Mark 15
1Very early in the morning, the chief priests, with the elders, the teachers of the law and the whole Sanhedrin, reached a decision. They bound Jesus, led him away and handed him over to Pilate.
2"Are you the king of the Jews?" asked Pilate.
"Yes, it is as you say," Jesus replied.
3The chief priests accused him of many things. 4So again Pilate asked him, "Aren't you going to answer? See how many things they are accusing you of."
5But Jesus still made no reply, and Pilate was amazed.
6Now it was the custom at the Feast to release a prisoner whom the people requested. 7A man called Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists who had committed murder in the uprising. 8The crowd came up and asked Pilate to do for them what he usually did.
9"Do you want me to release to you the king of the Jews?" asked Pilate, 10knowing it was out of envy that the chief priests had handed Jesus over to him. 11But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have Pilate release Barabbas instead.
12"What shall I do, then, with the one you call the king of the Jews?" Pilate asked them.
13"Crucify him!" they shouted.
14"Why? What crime has he committed?" asked Pilate.
But they shouted all the louder, "Crucify him!"
15Wanting to satisfy the crowd, Pilate released Barabbas to them. He had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified.
Introduction
Easter is right around the corner. It’s only two weeks away. Imagine that. There is only one way to get to Easter. There’s only one way to get to the empty tomb and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We must go through the cross. We must go through the crucifixion and all the horrible things that happened to Jesus on his way to Easter morning. We must travel by way of the execution of Jesus. There is no other route to get there but by the road up the hill to Golgotha.
Oh, we’re not going to stay there. No. We are just passing through for we need to remind ourselves of that, which no one should have had to endure but which Jesus did endure for our sakes. Jesus told us that whenever we celebrate Communion, we are to remember His death. Isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that important? We are to remember his bruised, bleeding body. For it is in the ultimate human weakness, our death and His death, that God’s power is made supremely visible.
The apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that Christ crucified is a stumbling block for some and foolishness for others. They cannot get past the cross to the life and the power of God that lies beyond it but must be found thorugh it. Today, we remember the cross.
The Sermon
As part of her 2006 Confessions world tour, Madonna, you all know Madonna? Most of you do I think, she is almost always controversial. Well, as part of her show, she staged a mock crucifixion. She sang a song called “Live to Tell” while wearing a crown of thorns and strapped to a mirrored cross.
Not surprisingly, many Christian groups protested the routine as an offense to their faith. After the tour ended, Madonna answered her critics in a released statement.
She writes, "There seems to be many misinterpretations about my appearance on the cross, and I wanted to explain it myself once and for all. It is no different than a person wearing a cross or 'taking up the cross,' as it says in the Bible. My performance is neither anti-Christian, sacrilegious, or blasphemous. Rather, it is my plea to the audience to encourage mankind to help one another and to see the world as a unified whole." Personally, I’m really not surprised that just about everyone missed her point.
Madonna, like so many others, misunderstands the cross. When we see a cross, we think of life, we think of hope, we think of peace, we think of the church but very rarely do we think of what the cross really is: an instrument of death. It was the Roman version of the electric chair. It was the ancient world’s idea of a lethal injection table only it was designed to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible while it was doing its job. Death by crucifixion was so painful and so horrible that Roman citizens were guaranteed by law that they would never be crucified. People died on the cross because their body weight pulled down on their arms causing the chest muscles to constrict. Eventually, and I say eventually because sometimes it took days, the person would die from suffocation. Of all the times and places Jesus could have appeared and of all the ways he could have chosen to die, Jesus chose crucifixion as the means of his death and our salvation.
You can ask anyone you want to how they wish to die and not one of them will say that they want to die in the most painful way possible. Most people will simply say, “I want to die quietly in my sleep. I want to close my eyes and not wake up.” But when you die for someone, dying in your sleep is not an option. It sounds rather silly to say something like, “Oh, yes, Jesus went into his double queen size bed, went to sleep, and died for you.”
One of the clearest purposes of Jesus’ death was that somehow in some way he died for you and me. Our sin, all of it, yours and mine, went to the cross with Him. His death was substitutionary. It was in place of you and me. John Stott writes in his book The Cross of Christ (page 83). that “our sin must be extremely horrible. Nothing reveals the gravity of sin like the cross.... If there was no way by which . . God could . . . forgive our unrighteousness, except that he should bear it himself in Christ, it must be serious indeed....”
