"A group of women were there standing around the foot of the cross. He spoke to them one time. There was an older woman and she seemed very emotionally distraught. It might have been His aunt or grandmother or mother. I don't know who she was, but He talked to her. Then you know in a relatively short period of time He died. Six or seven hours. I've seen men stay on that cross a week before they died. I guess they just beat Him half to death before He ever got there, but when He died something else happened."

"The sky became dark. Some people said there were earthquakes. Rumors started flying everywhere. Someone said they saw ghosts in the city. I have never seen anything like that in all of my life. And when He died I just screamed out. I'd had enough! I screamed out, 'This man surely was the Son of God.' Then I looked around and I was afraid some of my officers heard me and then I said, 'Well, I don't care! I don't care whether they heard me or not.'"

"What I saw today, I've never seen before in all of my life. On the way home I just couldn't get it out of my mind, those prayers, and oh, those eyes." The wife said, "It's a shame someone like that has to die." He said, "You know, I can't explain it, it's almost as if His life was not taken from him, it was almost as if in some strange, weird way He gave His life."

Why would He go through all of that? Why would He suffer the horror and humiliation of the cross? John Boyle was one of my professors at Southern Seminary. He told the true story of a young chaplain who was about to conduct his first communion service. In the small chapel there, inhabited by the patients of the mental hospital, he started into the liturgy of the communion service. He had gotten through a few sentences when all of a sudden a patient in the little chapel stood up and began to scream. Please allow me to quote the patient directly. The patient said, "Go to hell!"

The young chaplain was flabbergasted, panic stricken, taken aback so that he could not say a single word. An eerie silence circulated in and through the little chapel. The silence was broken by another patient when he said, "He did. He came here.'

"Alas and did my Savior bleed, And did my Sovereign die? Would He devote that sacred head for sinners such as I." "But God commended His love toward us that in while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).

Christ died for us. His life was not taken. It was given willingly, openly, without hesitation for us. Christ died for us even while we were yet sinners. Because there are certain things Christ knew we could not do for ourselves, He took the cross that He might do them for us. He knew we could not live without dignity. He died to allow us to have dignity and worth.

Forrest Carter has written a beautiful book entitled The Education of Little Tree. It is the story of a small Indian boy reared by his grandparents, his parents having died. He tells the story of Coon Jack. Little Tree and his grandpa went to the small church that they attended to a testimony meeting. Coon Jack stood in the testimony meeting and said something like this, "Now, I know there are a lot of people here who are jealous of me -- jealous of me ever since the deacon board gave me the key to the song book box. I'm tired of it! I'm tired of you talking about me." With that he pulled back his coat and there was exposed the handle of a pistol. A deacon in the church got up and said, "Coon Jack, if you have been offended by any person in this room, we're sorry." With that he sat down and Coon Jack was happy.