Jesus Suffering On The Cross Quotes & Sayings

The Cross is not simply a lovely example of sacrificial love. Throwing your life away needlessly is not admirable - it is wrong. Jesus' death was only a good example if it was more than an example, if it was something absolutely necessary to rescue us. And it was. Why did Jesus have to die in order to forgive us? There was a debt to be paid - God himself paid it. There was a penalty to be born - God himself bore it. Forgiveness is always a form of costly suffering. — Timothy Keller

We are closest to Christ when sharing the world's misery. Think you Jesus came to remove our pains? Wherever did you get that notion? The Lord came, not to remove our suffering, but to show us the way through it to the glory beyond. We can overcome our travails. That is the promise of the cross. — Stephen R. Lawhead

There is another reason also why the soul has traveled safely in this obscurity; it has suffered: for the way of suffering is safer, and also more profitable, than that of rejoicing and of action. In suffering God gives strength, but in action and in joy the soul does but show its own weakness and imperfections. And in suffering, the soul practices and acquires virtue, and becomes pure, wiser, and more cautious. — San Juan De La Cruz

The specific sufferings of Jesus do not amount to redemption: rather, redemption is wrought through the uniqueness of the person who suffered and the perfect charity for which, in which and by which he suffered. The uniqueness of the suffering of Christ, then, lies in the pro knobs, which is bound to the freedom through which the Son endures "every human suffering" on account of love. To say that Jesus endured "every human suffering" does not mean that he specifically suffered every thing that every person ever did or could suffer, but the he "sums up" in this Passion the suffering so fate world, mystically including them in his own suffering and recapitulating them in the form of perfect love. The whole weight of this psychological and physical dereliction of humanity is, in Christ, suffered and sorrowed now within God himself, in the sense that the human sufferings of Christ are "one" with the divine filial relation that constitutes his unity with the Father. — Aaron Riches

His cry on the cross was our cry of desperate alienation from God taken up into his and transformed through the resurrection. As we allow ourselves to experience our own pain, we can know that what we feel is Christ suffering in us and redeeming us. Rather than condemning ourselves for our weakness and making self-conscious efforts to try harder, we can allow the Crucified to love us in our brokenness. There is no way of healing from the wounds each of us carries except through the love of Jesus that forgives seventy times seven and keeps no score of our wrongdoing. — Brennan Manning

Saul fell upon his sword to avoid suffering. Jesus stretched himself upon the cross to take away ours.
Saul's suicide cheated his enemies. Jesus' sacrifice cheated death. — Lisa Bevere

Our tendency in the midst of suffering is to turn on God. To get angry and bitter and shake our fist at the sky and say, "God, you don't know what it's like! You don't understand! You have no idea what I'm going through. You don't have a clue how much this hurts."
The cross is God's way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments.
The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, "Me too. — Rob Bell

If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof. And of course that is the only way it could be. If it could be somehow proved, then we would have no choice but to believe. We would lose our freedom not to believe. And in the very moment that we lost that freedom, we would cease to be human beings. Our love of God would have been forced upon us, and love that is forced is of course not love at all. Love must be freely given. Love must live in the freedom not to love; it must take risks. Love must be prepared to suffer even as Jesus on the Cross suffered, and part of that suffering is doubt. — Frederick Buechner

It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Jesus has many who love the kingdom of God, but few who bear a cross. He has many who desire His comfort, but few who desire His suffering. All want to rejoice with him, but few are willing to suffer for Him. He writes; there are many who admire his miracles, but there are few who follow in the humiliation of the cross. — Thomas A Kempis

And take up their cross. That cross is already there, ready, from the very beginning; we need only take it up. But to keep us from believing that we must simply choose any arbitrary cross, or simply pick out our suffering as we will, Jesus emphasizes that each of us has his or her own cross, ready, appointed, and appropriately measured by God.1 — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

