Erica Scott: Tonight, we will be reading from Isaiah 50 verses 6 and Mark 15 verses 16 through 32. And please listen carefully, for this is God's word. I gave my back to those who strike, and my cheek to those who pull out the beard. I hid not my face from disgrace and spitting. And the soldiers led him away inside the palace that is the governor's headquarters, And they called together the whole battalion And they clothed him in a purple cloak And twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on him And they began to salute him Hail, king of the Jews And they were striking his head with a reed and spitting on him and kneeling down in homage to him.
And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him, and they led him out to crucify him. And they compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross. And they brought Him to the place called Golgotha, which means place of the skull. And they offered Him wine mixed with myrrh, but He did not take it. And they crucified Him and divided His garments among them, casting lots for them to decide what each should take.
And it was the 3rd hour when they crucified him. And the inscription of the charge against him read, the King of the Jews. And with him, they crucified 2 robbers, 1 on his right and 1 on his left. And those who passed by derided Him, wagging their heads and saying, You, who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in 3 days, save yourself and come down from the cross. So also the chief priests with the scribes mocked him to one another, saying, He saved others.
He cannot save himself. Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe. Those who were crucified with him also reviled him. This is the word of the Lord. If
Matt Francisco: you would, pray with me. Father, I don't even know how to begin to approach the weightiness of a passage like this. This is the most important few hours in the history of the world. Add 30 minutes of a sermon can hardly do it justice. Theologians have spent 1,000 of years pouring over these moments and what it means for us.
And I pray right now, you know the people who are gathered here in this room. You know what they need to hear. So I pray by the power of your Holy Spirit, you would speak to them according to your word. Lord, I'm not under any illusion that everyone here knows you and I pray that if there are those here who do not know you or are seeking or are doubting that you would speak to them, that they would see Jesus Christ and him crucified as worthy of all glory and all honor and all praise. Christ crucified is a stumbling block and foolishness to the world.
But to those of us with ears to hear and eyes to see, It's the smell of salvation. It's the sight of eternal life. It is everything that we have ever wanted and longed for but could not possibly believe to be true. And for my brothers and sisters here who do know you but maybe are are hurting or feel trapped under the weight of their sin, I pray that you would bring freedom tonight. Because Jesus, you tell us in your word that it is for freedom that you have set us free.
I pray that you would help me to get out of the way. We come to you like Simon Peter did to Jesus saying, where Simon Peter did to Jesus saying, where else would we go, Lord? Because you have the words of eternal life. So speak to us according to your word, we pray. In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit.
Amen. The first time I saw Braveheart, I wanted to run through a brick wall. Right? Anybody with me? How many of you were born after 1994?
You disgust me. That was an overwhelming percentage. Braveheart for those of you who don't know, it tells the story of William Wallace, the Scotsman who is rebelling against the evil British Empire. And just when it looks like William, who all the Scotsmans saw and believed was going to be the one to deliver Scotland from England, When it looks like he's going to prevail, he is betrayed. He's captured in Edinburgh and he is sentenced to death.
He is tied up. He's on the rack. His limbs are being pulled from him and the magistrate comes over asking if he wants mercy from the king. All he has to do to receive mercy and a quick death is to say I'm sorry. I submit to the king and his rule.
And it looks like William Wallace is about to do it, right? The magistrate gets close and there's a giant crowd gathered. But instead of swearing allegiance to the king, he yells out, That was the most pathetic yell I have ever heard. He yells out freedom so that everyone in the entire crowd hears him. In his death, it ignites a fire that leads the Scottish revolution.
Right? Because his death was the glorious death of a martyr for a glorious cause. It was inspiring and it would transform Scotland and all of the Scottish people. But Jesus, Jesus's death is nothing like that. It is nothing like that at all.
You see the disciples, they had seen and believed in Jesus. They had left everything to follow him because they believed that Jesus was the very son of God, the promised Christ, the king who was gonna come and restore God's kingdom to God's people once and for all. But now, Jesus had been condemned to die. His death was not going to be the glorious death of a martyr for a glorious cause. No, Jesus was dying the death of a failure or something worse.
The one who had healed the sick, who had commanded the wind and the waves, who would even raise the dead, the one who seemed to have absolute authority over the spiritual and the physical world, all of a sudden completely helpless before the Roman authorities. The one who had so often used his power to save others, now powerless, it seems, to save himself. This, my friends, was the end of all hope. This was the final triumph of evil over good. I mean, just picture Jesus.