The Cross also makes it clear that we all stand in one sense or another in hostility towards Jesus. We may not have swung the whip, driven the nails, or called for Jesus’ crucifixion with the crowds, but it is our own sin and rebellion towards God that put Him on the Cross. I think this is one of the hardest truths of the cross to accept. We very much like to think that we would be different if given the chance. We would not be like Peter who denied Jesus. We would not be like the other disciples who seem to have just disappeared in the face of the angry mob. We like to think that we would have willingly died along with Jesus but the real fact is that each one of us had a hand in putting him up there on that cross. The issue that we have to face here is that Jesus own people put him on the cross. The people that should have known better, did not.
Think of this. People who followed the ten commandments religiously, demanded that Jesus be crucified. People who followed the law written out in the Bible and kept it as if their lives depended on it, delivered Jesus to the Romans for the sole purpose of capital punishment. People who kept the Sabbath far, far better than I could ever, ever hope to, were the same people who bought one of his friends and had Jesus arrested, beaten, and executed. The danger is that, like them, we who should know better, may not. We might see in Jesus a threat to the way of life that we are attached to and in so doing we fail to recognize him as our king, our savior, and our lord but are perfectly willing to nail him to the cross.
Jesus words, “Forgive them Father for they don’t know what they are doing” apply to the whole human race, not just to the soldiers carrying out his execution. The concept here is that it is not our love or our devotion that earns us grace. Jesus bestowed grace upon us even though it is our actions that crucified him 2000 years ago. Paul writes in Romans that even while we were still in the enemies camp, Jesus died for us. While we were still his enemy, Jesus died for us.
Tim Keller shares the story of a woman in his congregation who had always heard that God accepts us only if we are good enough. She listened to his new message about grace and said that the new message was scary. I asked why it was scary and she replied: If I was saved by my good works then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with "rights"—I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if I am a sinner saved by grace—then there's nothing he cannot ask of me."
This woman could see immediately that the teaching of salvation by sheer grace had an edge to it. She knew that if she was a sinner saved by grace, she was (if anything) more subject to the sovereign Lordship of God. She knew that if Jesus really had done all this for her, she could not be her own and there would be nothing God could not ask of her.
The cross illustrates beyond doubt that God understands suffering. There is no one who can say that Jesus does not know what it is like to feel pain. He was betrayed by a friend. He was beaten. He was whipped. He was showered in spit. He had one inch thorns pushed into his scalp. He had nails driven through his wrists and feet. Jesus knows what is like to feel all kinds of pain.
The cross leaves no doubt that Jesus understands the helplessness of being human. Life often catches us in its currents and takes us downstream against our will. Every person I know has had circumstances push them and pull them until they feel like they are coming apart at the seams. We can’t change those circumstances. All we can do is try to survive them. Jesus didn’t survive them. And because of that, he understands the helplessness of being human.
The cross leaves no doubt that Jesus understands what it is like to die. There is a fact about this world that is the same for everyone: no one gets out of here alive. Jesus understands what we face and the uncertainty with which we face it. We may not face death by crucifixion but death for us is just as certain as if we were crucified. Jesus understands what it is like to die.
You, of course, by now see that God has taken probably the most evil act of all time, the crucifixion of His own son, and turned it into the best thing, the most glorious thing that could ever happen to humankind. The cross is ugly. The cross is painted with human blood and decorated with bits of human flesh yet it is only in those things that I am able to approach God’s throne. Remember in Holy Communion what we celebrate, the torn body of Jesus and his shed blood. At the communion table it is a metaphor for a historical reality.
Of course, you know the story is not over with the crucifixion. The Cross is not just a story of cruelty and bloodshed, it is a prelude to an incredible conclusion starring God’s power, love, and hope. Only God could take an instrument of death and turn it into a symbol of hope and transformation. We preach Christ crucified otherwise we could not preach Christ resurrected. The cross as the greatest act of sacrifice and love became the greatest display of life since God created the earth.
The cross stands as a magnetic focal point for all of history. It is the defining moment for all of humankind. The crucifixion of Jesus is a moment in time and yet stretching outside of time like an umbrella over everything that ever was so that anything that was ever contrary to God’s will would be fixed. Not just fixed but made absolutely new. The cross is that which re-establishes true justice so that all things become what God meant them to be in the first place and all those sins that got us so far off course are expunged from the record.
We preach Christ crucified but Easter’s only two weeks away.