He was without any comforts of God - no feeling that God loved him - no
feeling that God pitied him - no feeling that God supported him. God was his
sun before - now that sun became all darkness ... He was without God - he
was as if he had no God. All that God had been to him before was taken from
him now. He was Godless - deprived of his God. He had the feeling of the
condemned, when the Judge says: "Depart from me, ye cursed," "who shall
be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and
from the glory of his power." He felt that God said the same to him. Ah! This is
the hell which Christ suffered. The ocean of Christ's sufferings is
unfathomable ... He was forsaken in the [place] of sinners. If you close with him
as your surety, you will never be forsaken ... "My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?" [The answer?] For me - for me. — Robert Murray McCheyne

One of my young married students has suffered all her life because she was taught in her Church that she was born so sinful that the only way the wrath of God the Father could be appeased enough for him to forgive all her horrible sinfulness was for God the Son to die in agony on the cross. Without his suffering, the Father would remain angry forever with all his Creation.
Many of us have had a least part of that horror thrust on us at one time or other inour childhood. For many reasons I never went to Sunday School, so I was spared having a lot of peculiar teaching to unlearn. It's only lately that I've discovered that it was no less a person than St. Anselm who saw the atonement in terms of appeasement of an angry God, from which follows immediately the heresy that Jesus came to save us from God the Father. — Madeleine L'Engle

Faith is an action. He (one criminal on the cross) puts himself one step lower than where he was, sharing Jesus' place of poverty, insecurity, and the focus of rage. Remember me. And he will be remembered, because of his association with the Crucified One. — Megan McKenna

Jesus didn't have to extend His love. He didn't have to think of me when He went up on that cross. He didn't have to rewrite my story from one of beauty to one of brokenness and create a whole new brand of beauty. He simply didn't have to do it, but He did. He bought me. He bought me that day He died, and He showed His power when He overcame death and rose from the grave. He overcame my death in that moment. He overcame my fear of death in that unbelievable, beautiful moment, and the fruit of that death, that resurrection, and that stunning grace is peace. It is the hardest peace, because it is brutal. Horribly brutal and ugly, and we want to look away, but it is the greatest, greatest story that ever was. And it was, and it is. — Kara Tippetts

Jesus does not suffer so as to exclude your suffering. He bears a cross, not that you may escape it, but that you may endure it. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. ~ Isaiah 53:2-3 Isaiah's the Suffering Servant songs paint a picture of someone who has experienced rejection, dis-appointment, and even abuse. Jesus' suffering on the cross is well known, but Isaiah also points to the anguish of heart: the feelings our Lord experienced among his own people. In the opening of his — Ray Hollenbach

O endure the cross is not tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

To know the Cross is not merely to know our own sufferings. For the Cross is the sign of salvation, and no man is saved by his own sufferings. To know the Cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ; more, it is to know the love of Christ Who underwent suffering and death in order to save us. It is, then, to know Christ. — Thomas Merton

The Cross is the equivalent of the Ephesus stoning. To say that Jesus identifies himself with all victims is to say that he identifies himself not only with the adulterous woman or the Suffering Servant but also with the beggar of Ephesus. Jesus is this poor wretch of a beggar. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - — Rene Girard

God doesn't give us a nice tidy answer on why suffering and evil exist, but he does blatantly and explicitly show us what the reason isn't. Knowing what Jesus did on the cross, his love is too potent and too obvious for us to say he must not care. A God who hates suffering and evil just as much as we do was willing to subject himself to it in order to reconcile us to him. He got involved in our mess. He got involved in our hurt. He got involved in our pain. — Jefferson Bethke

The Cross of Christ bears the suffering and the sin of mankind, including our own. Jesus accepts all this with open arms, bearing on His shoulders our crosses and saying to us: 'Have courage! You do not carry your cross alone! I carry it with you. I have overcome death and I have come to give you hope, to give you life' (John 3:16). — Pope Francis

The key to understnading masculinity is Jesus Christ. Jesus was tough with religious blockheads, false teachers, the proud, and bullies. Jesus was tender with women, children, and those who were suffering or humble. Additionally, Jesus took responsability for Himself. He worked a jon for the first thirty years of His life, swinging a hammer as a carpenter. He also took responsability for us on the cross, where He substituted Himself and died in our place for our sins. My sins are my fault, not Jesus'fault, but Jesus has made them His responsability. This is the essence of the gospel, the "good news". If you understand this, it will change how you view masculinity. — Mark Driscoll