He's being led into the palace where he is surrounded by 100 of Roman soldiers, who are hell bent on humiliating him. They mockingly kneel before him, saluting him saying, hail king of the Jews. But Jesus is no king to them. Jesus is a joke. He's assumed to be dead and then forgotten nobody from nowhere.
He's a bug. Deserved of being squashed. And you can imagine the smirk on these soldiers' faces as they dream of ways to shame this king before them. Hey, somebody grab a royal robe, throw it on this king. So they find a purple robe.
They put it on his ravaged back. Hey, no king is complete without a crown. Right? Let's make this king a crown. So they grab thorns and they fashion it into a crown.
And they jam it into his forehead until blood streaks down his face. And then the gospel writers tell us these soldiers, They strike him. Spit on him. Again. And again.
And again. And again. And Jesus, though he is oppressed and afflicted, he opens not his mouth. And the soldiers lead Jesus out to crucify him like a lamb being led to the slaughter. Remember, it was just 5 days earlier, 5 days earlier on Palm Sunday, when the crowds gathered, they laid down their robes before Jesus on the road riding on a donkey.
They waved palm branches before him saying, Hosanna or save us. Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father, David. Here is the king who has finally come to save us. But this Friday as Jesus steps out into the light, no one is mistaking him for a king. He is a bruised and battered pulp of a human being.
He is stumbling along the weight of his own instrument of execution. This great big wooden thing that he can hardly lift. And Jesus, exhausted as he is, he falls under the weight of it and the soldiers compel a man named Siren of Cyrene, who is coming from the country to carry his cross. And as Jesus is struggling along towards Calvary, as the crowd gathers, Francis Spufford reminds us that he recognizes every roaring, jeering face. That he knows all of their names.
He knows all of their histories and ours. Because he's not just this bruised and battered man. He's also the love that made the world, to whom all places and times are equally present. He isn't just feeling the anger and the spite and unbearable self disgust of this one crowd on this one Friday morning in Palestine, he's turning his bruised face toward the whole human crowd, past, present and to come. And accepting everything we have to throw at him.
Everything that we fear, we deserve ourselves. And the doors of his heart, they're wedged open wide. And what rushes in is the vile roiling tide of all of our sins, all of our cruelties, all of our failures. And he's looking out upon that crowd and the whole crowd of human history saying, Let me take that from you. Let me have that instead.
You can't bear it. I am here to take that from you. I am a gift without cost. I am. I am.
Before the foundation of the world, I am. But this is killing him. And soldiers, they lead him out of the city gate and with crushing blows from a spear, they drive him up a small hill where Jesus will leave the land of the living. Although he had done no violence and there was no deceit found in his mouth. Verses 23 and 24.
They offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. Jesus must be fully present in this moment. And they crucified him and divided his garments among them casting lots for themselves to decide what each should take. They're playing a game to decide who gets Jesus's only earthly possessions exactly as Psalm 22 said they would do. Verse 25, and it was the 3rd hour when they crucified him.
And Mark says it so simply, they crucified him. Mark doesn't focus on the gory details of the cross for, I believe, at least two reasons. 1st is that crucifixion was incredibly common in the Roman Empire. So it didn't need to be explained. Everyone knew the horror of death on a cross.
Just a couple of years before Jesus was born, a Roman general executed 2,000 Jews by crucifixion in a day. Crucifixion, it's far removed from us. The cross is more likely to be seen as a piece of jewelry than an instrument of execution. So sometimes the horror of it can be lost on us. On Calvary, Jesus's wrist, they were pierced through with 6 inch iron spikes nailing him to the crossbar.
And that crossbar was lifted and attached to the permanent upright post. And the soldiers, they would have bent Jesus' his legs at the knee so they could drive a single spike through both of his feet so that his arms would be left hanging above his head with all of his weight resting on those nails in his wrists. I mean, I can't even imagine how absolutely agonizing that had to be. But that pain was only part of the point. Hanging like that made it almost impossible to breathe.
Jesus would have to push up upon the nail in his feet just to be able to breathe out before the pain would become so excruciating. A word which means out of the cross that he would slump back down again with all of his weight resting once again on the nails in his wrists, unable to breathe once more. See, on a cross, more often than not, eventually you choke to death when you're finally just too tired to heave your weight up up to take your next breath. And Jesus hangs, the bible tells us, upon that cross for 6 agonizing unbearable hours. With that crown of thorns twisted into his brow, with his back already ripped to shreds from the flogging he had received.
He's being poured out like water with all of his bones out of joint. Verse 26, in the inscription of the charge against them read, the king of the Jews. And with him, they crucified 2 robbers, 1 on his right and 1 on his left. And those who passed by derided him their heads and saying, You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in 3 days, save yourself and come down from the crawl. So also the chief priests with the scribes mocked him to one another saying, he saved others cannot save himself.
