I know we just celebrated thanksgiving and my talk today is ultimately about gratitude. But we’re going to take the long way to get there.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus suffered the pains and afflictions of every living creature. We can’t imagine what this must have been like. How sore we know not. How exquisite, we know not. How hard to bear we know not. But we do know that it caused even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain and to bleed from every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit and would that He might not take the bitter cup, and shrink. (D&C 19:16-19).
You would think that after suffering literally an infinite amount, Jesus’s work would be done. It wasn’t. He was betrayed by His friend. Abandoned by His disciples. Peter, His rock, denied knowing Him three times.
He spent the entire night being dragged from the Sanhedrin to Pilate to Herod and then back to Pilate. They called Him a liar, a blasphemer, a traitor. They spit on Him and mocked Him and beat Him bloody.
Christ had to watch as His chosen people chose to save a murderer and a criminal instead of their Messiah and their King. He staggered under the weight of the cross as the jeering crowds heaped scorn and abuse upon His head. They would not stop their mocking even after nails were pounded into His hands and feet.
To go through what Jesus did from the time of His arrest to the time they lifted Him up on the cross would have been extremely hard at the best of times, but He went through all of that after He had bled from every pore and collapsed multiple times begging His father to let this cup pass as the weight of the sins of everyone who ever lived pressed down on Him.
But after Gethsemane and the trials and the scourgings and the mocking crowds and dragging the cross up the hill with the very last trickle of His strength, He still had not reached the end of the road.
As President Holland taught us in his talk “None Were With Him,” “Now I speak very carefully, even reverently, of what may have been the most difficult moment in all of this solitary journey to atonement. I speak of those final moments for which Jesus must have been prepared intellectually and physically but which He may not have fully anticipated emotionally and spiritually—that concluding descent into the paralyzing despair of divine withdrawal when He cries in ultimate loneliness, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
For Christ’s entire life He had enjoyed the constant companionship of His Father. Christ carried out and lived and understood His Father’s will so perfectly and completely that His soul and His Father’s were knit together with every fiber and strand of their Beings. For Him to suffer the spiritual death of being completely cut off from the presence of God would have meant tearing apart and unraveling every nerve fiber, every molecule, every particle of His immortal soul.
In Psalms 22, we read “God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death. For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.”
What Jesus went through when He was cut off from His Father was, if anything, even worse than the suffering He had endured in Gethsemane. It was important in these final moments that Jesus Christ stood tall with His arms outstretched, lifted up for all who would look to Him and live. I don’t think that even Jesus would have been able to stand on His own in that darkest moment.
When none were with Him, when even His Father had forsaken Him, it was the cross that helped Jesus to stand tall in that last, most dreadful test. It was the cross that lifted up the hands that hung down and strengthened the feeble knees.
The Cross is the symbol of Christ not because it was an instrument of torture and death, but because it lifted Him up when he was at his lowest and kept Him on his feet with His arms outstretched when surely He had not an ounce of strength left. The Cross was a harsh mercy that helped keep Christ fixed in place so that He could see His mission through to the bitter end.
Christ proudly bears still the marks of the nails in His hands and His feet not just to remind us of what He did to save us from our sins, but also in gratitude for the iron hard resolve the nails gave Him to stand still and see the Salvation of the Lord be fulfilled.
We all have our crosses to bear. It can be hard to feel grateful when the nails tear through our flesh or our arms and our legs ache from the strain of trying to keep ourselves from collapsing. But when we get through to the other side and look back and realize that thanks to that cross, we were able to stand straight and tall even with the weight of the world on our shoulders, then we will see that the cross carried us through when we no longer had the strength to stand on our own.
If Christ needed the help of the cross to finish His mission, then surely we need it even more. I am grateful for the opportunities I have been given to be lifted up by the cross. I bear witness that there have been many days, even quite recently, that I would not have been able to get through on my own power.