Jesus' call to bear the cross places all who follow him in the community of the forgiveness of sins. Forgiving sins is the Christ-suffering required of his disciples. It is required of all Christians. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The second call

The first call is frequently to follow Jesus or to prepare ourselves to do wonderful and noble things for the Kingdom. We are appreciated and admired by family, by friends or by the community. The second call comes later, when we accept that we cannot do big or heroic things for Jesus; it is a time of renunciation, humiliation and humility. We feel useless; we are no longer appreciated. If the first passage is made at high noon, under a shining sun, the second call is often made at night. We feel alone and are afraid because we are in a world of confusion. We begin to doubt the commitment we made in the light of day. We seem deeply broken in some way. But this suffering is not useless. Through the renunciation we can reach a new wisdom of love. It is only through the pain of the cross that we discover what the resurrection means. — Jean Vanier

Jesus says that every Christian has his own cross waiting for him, a cross destined and appointed by God. Each must endure his allotted share of suffering and rejection. But each has a different share: some God deems worthy of the highest form of suffering, and gives them the grace of martyrdom, while others he does not allow to be tempted above that which they are able to bear. But it is the one and the same cross in every case. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Why must we suffer? Because here below pure Love cannot exist without suffering. O Jesus, Jesus, I no longer feel my cross when I think of yours. — Bernadette Soubirous

It is You Jesus, stretched out on the cross, who gives me strength and are always close to the suffering soul. Creatures will abandon a person in his suffering, but You, O Lord, are faithful ... — Mary Faustina Kowalska

What does hanging on a cross for twenty-four hours mean to a man who has no children,' I said, 'especially when he knows he's dying for a good cause -- indeed, that he's saving the whole world and then going straight into the best place in Heaven? What's that compared to the suffering I've had to put up with for months and years with the house full of children, when for many whole nights I've shrieked with pain unceasingly and without relief, and I'll soon be dead, and that without having anything to die for; and there'll be no heavenly Kingdom for me, for I know the children will go on crying when I'm dead, and swearing and quarrelling, and begging for milk they can't get. — Halldor Laxness

The only restorative for a guilty conscience is a sight of Jesus suffering on the cross. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Would it be worth it to pick up my cross and be crucified next to Jesus? If He is not God, then, no. Lose everything I love to worship a false God? A million times over, no!

But if He is God, then yes. Being forever bonded to my Lord by suffering alongside Him? A million times over, yes! — Nabeel Qureshi

Gideon conquers, the church conquers, we conquer, because faith conquers. But the victory belongs not to Gideon, the church, or ourselves, but to God. And God's victory means our defeat, our humiliation; it means God's derision and wrath at all human pretensions of might, at humans puffing themselves up and thinking they are somebodies themselves. It means the world and its shouting is silenced, that all our ideas and plans are frustrated; it means the cross. The cross over the world
that means that human beings, even the most noble, go down to dust whether it suits them or not, and with them all the gods and idols and lords of this world. The cross of Jesus Christ
that means God's bitter mockery of all human grandeur and God's bitter suffering in all human misery, God's lordship over all the world. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Would you like to know where Jesus feeds His flock? Deny yourself and take up your cross, then you can be sure of following Him. Would you like to know where He rests at noon? Once He rested in the bosom of the Father, now He rests in the heart of every believer who gives Him room. But He is preeminently resting in the hearts of the believers who are suffering and in the hearts of those who have purified themselves from an attachment to created things, so that they may abide entirely in the Creator (John 15:4). — Richard Wurmbrand

We must be so careful that we do not refuse the cross that the Lord has given us to carry. Let us remember that our present sufferings serve to prepare us for entering into the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. — Corrie Ten Boom

Look at Jesus Christ. Every time he was in trouble he used the Word of God. When he was tempted he used the Word. When he was suffering on the cross he used the Word. — Timothy Keller

