You know it's bad when the people being crucified with Jesus were mocking and reviling him. The Gospel writers paint a scene as bleak as it can be -- he cannot carry his own cross. He is stripped naked. Even the robbers dying with him seem to have more dignity than Jesus.
If humans were making up the story, this is the low point, right before Jesus would jump down off the cross and defeat the Romans, showing them who was really in charge. If it were a movie, Jesus would somehow manage to fight off individual soldiers despite crippling wounds suffered only moments earlier (I've never understood that part of action movies, and I've watched a lot of action movies).
But this isn't a human story. This is God's story, and so it doesn't end before his death. It continues to get worse, because Jesus will suffer a fate worse than any human ever has. He'll die there on the cross, and it will appear that all the mockers were correct about him, but only because there is more to the story than simply life and death. This is about eternity and eternal life, and it's a bigger battle than simply one man. He's fighting for what we cannot see, waging a war against the powers and principalities. Sin is bigger than Rome, bigger than death, and God will defeat it all, so God writes a bigger story than our minds can grasp.
So many who mocked him couldn't grasp this. Even the disciples, who fled for their lives, struggled to see it. It would be days before they began to see glimpses of what Jesus meant, and what God was doing.
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