Twelve Legions, Unused

Come down, and we'll believe. That was the offer nailed up over Him that day, and it wasn't just an insult. It was a real proposition, stated in the crowd's own terms of proof:

You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.— Matthew 27:40, ESV

It sounds almost fair, if you don't know what you're asking. One motion, and the argument's over. Every doubter standing at the foot of that hill might go home settled.

What could it possibly cost Him to take the deal?

I know that pull, if only in shadow of it. Reading that verse, I can still hear the sarcasm in it: something like the arrogant pride and joy of men who thought they'd finally cornered God. And in my own more youthful days, the daily call of discipleship, the ordinary self-sacrifice it asks for, made me want to step down from the obligation. Nothing like what He carried; I was never in excruciating pain. But I wanted the comfort exit strategy. I could still step away from obedience, just as His obedience was not forced upon Him. The difference between us was immeasurable: I looked for relief from small sacrifices; He refused deliverance from the cross. There is an old hymn about ten thousand angels waiting at His command. Its pivotal truth is not that the angels were powerful enough to rescue Him. It is that He never called them. I have sung that line while knowing how quickly I look for rescue from far smaller obediences.

He'd already turned it down — hours earlier, in a garden, with a sword drawn and a friend's ear on the ground. This is what He said before the mocking ever started:

Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so? — Matthew 26:53–54, ESV

Let's reason together on this piece. Twelve legions. Standing by. One word away. The crowd thought it was handing Him an exit no one had considered. He had already answered that question before the first nail went in. Coming down would have proved He had the power. It never would have proved why He came. What held Him there wasn't a locked door. It was obedience — the kind Paul would later put into words:

And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.— Philippians 2:8, ESV

The Scriptures had to be fulfilled. That's the reason the text gives, and it doesn't ask us to admire the suffering so much as the staying. Here's the part worth being precise about: He didn't stay so His people would never suffer. That was never the promise, and it isn't even what the story offers. Staying wasn't strength on display for its own sake. Obedience always has an object, someone or something it answers to, and

Scripture is specific about what that was here:

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.— 1 Peter 2:24, ESV

Not a shortcut around suffering. A substitution underneath it.

And what they wanted to see didn't come that afternoon. It came three days later, when He was:

declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.— Romans 1:4, ESV

Not by coming down. By coming back.