As the floods of God
Wash away sin city
They say it was written
In the page of the Lord
But I was looking
For that great jazz note
That destroyed
The walls of Jericho
The winds of fear
Whip away the sickness
The messages on the tablet
Was valium
As the planets form
That golden cross Lord
I'll see you on
The holy cross roads
After all this time
To believe in Jesus
After all those drugs
I thought I was Him
After all my lying
And a-crying
And my suffering
I ain't good enough
I ain't clean enough
To be Him
The tribal wars
Burning up the homeland
The fuel of evil
Is raining from the sky
The sea of lava
Flowing down the mountain
The time will sleep
Us sinners by
Holy rollers roll
Give generously now
Pass the hubcap please
Thank you Lord — Joe Strummer

Adam returned his gaze to the cross. The Jesus was hurting. Guilt simmered and then boiled in him. Jesus had a whole world of suffering and horror to worry about and here Adam was in all his punk puniness. He didn't want to add to Jesus's burdens, but...

'Sorry about that. Look, I know you're busy and I don't want to get greedy with your time, but still, if you could just help me... If you could find a minute, please, please, please, dear sweet Jesus, fix me. — Teresa Toten

The cross is a very powerful symbol and it symbolizes suffering, but it also is connected to a person who was loving and sharing and his message was about unconditional love. I tried to take a powerful image and use it to draw attention to a situation that needs attention. For me, we all need to be Jesus in our time. Jesus' message was to love your neighbor as yourself and these are people in need. — Madonna Ciccone

To endure the cross is not a tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ. When it comes, it is not an accident, but a necessity. It is not the sort of suffering which is inseparable from this mortal life, but the suffering which is an essential part of the specifically Christian life. It is not suffering per se but suffering-and-rejection, and not rejection for any cause or conviction of our own, but rejection for the sake of Christ. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Love, not anger, brought Jesus to the cross. Golgotha came as a result of God's great desire to forgive, not his reluctance. Jesus knew that by his vicarious suffering he could actually absorb all the evil of humanity and so heal it, forgive it, redeem it. — Richard J. Foster

The cross is not a sign of the church's quiet, suffering submission to the powers-that-be, but rather the church's revolutionary participation in the victory of Christ over those powers. The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God's account of reality more seriously than Caesar's. The cross stands as God's (and our) eternal no to the powers of death, as well as God's eternal yes to humanity, God's remarkable determination not to leave us to our own devices. — Stanley Hauerwas

Jesus is no draughtsman of political blueprints, he is the one who vanquished evil through suffering. It looked as though evil had triumphed on the cross, but the real victory belonged to
Jesus. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In His thirty-three years on earth, Jesus suffered with man; on the cross He suffered for man. — Billy Graham

God still speaks to us. He speaks not from a life of ease, far removed from our suffering. He speaks from the cross, the same place of agony where we live. He speaks as one who joins our suffering wherever we are. He blesses us as he says, "I am with you now in your suffering. Take courage. Soon you will be with me in Paradise." So we realize that from the cross Jesus enacts the words of Aaron's benediction. Lifted on the rough beams, Jesus is yet God shining on us in favor. Even when we killed him, Jesus was gracious to us. Lined with pain, cut and bleeding, his countenance yet radiated love. The most shameful thing human beings have ever done, putting the incarnate Son of God to death, has become the greatest sign of his blessing grace. — Gerrit Scott Dawson

Jesus Christ has taken the lead on the way of the cross. He has suffered first. He does not drive us toward suffering but shares it with us, wanting us to have life and to have it in abundance. — Pope John Paul II

Prayer for a Time of Suffering O Lord Jesus, by your incomparable sadness and by the unparalleled desolation that seized your divine heart on the Mount of Olives and on the Cross, and by the desolation of your dear Mother when she lost you, be our joy, or at least be our strength, now while your Cross and Passion are so closely joined to our hearts. — Francis De Sales

