Dear friend,
I want to put you at the foot of the cross tonight.
Not theologically. Not symbolically. Physically. I want to describe what the people standing there actually experienced with their eyes and their ears and their senses on that Friday afternoon two thousand years ago.
Because I have been with the Church for fifty years and I have sat through more Good Friday services than I can count. And I have noticed something about the way we talk about the crucifixion.
We talk about what it means. We talk about substitutionary atonement and redemption and the forgiveness of sins. All of it true. All of it important. All of it necessary.
But we almost never talk about what it looked like.
And I believe that gap — between the theology and the experience — is part of why the cross has lost some of its weight for people who have heard about it their whole lives. When something becomes familiar it stops landing. And the cross has become so familiar that most Christians can discuss it without feeling anything at all.
Tonight I want to change that. For at least a few minutes.
What crucifixion actually was.
Before I show you what the people at the foot of the cross saw I need to tell you what crucifixion was. Because the modern world has sanitized it in ways that make it impossible to understand what actually happened.
Crucifixion was designed by the Romans to be the most painful and most humiliating death a human being could die. It was reserved for the worst criminals and the most dangerous enemies of the state. Roman citizens could not be crucified. It was considered too degrading even for the worst of them.
The person was first flogged. Not lightly. The Roman flagellum was a leather whip with pieces of bone and metal embedded in the ends. It tore the skin from the back in strips. Men died from the flogging alone. The ones who survived it arrived at the cross already in shock. Already losing blood. Already at the limit of what a human body can endure.
Then they were made to carry the crossbeam through the city. Not the whole cross. The crossbeam. Through streets lined with people who had come specifically to mock. To spit. To throw things. The walk was designed to humiliate as much as to exhaust.
Then the nails.
Not through the palms the way the paintings show. Through the wrists. Between the radius and ulna. Where the median nerve runs. The pain of a nail through the median nerve is beyond what most people can imagine. It produces a specific kind of agony that has no equivalent in ordinary human experience.
Then they lifted the cross upright. And the body weight pulled against the nails. And the person had to push up on the nail through their feet to breathe. And then collapse. And then push up again. Every breath a choice between suffocation and agony.
People took days to die on a cross. Jesus died in six hours. The Romans were surprised. He had been flogged so severely that the cross finished what the flagellum had started.
What the people standing there saw.
In John chapter 19 verse 25 it says this.
Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.
His mother.
I want you to think about what Mary saw that day. Not what she believed. What she saw.
She saw her son flogged until his back was open. She saw him carry the crossbeam through the city while the crowd mocked. She saw the nails go in. She heard the sound they made. She stood close enough to the cross that John records she was near it.
She stood there for six hours.
There are no words in any language adequate to describe what that was. The theology of the atonement is real and true and beautiful. But before it is any of those things it is a mother standing at the foot of a cross watching her son die in the worst way the Romans had ever invented.
And she stayed.
What they heard.
From the cross Jesus said seven things. They are recorded across the four Gospels.
The first thing He said was Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.
He said that while the nails were going in. While the pain was at its most acute. While the people who had just driven metal through his wrists were still close enough to hear him.
Father forgive them.
Not later. Not after it was over and the anger had subsided. In the middle of it. At the worst moment. The first words out of his mouth were a prayer for the people doing it to him.
I have been reading those words for fifty years. They still stop me.
What they smelled.
This is the part nobody talks about in church. But it is part of what was real that day.
Golgotha was the regular place of execution outside Jerusalem. It was not clean. It was not prepared specially for this occasion. It was a place where people had been dying for years. In the way that dying people die.
The smell of blood. The smell of bodies. The smell of the crowd that had gathered to watch. The smell of the earth that had absorbed decades of what execution produces.
This is where God chose to accomplish the most important thing that has ever happened in the history of the universe.
Not in the Temple. Not in a throne room. Not in a place of beauty or power or significance.
On a garbage heap outside the city walls. In the worst smell in Jerusalem. Surrounded by criminals and soldiers and a crowd that had come for the entertainment.
