Real Motives at Calvary

I believe the reason we misunderstand the events around the cross and almost completely misinterpret the words and actions of Jesus through those events is because we start with the assumption that He was struggling against great fear as we would do naturally or was working very hard to resist retaliation. We view these things through the strong bias of what we would feel in those circumstances and filter everything through our lenses of fear. We therefore inject into the Bible our own issues and thoroughly mix them into the text as assumptions that go unchallenged. By so doing we almost completely miss seeing the true passion, even excitement, that radiates from Jesus' last hours as He arrives at the time for which all the plans of heaven have focused. This focal point of history and eternity is an overwhelming revelation of God's passionate, unquenchable love – a fire that absorbs every attempt by man or demons to extinguish it and only burns more intensely.

This is NOT the story of a God/man struggling to bring Himself to love us enough to force Himself to endure enough pain to appease an offended God on our behalf. Yes, His humanity was intensely tempted to engage in fear of enduring what was impossible for a human to endure. But we have completely missed what His divinity was thinking and feeling and what the Father was doing all through those events of trial, torture and mocking. Circumstances had been carefully arranged and guided by Sovereign God for the worst of human sinfulness and demonic cruelty to all coalesce at this point of time SO THAT He could have the greatest opportunity of demonstrating the real truth about how He really feels about all of His creatures, the children He created to be His intimate companions. The deepest darkness is all the more useful to highlight the real light by contrast.

Jesus was not demonstrating supernatural willpower and restraint to overwhelming urges for retaliation. He was fighting His divinity's overwhelming urges to love these monsters using His own divine nature instead of remaining completely passive to allow the Father to demonstrate His own passion through Jesus. Since joy is always and only with another, to use His own natural divine power instead of depending on God's power would have been to short-circuit joy.