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In the United States of America, there is a long-held tradition attempting to prohibit “cruel and unusual punishment,” which has been unevenly implemented. The Romans, on the other hand, went to great lengths to invent and enhance cruel and unusual ways of punishing people. Unfortunately, in today’s world, there are many governments and strongmen who do awful things to people to prove a point, change behavior, or terrify people. The Romans were brutally efficient at this tactic.

In 71 BC, 6,000 slaves were crucified along the Appian Way, a famous regional road. They had joined Spartacus’s rebellion and were punished by the regime. The crosses were lined up along 120 miles of the road, a gruesome reminder of who had power and who must submit. Jewish rebels faced a similar fate in 4 BC when 2,000 were crucified. The point was humiliation and terror.

When the leaders of the Jewish council, the Sanhedrin, compelled the Roman governor Pilate to crucify Jesus, it was the strangest arrangement. It shows the extent to which the leaders felt threatened and how much they despised Jesus, since they too felt the humiliation of the Roman occupation. This is one of the rare circumstances where they worked with Rome.

Amazingly, counter-intuitively, this outcome was exactly God’s chosen path to undermine oppressive regimes and redeem humanity. The Romans weren’t the problem. The Jewish leaders weren’t the problem. The powers of sin and death, along with fear, hatred, jealousy, and a host of other troubled emotions, gripped their hearts. These powers are the enemies Jesus came to defeat. He came to invite all people, the oppressors and the oppressed alike, back into what it means to be truly human. Jesus expresses this purpose in different ways. One famous way is: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” and “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:29–31).

It’s deeply meaningful the way Jesus died. The hymn to Jesus in Philippians 2:5–11 says, “He humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!” The Jewish leaders were capable of enforcing their own laws, executing someone by crushing them with rocks as the law dictated. But they could not crucify. Jesus not only stepped into the human experience of death; He took on the death of a criminal. But it wasn’t the normal execution. It was the humiliating, excruciating death on a cross. He suffered the worst available torture to enter into the experience of the most vulnerable and the most oppressed. 

The resurrection of Jesus overturned the unjust verdict of death by crucifixion. He promises the same for those who trust His way of salvation. Replying to a trick question, Jesus clarifies, “But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.” (Matthew 22:31–32).

The God of the living sees suffering, and it grieves Him. By His Spirit, Jesus wants to enter into even the most painful situations to bring peace and joy.