That choice was not accidental. Everything about the crucifixion was deliberate. Including the location. Including the company. Including the specific degradation of it.
The God of the universe chose the most undignified death in the most undignified place to accomplish the most dignified thing ever done for human beings.
I find that extraordinary every time I sit with it.
What the disciples did.
In Mark chapter 14 verse 50 it says everyone deserted him and fled.
Everyone.
The men who had said they would die for him. Who had walked with him for three years. Who had seen the miracles and heard the teaching and knew better than anyone alive who he was.
They ran.
One of them — John — came back. He is the one standing near the cross in John chapter 19. The only disciple who did not stay away.
The rest of them were hiding. Behind locked doors. Terrified that what had happened to Jesus was about to happen to them.
I want you to hold that image alongside the image of the women standing at the foot of the cross. Mary. Her sister. Mary Magdalene. The women who had followed Jesus from Galilee. Who had supported his ministry. Who had no power and no protection and every reason to be as terrified as the disciples.
They stayed anyway.
The ones with the most to lose ran. The ones with the least power stayed.
That is not an accident. That is a pattern that runs through Scripture from beginning to end. And it runs through history the same way.
Why I am telling you this tonight.
Because I want you to feel the weight of what was paid.
Not the theological weight. The human weight. The specific, physical, irreversible cost of what God chose to do for the people reading this letter tonight.
He did not do it cleanly. He did not do it from a distance. He did not accomplish it through power or comfort or the exercise of the divine authority that could have ended the whole thing with a word.
He did it the hard way. The painful way. The humiliating way. The way that cost everything.
And He did it knowing you would read about it two thousand years later and sometimes forget what it cost. And He did it anyway.
I want to connect something to what I have been describing tonight.
The specific pattern of the cross — the chosen man, the coordinated opposition, the betrayal from the inside, the total apparent defeat, the certainty of the enemies that it was finally over — is the pattern I have been writing about all year.
Not because Donald Trump is Jesus. I have said that before and I will say it again. He is not.
But the playbook is the same. It has always been the same. The people who oppose what God is doing have one playbook and they have been using it since the beginning.
False accusations. Rigged processes. Inside betrayal. Public humiliation. The absolute certainty that this time it is finally finished.
They were certain it was finished on Good Friday too.
Three days later the stone was rolled away.
I wrote about this pattern in They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. Not to compare Trump to Jesus. To show that the enemy of God's purposes has one playbook and God has one response to it. And that response has never once failed.
Read it this week if you have not: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
Alternatively, you may find it by clicking on the image below:
I think after tonight's letter it will land differently than it would have before.
I want to close where I started. At the foot of the cross.
With Mary standing there for six hours. Watching something she could not stop and could not understand and could not leave.
I think about her often. About what she knew and what she did not know. She knew who her son was. She did not know yet what Sunday was going to look like.
She stayed anyway.
That is faith. Not the faith that sees the ending and decides the cost is worth it. The faith that stays at the foot of the cross on Friday afternoon when Sunday is still invisible.
That is the faith I see in the people reading this letter. The ones who are standing at their own version of Friday afternoon. Who cannot see Sunday yet. Who are staying anyway.
Stay, friend. Sunday is coming.
God bless you. More than I can say tonight.
With you in prayer always,
Father Thomas
This week I want you to do two things:
One. Read the crucifixion accounts this week. Not just one Gospel. All four. Matthew 27. Mark 15. Luke 23. John 19. Read them back to back in one sitting. Pay attention to the details each writer noticed that the others did not. Let the weight of what you are reading land without rushing past it to the resurrection.
Two. Read They Tried To Stop Him this week: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
After tonight I think the pattern it describes will make more sense than it did before. The cross is the template. Everything else is a variation of it.
P.S. If you want to go deeper on anything I have written, everything is available at fatherthomasletters.com/products — including The Signs Are Here, which maps today's headlines directly against the specific passages that described them, and the Father Thomas Prayer Card Collection, which many of you have told me you return to every morning. Take a look when you have a moment.