Shredded flesh against unforgiving wood, iron stakes pounded through bone and wracked nerves, joints wrenched out of socked by the sheer dead weight of the body, public humiliation before the eyes of family, friends, and the world — that was death on the cross, "the infamous stake" as the Romans called it, "the barren wood," the maxima mala crux. Or as the Greeks spat it out, the stauros. No wonder no one talked about it. No wonder parents hid their children’s eyes from it. The stauros was a loathsome thing, and the one who dies on it was loathsome too, a vile criminal whose only use was to hang there as a putrid decaying warning to anyone else who might follow his example.
That is how Jesus died.
("The Gospel: God’s Self-Substitution for Sinners” in Don’t Call It a Comeback, ed. Kevin DeYoung (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2011), 72)
(HT: Of First Importance)
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