About this painting, the artists comments:
Confidence in the ultimate success of Christ's Atonement can at times obscure our appreciation of the creativity, the courage, the risk, and the danger of the collaborative redemptive venture made by Jesus and the Father on our behalf in the actual moments that these events were unfolding. I do not want to diminish the terrible tragic courage that stretched beyond our ability to hope and apparently to the very limits of even Jesus' hoping. The witnessed physical horrors of the political torture and execution of the Lord must have darkened the minds and hearts of all associated with Him far more than the lowering elements imagined here. I hope my depiction does not stand in the way of the depths of this shattering tragedy, but rather to draw out the difficulty of those moments that had to be traversed before the good news of the resurrection began to shine fabulously through the opening fissures of our fallen and broken circumstance.
It is very hard for us now to read about the events surrounding Jesus’ torture and death without the pain of it being diluted by the universal spoiler alert of the fabulous conclusion of the gospel narrative. But they who went through it didn’t know it would turn out, not just “ok”, but unspeakably gloriously. They labored over his lifeless body with no notion at all that this was going to work out well. Their hopes were dashed and there was nothing for it but to provide as appropriate a burial as could be arranged. There was sad work to be done and endured. This moment in the narrative is important because of the time we ourselves spend on the “Friday” of our experience with no notion of how the “Sunday” ever can break through it.