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Resurrection Sunday is definitely the best day of the year, as we sing the glorious truth that Christ the Lord is risen! But back in the day, when the disciples were expecting Jesus to save them from Rome, they never expected him to die—and certainly not to die on a cross because that was cursed by God.
But it was totally necessary for Jesus to die if any of us could be forgiven. You see, even if each of us were to pay for our sins, we would simply die in our sins. We would pay the price—death—but there would be no redemption. Jesus paid the price for our sins. Because he was the perfect Son of God, he was qualified to die for our sins because he did not have to die for his own sins. He took our sins on himself and paid the price we could never pay so that those sins could be forgiven and we could have access to God through Jesus and his sacrifice.
Furthermore, the payment for sin had to come through the shedding of blood. Hebrews 9:22 tells us: “In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” So, the death that Jesus died had to be one where his blood was shed; it could not be a bloodless death. The cross was God’s choice for the death of his Son—the shameful cross—because in that way his blood was shed, and Jesus took that curse that we deserved and paid the penalty that we owed. Galatians 3:13 says, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole.’”
The good news is that even though the wages of sin is death, the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 6:23). It’s good for us to get a renewed and deeper understanding of why Jesus died and why he died on a cross.
As clueless as the disciples were while Jesus was with them, once they “got it,” once they began to see why Jesus came to die and why he died on a cross, and they saw that he triumphed over death and rose from the grave, then when they were indwelled with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, their whole attitude toward the cross changed. Their hopes were dramatically restored and they had unshakable faith in their crucified risen Messiah.