An acceptance of extreme suffering and of agonising death

“No man’s sufferings ever have been, or ever can be, as voluntary as were the sufferings of Christ… It is the divinity of Christ that tests his human heroism on a pinnacle beyond the reach of any rivals in heroic martyrdom… He only had complete and absolute power to save himself all through his Passion, and all through it at every second he actively refused to do so. This magnified beyond conception the intensity of his ordeal. The crucifixion is the unique example of an entirely and totally voluntary acceptance of extreme suffering and of agonising death in the presence of total ability to escape them at any moment.”

K.C. Thompson, Once For All quoted in Michael Green, The Empty Cross of Jesus.

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