The Cross, Where Every Love Meets

So He stood up off the ground, and He went.

I will not tidy up what happened, because it matters that you see it plainly. They arrested Him on lies. They beat Him. They mocked Him and stripped Him and drove iron through His hands and feet and hung Him in the air to die in front of a crowd. He hung there six hours. And near the end, out of the depths of it, He cried out:

"My God, My God, why have You abandoned Me?" — Matthew 27:46 (NET)

That cry is real. The forsakenness is real. Do not let anyone smooth it over. The God who is love went all the way down into the worst that being human can hold — even into the feeling of being abandoned by God — because that is exactly where the people He loved had been living since the garden. He did not call down comfort from a safe height. He came down to where we were, all the way to the floor of it, on purpose.

Stand at that cross and you can see, all at once, every love I showed you. The Father who would not spare His own Son — there is the love that was there before you deserved it, poured out now to the last drop. The loyal love that would not quit after a thousand years of our leaving — there it is, holding to the end. The friend who wept at the grave — there He is, dying for the friends. The deep, bodily ache of a love that feels the loss in its own body — there it is, on a hill outside the city. And the steady, choosing love that walked toward the nails wide awake — there it is, because that is simply what love does when love is endless and the beloved is lost.

This is what love costs when it is real. This was the last lesson, taught not in words but in blood, and in the long silence of the Saturday when it looked, to everyone watching, as though love had lost. He knew what He was asking of you when He said take up your cross and follow Me. He had already carried His.