Life Conquers Death Meditations on the Garden, the Cross, and the Tree of Life
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Anthony Bloom used to say that tradition is the living faith of dead people, and traditionalism is the dead faith of living people.
Perhaps he has read the ironic superscription recorded in Greek by Luke as "this is the king of the Jews", and he had seen more deeply into its essential meaning than had those only response was mockery and cynicism. More likely it was the Aramaic form "Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews" he read, for he addressed Jesus by name.
This is the only place in the Gospels where anyone simply addressed our lord as "Jesus", the name which is above every name and which, after all, is a simple sentence meaning "God saves".
The thief on the right hand on the cross was the only one who ever refers to Jesus as "Jesus" in the Gospel.
It was appropriate that the Son of Man, when He was seen to be the Son of God, should suffer. It was a moral necessity and a divine obligation. It was not inevitable, but it was a conscious choice.
If the man who dies on the cross is not God himself, then the cross is simply one tragedy among many, and God loses evil more moral credibility.
A man from whom you have taken everything is no longer in your power. He is free all over again.
It is great imaginative writers like Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare who can recreate from introspection the truth that is stranger than either fiction or history.
The survivor is a sign of hope - but only if you survives not just biologically, not just as an animal but as a human being, with his moral and emotional faculties intact and purified.