthy God, it is an infinite crime. It would not be just for God, and thus not in his character (God defines justice), to simply ignore our sin and bring us into his presence. In not punishing sin, the one dishonored by the sin (God) would be treated as unworthy, but God treats all things according to their value, including himself – he who is of the greatest value and worth. Offense against a holy and just God must be given its proper weight, and to see the full magnitude of sin we must look at the cross, which is the product of God’s justice along with his love.

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The Suffering of God

Here perhaps something more can be said in answer to the “problem of evil” and in answer to those who cry out in the darkness “where is God?!” Where is God in this terrible world, in our suffering and death? Where is God in the horror, the evil? Where is God when there are children starving or being sold as slaves, when families are ripped apart, or when planes fly into buildings? Is God dead? Is he dying too? Yes, God is dying. He’s here with us – hanging on the cross in unfathomable pain and anguish, his body broken, his skin torn to shreds, and his blood pouring out, scorned and humiliated as a criminal, with the immeasurable weight of the horror and evil of a fallen and terror-saturated world on his shoulders. “On the cross [Christ] went beyond even the worst human suffering and experienced cosmic rejection and pain that exceeds ours as infinitely as his knowledge and power exceeds ours. In his death, God suffers in love, identifying with the abandoned and godforsaken” (Tim Keller, The Reason for God p. 30). God is familiar with our struggles and pains – having “identified himself with the extreme of human wretchedness” (Martin Hengel, Crucifixion p. 89), he knows fully the reality of a fallen world. He suffers with us, giving himself for us in love.

I have not suffered much at all in my life, so you might fairly question whether my judgment of such weighty things is at all accurate. Would I find comfort in God’s presence on the cross if I was in a death camp or had lost loved ones? Would I lose my faith? I don’t know. All I can say is that, from what I have seen in the world, I think that deep down we know that God is here in the suffering, and there are others who have suffered more and have found him there in the darkness. Granted, many have lost their faith in suffering, but many have come to faith in God through similar experiences.¹ As C. S. Lewis said, God whispers to us in our pleasures and yells at us in our pain. God is present in the darkness. To cry “God!” in the darkness and horror and great suffering is the only fitting response to such enormous realities. Atheism gives no answer but that suffering is a byproduct of particles moving according to the laws of physics, and this is a weak response to such a huge thing as the problem of evil. It leaves us crying out “why!” Only God is big enough to answer to such great moral horror. And his answer is the cross of Christ.²

As we will see, the cross is not the end of the story. By itself, the cross would not give us comfort that God is with us, but despair – despair because God himself had been defeated. If the cross were the end of the story, we would be right to despair, for the darkness would be complete, and there would be only demons to cry out to. Imagine what a horror and a hell it would be to exist in such a world! But something follows this death of God that renders it a mystery and a victory, and a comfort to know that God is familiar with our pain. Even in the cross God is sovereign, in complete control – his plan moves forward exactly as he intended from eternity. God has a plan to turn his own suffering into something glorious – he has made a way to defeat evil finally and fully with his own “death.” What a paradox, what a mystery! Who but God himself could have come up with such a beautiful design? And it is beautiful, this victory of God.


¹ Lewis writes, “I have seen great beauty of spirit in some who were great sufferers. I have seen men, for the most part, grow better not worse with advancing years, and I have seen the last illness produce treasures of fortitude and meekness from the most unpromising subjects” – The Problem of Pain, ch. 6

² Listen to this message by John Piper on “Treasuring Christ and the Call to Suffer.” Piper has some powerful words to say about the reality of evil and what God accomplishes through it.

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A Strange Way to Triumph

But the victory is already won. It is not in that great final battle that the victory of God is accomplished, for the enemy knows his doom is sure even now. There was a moment in an age long ago where the same face as that of the King of Kings upon his white horse did not bear the marks of sovereign control or power or strength or joy. There was a day when his face was one of weakness and agony, a gaunt and horrified face that brought despair to one’s mind. There is no triumph at hand, no unshakeable control in the face of the afflicted Son of God. Yet this is where the battle was won. This is where the victory of God was accomplished. Where was the tide turned? Where was the final joy ensured? Where did Christ triumph in battle, full of strength and power? Hanging on the cross, in ultimate suffering, his body broken.

“Come and see, look on this mystery: the Lord of the universe, nailed to a tree.” – Fernando Ortega, “Sing to Jesus”

“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering…
Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.” – Isaiah 53:2-5

Who would expect victory to be won through death and suffering. Who could have foreseen a suffering and dying Messiah? What a strange way to victory. What a mystery! There is a hidden beauty in this paradox of victory and defeat – a beauty and majesty greater than that of the glorious warrior.

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