Jesus Christ was the only one capable of performing the magnificent Atonement because He was the only perfect man and the Only Begotten Son of God the Father. He received His commission for this essential work from His Father before the world was established. His perfect mortal life devoid of sin, the shedding of His blood, His suffering in the garden and upon the cross, His voluntary death, and the Resurrection of His body from the tomb made possible a full Atonement for people of every generation and time. — Cecil O. Samuelson

When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters into the finitude of man, but in his death on the cross also enters into the situation of man's godforsakenness. In Jesus he does not die the natural death of a finite being, but the violent death of the criminal on the cross, the death of complete abandonment by God. The suffering in the passion of Jesus is abandonment, rejection by God, his Father. God does not become a religion, so that man participates in him by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings. God does not become a law, so that man participates in him through obedience to a law. God does not become an ideal, so that man achieves community with him through constant striving. He humbles himself and takes upon himself the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with him. — Jurgen Moltmann

Let us remember: when we talk of the rending of the veil we are speaking in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and death no death at all. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free. — A.W. Tozer

What is the "extraordinary"? It is the love of Jesus Christ himself, love that goes to the cross in suffering obedience. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Suffering, sin, and evil are no longer located in God's will, but are understood as arising within a finite, open, developmental, and future-oriented creation. They are dealt with by the power of God's love revealed in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. God's answer to the problem of woundedness and wickedness is not to show us now or in the eschaton how they fit into God's design or mosaic, but to show us how God overcomes the brokenness and maliciousness of the creation now and in the eschaton through the redemptive power of the cross and resurrection. Divine power is rethought as the suffering and transforming power of Jesus' cross and resurrection, not as the omnipotent power of the timeless will of God. Incarnation, instead of immutability, defines God's will and way. God is the suffering and transforming God. — Tyron Inbody

If we read the text alone, assuming that the word 'cross' can only derive its meaning from the later death of Jesus, then its appearance in the text must be an anachronism read back into the story after the crucifixion. This conclusion becomes unnecessary if the cross, being the standard punishment for insurrection or for the refusal to confess Caesar's lordship, already had a clear definition in the listener's awareness. 'Take up your cross' may even have been a standard phrase of Zealot recruiting. The disciple's cross is not a metaphor for self-mortification or even generally innocent suffering; 'if you follow me, your fate will be like mine, the fate of a revolutionary. You cannot follow me without facing that fate. — John Howard Yoder

Carrying the cross does mean following in Jesus' footsteps. And in His footsteps are rejection, brokenheartedness, persecution and death. There are not two Christ's - an easy going one for easy going Christians, and a suffering one for exceptional believers. There is only one Christ. Are we willing to follow His lead? — Hudson Taylor

All those who belong to Jesus Christ are fastened with Him to the cross. — Saint Augustine

The cross is the place where heaven meets earth and grace erupts. The cross is the place where Jesus does not simply meet our suffering, but becomes our suffering so as to transform the world. — Matt Farlow

Make a little bouquet of the sufferings of Jesus and carry them in the bosom of the soul. — Paul Of The Cross

Jesus comes from Nazareth, a town from which folks said nothing good could come. He knew suffering from the moment he entered the world as a baby refugee born in the middle of a genocide. Jesus knew poverty and pain until he was tortured and executed on a Roman cross. This is the Jesus we are called to follow. With his coming we learn that the most dangerous place for Christians to be is in comfort and safety, detached from the suffering of others. Places that are physically safe can be spiritually deadly. — Shane Claiborne

Jesus isn't suffering day after day for your sin. He sits triumphantly at the right hand of God and has won the final and decisive victory for you. If constant lamenting over your sin could actually help you atone for it, then it would be a noble act. However, since there is nothing to be added to your salvation and your agony contributes nothing to your salvation or sanctification, then you are free to walk through life with confidence in your forgiveness. Godly sorrow for sin does not lead to self-condemnation and attempts to atone for your sins through acts of penance. Godly sorrow leads to repentance, which leads us to the cross. There we see, once again, the beautiful sufficiency of our marvelous Savior. Godly sorrow leads us on to a big party, another glorious celebration of the truth of the gospel. — Barbara R. Duguid