P1971:6, 183:1.1
There is great danger of misunderstanding the meaning of numerous sayings
and many events associated with the termination of the Master's career in
the flesh. The cruel treatment of Jesus by the ignorant servants and the calloused
soldiers, the unfair conduct of his trials, and the unfeeling attitude of
the professed religious leaders, must not be confused with the fact that Jesus,
in patiently submitting to all this suffering and humiliation, was truly doing
the will of the Father in Paradise. It was, indeed and in truth, the will
of the Father that his Son should drink to the full the cup of mortal experience,
from birth to death, but the Father in heaven had nothing whatever to do with
instigating the barbarous behavior of those supposedly civilized human beings
who so brutally tortured the Master and so horribly heaped successive indignities
upon his nonresisting person. These inhuman and shocking experiences which
Jesus was called upon to endure in the final hours of his mortal life were
not in any sense a part of the divine will of the Father, which his human
nature had so triumphantly pledged to carry out at the time of the final surrender
of man to God as signified in the threefold prayer which he indited in the
garden while his weary apostles slept the sleep of physical exhaustion.
P1972:1, 183:1.2
The Father in heaven desired the bestowal Son to finish his earth career naturally,
just as all mortals must finish up their lives on earth and in the flesh.
Ordinary men and women cannot expect to have their last hours on earth and
the
supervening episode of death made easy by a special dispensation. Accordingly,
Jesus elected to lay down his life in the flesh in the manner which was in
keeping with the outworking of natural events, and he steadfastly refused
to extricate himself from the cruel clutches of a wicked conspiracy of inhuman
events which swept on with horrible certainty toward his unbelievable humiliation
and ignominious death. And every bit of all this astounding manifestation
of hatred and this unprecedented demonstration of cruelty was the work of
evil men and wicked mortals. God in heaven did not will it, neither did the
archenemies of Jesus dictate it, though they did much to insure that unthinking
and evil mortals would thus reject the bestowal Son. Even the father of sin
turned his face away from the excruciating horror of the scene of the crucifixion.