There is a question that has nagged me for years since I first heard the story of the cross but I never dare ask it. I did not want to be irreverent…it must be something I’m missing but how can I ask and not be stoned 😅. But Job questioned God and Jacob wrestled with Him and neither of them were struck by lightning so maybe it’s OK to ask? ## What is the Cost? All the faithful spoke of how much Jesus suffered. The cross, the nails, the weight of all our sin laid on Him. They spoke of the cost, and I believed them. But still, I keep wondering…what exactly is this cost for God - the creator of all? He is God. Whatever the price was, of course He could pay it. He planned the method by which He would rescue His children and it was the only way. He knew He would die a human death and then would rise 3 days later. He knew what it would take to redeem His children and He knew it must be done but it is His plan and it will be done to His will. So when I heard that He paid so dearly, part of me wondered, dearly compared to what? For the One who holds all things and is eternal, what is loss? Let me start with what I do not doubt. He did not have to do any of it. However, in a fallen world we cannot simply decide to be good and if He left us to our choices we would be lost. Given the choice, again and again, we do not choose Him. Without grace, we are lost. And He would not force us, because love that is forced is not love. But He would not leave us to our ruin either. So He took a third way. He came down and paid it Himself. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Not once we had cleaned ourselves up. While we were still in the wrong. And it was not nothing to Him. In the garden, before a single soldier arrived, He was already in anguish. “Let this cup pass from me,” He prayed, “yet not as I will, but as You will” (Matthew 26:39). Something in that cup was heavy enough to make God in flesh tremble and ask for another way. So the question only grows sharper. What was in the cup? What does it cost Jesus? ## Wolverine?! Here is where my mind went somewhere strange. I thought of Wolverine. In the comics, Wolverine didn’t have super strength. He wasn’t invulnerable. Bullets didn’t bounce off him. Wolverine has the ability to heal from all wounds but he still feels all the pain the wounds cause but somehow knowing he can heal allows him to move forward. Any wound closes over and vanishes. He seemingly cannot be killed. So he throws himself into fights that would destroy anyone else. He takes pain that should be unbearable, because he knows that in a moment the wound will be gone, as if it never happened. Even his mind seems to scar over and keep going. He carries the bitterness of all of it, but his body always comes back whole. So when I first heard the story of the cross, I kept thinking of Wolverine and thought, the cost had to be more than just physical pain or even death since death and pain would not be something God would fear. Jesus knew He could not stay dead. He knew the pain was temporary. He knew Sunday was coming. So it can’t be this simple, Jesus could braced for what was to come the way Wolverine braces, enduring pain He knew would pass. ## The Cup is Heavy But there is the matter of the cup that Jesus asked the Father to take away. What’s in the cup? The deepest wound on the cross was not in the body. Wolverine’s pain is flesh, and flesh heals. For one moment, holding the full weight of our sin, He was cut off from the Father. “My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” He cried (Matthew 27:46). A moment is nothing against eternity. But think about what broke at that moment. The Son had been one with the Father for all of eternity, in a communion with no beginning. To be severed from that, even once, even for a breath, is a loss we have no way to measure. It is hard to imagine what could frighten God… but maybe this did. That’s then is the real cost - the separation from God. Christian often proclaim how God sent His son to die for us on the cross. To die in our place but if it is just a death and pain of the cross then didn’t the martyr do the same - they die while singing praise to the Lord. This misses the mark, I think. Death and pain is not the cost, the true cost is the separation from God that’s what we are spared by Jesus' sacrifice. ## The Wounds He Kept And then there is the part that finally settled it for me. When Jesus rose, His wounds did not disappear. Wolverine comes back from every battle smooth. Skin closed. No record left on the body. Jesus did not. Three days later He stood alive among His friends, and the holes were still in His hands and His side. He told Thomas to reach out and touch them (John 20:27). He didn’t rise body whole without the wounds of the cross. Scripture says that when we are raised, we are given new bodies, free of sickness and injury. Every tear wiped away. No more death, no more mourning, no more pain (Revelation 21:4). What is sown perishable is raised imperishable (1 Corinthians 15:42). We are healed clean. Our old wounds are simply gone. He was the exception. He carried His wounds through death and out the other side, into the resurrection itself. And not only there. When John is shown heaven, the throne at the center of everything, he sees the Lamb standing in glory, “looking as if it had been slain” (Revelation 5:6). The wound is still there. At the very center of heaven, in the place of highest honor, the mark of the cross remains. Forever. The true cost! ## How Much We are Worth to Him! Maybe that’s the answer to the question that had nagged me for years. If the cost had been fleeting, if His wounds had closed over like Wolverine’s and left no trace, then what was really paid? A pain that fully heals and is forgotten is not a price. But the mark did not leave Him. He carries it into eternity, where it can never be lost, where one day we will all see it. And that will remind us of the real cost. It was not just physical. It was not just death and pain. It was spiritual. It is past anything we can hold, a cost only God could pay and only God could measure. That is what our rescue was worth to Him. 🙏 🧘