According to Rick Atkinson in The Guns at Last Light, as WW2 drew to a close, American took more reprisals against German soldiers. The violence of war wore down the American soldiers, especially when stories of German atrocities spread. At the Battle of the Bulge, for example, SS troops slaughtered over a hundred American soldiers after they had surrendered.

By the time the Allies reached Germany, they showed no mercy. These, after all, were the perpetrators. German soldiers flying white flags were gunned down. And when the Allies liberated concentration camps, their sense of outrage and hatred grew even more murderous. "Still having trouble hating them?" Eisenhower asked a nervous young GI after touring Buchenwald. At Dachau, American liberators stood aside while inmates literally tore apart their guards, limb from limb. GIs gunned down many more after they surrendered.

In contrast, think about how God responded to us at the Cross of Christ. It takes a good deal of determination to murder someone. Those who plotted Jesus' death, those who bayed for it before Pilate, even the Roman soldiers who beat Jesus and then nailed him up—they did it with feeling. What had he done to deserve death by torture—or, any death at all? He threatened their sense of order, he endangered them through his heedless rhetoric, he was a living blasphemy. They hated him enough to kill, and niceties like judicial procedure be damned.

And what about God? Looking at this world that scorned and abused his own Son, and hung him up to die a slow, dangling death, how he must have hated them, enough to kill them all. Except he didn't.