Why the Cross? (Good Friday 2025)

On that first Good Friday, the religious leaders had Jesus killed. It was the culmination of their long plan to do away with Jesus.

We read this past fall how, after a confrontation regarding the Sabbath, “the Pharisees went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him” (Matthew 12:14).

John, recounting a similar experience, says “This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5:18).

And this conflict was enough to shape Jesus' ministry. John 7:1 says “After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He would not go about in Judea, because the Jews were seeking to kill him” (John 7:1).

Good Friday was the completion of a long conspiracy against Christ.

Several times attempts were made to arrest Jesus.

• “So they were seeking to arrest him, but no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come” (John 7:30).
• “The Pharisees heard the crowd muttering these things about him, and the chief priests and Pharisees sent officers to arrest him” (John 7:32).
• “Some of them wanted to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him” (John 7:44).
• “Again they sought to arrest him, but he escaped from their hands” (John 10:39).

Not only were several arrest attempts made, but at least three significant attempts on Jesus' life had been made.

In Luke chapter 4, we read about Jesus teaching in his hometown, and speaking about God's salvation for the gentiles. And verse 28 says that “When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, he went away” (Luke 4:28–30).

In John 8, after proclaiming that "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58), we read that “they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple” (John 8:59).

Two chapters later, after proclaiming "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30), “The Jews picked up stones again to stone him” (John 10:31).

Three separate attempts on his life. One by falling, two by stoning.

I want to ask us this morning: what if Jesus had died in one of those earlier attempts? We know that He didn't because it wasn't his time, but what if it had been his time? What if that is how the Son of God was to die for our sins—instead of on a cross, crushed to death by rocks like Stephen?

What if, instead of a cross, we had a pile of stones in the corner to remember the death of Jesus?

What would be different? That's how Stephen died, and we remember him as a martyr and a hero. Could we not just as easily this morning sing about the power of the rocks instead of the power of the cross?

That would have been Pontius Pilate's preference. In John 18:31, we read that “Pilate said to them, ‘Take him yourselves and judge him by your own law.’ The Jews said to him, ‘It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death.’”

Technically, they were right, although that didn't stop them from trying to stone Jesus multiple times, or from stoning Stephen later on. It seems like officially the Romans didn't let the Jews put people to death, but they looked the other way often enough.

Why did Jesus so carefully arrange the circumstances that it was not the heat of a mob putting him to death with whatever rocks they had on hand, but the careful, calculated plan of the Sanhedrin who had to work with Pilate to ensure a proper Roman execution?

Why crucifixion?

And the answer is that Jesus chose crucifixion because no other form of death communicated what needed to be communicated.

Many common sinners and some martyrs (2 Chronicles 24:21) had been killed by stoning—a form of execution that was relatively quick. Rocks pummelled one's body until blood loss or brain trauma caused death.

Crucifixion, on the other hand, was the most prolonged, painful, and utterly shameful form of death imaginable.

Many of us know about the physical details of crucifixion—suspended by nails, having to push oneself up to take a breath, how suffocation was typically the final cause of death after what could be days of agony.

And the whole time, there was a crowd there to watch you slowly die. With stoning, the crowd was occupied with picking up and throwing stones, and it might he hard to see exactly what was happening in the hail of rocks until the deed was done and the person had died.

With crucifixion, after the soldiers did their initial work, gravity and the nails did the rest. The cross did the killing. And the crowd could stand around and watch.

We often miss the shame of crucifixion. Victims were stripped naked, and hanging there for days, their bodily functions on display for everybody to see. Crucifixion was the Roman empire's way of saying that someone was garbage. After death, bodies were often left up on a cross to rot and be picked at by crows, or thrown in a ditch to be eaten by dogs.

You might not think that this is polite to talk about in church, but that's the entire point. Everybody in the ancient world knew about this. This was a part of the shame and scandal of the cross.

Crucifixion was such a shameful form of death that if a family member was crucified, it would destroy that family's reputation permanently. Polite people didn't talk about crucifixion in high society. The cross was the stuff of nightmares.

And Jesus chose crucifixion. Why?

Because no other form of death accurately conveyed the horror of our sin. We spoke in Sunday school last week about how suffering and pain are God's ways of communicating the reality of our sin.

For Jesus to die as a sacrifice for sin, His death had to communicate the infinite horror of sin. We are supposed to think of Jesus on a cross, nails slowly ripping further into his flesh with each breath, and see the horror of our sin.

That's what that arrogant thought or you had yesterday, or that angry word you spoke earlier this week, actually deserves.

Romans 3:25 says that God "put" Jesus "forward" on the cross. Galatians 3:1 says that It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified.”

The public gruesomeness is the point because God wanted us to see the price for sin.

There's also the curse of the law spoken against those who hang on a tree — “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”—’” (Galatians 3:13).

To the Jewish people, the cross did not just speak of the curse of Rome but the curse of God.

To be cursed by God is to loose everything. Instead of God being for us, his curse means he is against us. Instead of his face shining upon us, he turns his face away. Instead of peace, there is his wrath.

Jesus chose the cross because no other form of death would have communicated the divine curse that He bore in our place as He who knew no sin was made sin for us.

But friends, this is the miracle of Good Friday— that we even call it Good Friday in the first place. That the horrific cross became the wonderful cross.

Because those are our sins He is being crucified for. That is our curse He bears. It is for crimes we've committed that He struggles for His next breath.

Even if it would have been possible in the grand scheme of things for Jesus to die under a pile of rocks, that would not have come close to communicating the deep, deep love of Jesus for His Father and for His people. He chose the worst, most painful, most shameful, most agonizing form of death imaginable to show us the depths of His obedience and the depths of His love.

“And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8).

“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24).

So we can look at the cross and know that it had to be a cross and know that the horrific, nightmarish cross has become the wonderful cross.

The cross of blood and shame becomes our hope and even our boast. “But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Galatians 6:14).

Every good thing was bought for us there. The glory of Jesus, displayed there. The love of God, displayed there. Our only hope—displayed there.

This morning is a chance for us to survey the wonderful cross.

And not just to survey this one time, as a yearly exercise, but to stay fixated on the cross, not allowing our gaze to be pulled away.