Press Forward Saints

The Death of the Lamb of God

It is popular in many religious traditions to focus on the extreme suffering of Jesus’s scourging and crucifixion, but the Gospels themselves are sparing of such brutal details. Instead, they emphasize the words and symbolic acts that fulfill prophecy. These include His crucifixion between two bandits or criminals; the division of His garments; the offering of cheap wine, or “vinegar” (Psalm 69:21) to assuage His thirst; the fact that His legs were not broken; and the piercing of His side. Significantly, the greatest suffering that our Lord experienced on the cross does not seem to be anything that man inflicted upon him. Jesus’s cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34) may reflect, as in Gethsemane, that His carrying the weight of our sins necessarily separated Him from His Father in a way that He had never experienced before.

Jesus died as a ransom for all. President Gordon B. Hinckley (1910–2008) taught:

“No member of this Church must ever forget the terrible price paid by our Redeemer, who gave His life that all men might live. …

“This was the cross, the instrument of His torture, the terrible device designed to destroy the Man of Peace, the evil recompense for His miraculous work of healing the sick, of causing the blind to see, of raising the dead. This was the cross on which He hung and died on Golgotha’s lonely summit.

“We cannot forget that. We must never forget it, for here our Savior, our Redeemer, the Son of God, gave Himself, a vicarious sacrifice for each of us.”

Jesus’s being lifted up upon the cross is a fundamental component of the gospel message as later defined by Jesus Himself to the Nephites when He promised that even as He was lifted up by men, so all men will “be lifted up by the Father, to stand before me” (3 Nephi 27:14–15). Foreshadowed by the brazen serpent that Moses raised in the wilderness, Jesus was lifted up that all might be saved if they would but look to Him (see Numbers 21:6–9; 1 Nephi 17:41; Alma 33:19–22.

The Gospel of John, which explicitly describes Jesus as “the Lamb of God” (John 1:29, 36), also connects the death of the Savior directly with the Passover. Jesus, as the unblemished or sinless lamb whose bones could not be broken (see Exodus 12:3, 5, 46), died so that spiritual death might “pass over” those who come unto Him. As the blood of the first Passover sacrifice was spread on the doors of each Israelite home, so too did the blood of Christ flow upon the wood of the cross. According to one approach to the chronology of the last week suggested by the Gospel of John, Passover actually began at sunset the day Jesus was crucified. In this scenario the paschal lambs, which were sacrificed before the beginning of Passover so that they would be ready in time for the Passover meal, would have been sacrificed in the temple at the very time that Jesus was dying on the cross.