Let the Christ, the king of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe. Those who were crucified with him also reviled him. The second reason that I think that Mark doesn't focus on the pain of the cross Is it because he wants us to feel the weight of shame instead of the pain that Jesus is enduring? That is his focus. You see, before being crucified, victims were usually stripped naked.
It's difficult to imagine anything more humiliating than that. There is reason to think that this was absolutely true about Jesus. But we find it virtually impossible to look upon his naked form or even consider it. I mean, how many of you have ever seen a painting of Jesus naked upon the cross? I'm not saying that we should suddenly start doing that.
I'm just highlighting our tendency to wanna hide our eyes from the shame that Jesus was actually experiencing on the cross. And shame was the point. Right? As Fleming Rutledge has written, crucifixion was a form of advertisement. This person is the scum of the earth, not fit to live more an insect than a human being.
Crucifixion as a means of execution in the Roman empire had as its express purpose, the elimination of victims from consideration as members of the human race. It cannot be said too strongly that was its function. Those crucified were in the eyes of the Roman Empire condemned to the death of a beast. They were left to be eaten by the birds. See the soldiers saw Jesus the king of the Jews and they did not believe.
I mean, how could they? In their eyes anyone who died on the cross was a traitor, was a nobody, was less than human. He had to be a worm and not a man. Someone who deserved to be scorned by mankind and despised by the people. And so they mock him.
But here's the thing. Absolutely everyone here at this scene, people with different social statuses, different political affiliations, different religions, different moral records, every single one of them, They heap their scorn and their shame upon Jesus, the man of sorrows hanging before them. It is not just the soldiers who mock Jesus. Common people just passing by seemingly go out of their way to deride him. Jesus, I thought you said you were gonna tear down the temple.
Doesn't look like it. Even the worst of the worst. Right? The man on his left and his right, those murderous insurrectionists dying next to him. They did not believe they reviled him.
The religious leaders too, they saw Jesus and they did not believe. The cross was for them a sure sign of their vindication, no matter how many laws they had broken over the last several nights. After all, Jesus had promised and proclaimed himself to be the Christ. He had said out loud that God was his father, that he and the father were 1. Jesus had the audacity to declare that he had the power to forgive sins.
Now here he was hanging from a tree naked and bloodied. And they knew the old testament, right? They knew that Deuteronomy 2123 said that a hanged man is cursed by God. Anyone sentenced to death in the old Testament for the sin of blasphemy. That is saying something untrue about God would be stoned to death and then hung from a tree publicly symbolizing that they had been rejected by God.
So the religious leaders are there, they see the cross as proof that Jesus was not who he claimed to be. After all, how could the Christ be hanging from a tree? And here before their very eyes, they saw for themselves that Jesus was stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. That he must be a blasphemer deserving of a godless death, cursed and cut off from God himself. So they yell out to him on the cross.
He saved others. He cannot save himself. Let the Christ, the king of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe. But Jesus had saved others, right? I mean, if you've been with us at all through this journey in the book of Mark, you've seen him.
You've seen him save the woman who was bleeding for 12 years. You saw him save the man who was plagued by a legion of demons. You saw him open the eyes of blind Bartimaeus. You saw him raise a little girl from the dead. But now, it looks like he can't even save himself.
This is crucial. Jesus could have at any second climbed down from the cross and healed all of his own wounds. He could have called down a legion of angels to do whatever he wished. He could have sent the Romans home with a blink of his eye and reestablished the kingdom of Israel. But if Jesus had saved himself, it would have cost him something that he daint deemed far more precious than his own life.
You and me. Because if Jesus wanted to save us, then he could not come down from the cross. The religious leaders, their words were spoken as an insult, but they were the literal truth. Jesus could not save himself and save others. The only way that Jesus could save others was by refusing to use his power and authority to save himself.
That he would bear our sins in his body on the tree. You see your sins and mine, they created a separation between us and our God. And to be in sin means being catastrophically separated from the eternal love of God. It means to be on the other side of an impassable barrier, to be completely left without hope, under a dominion of darkness from which we have no hope of escape. I don't know about you, but I have this terrible tendency to gloss over or so easily excuse my sin, especially my anger.
I say, well, I had a hard day or that guy cut me off or if you had heard how many times he interrupted me. If you only knew what she said or she had done. And I let myself off the hook. And maybe you're the same way. I think we all have this tendency to not treat our sin is that big of a deal.
But if you wanna know how seriously our God takes our sin, look at the man on the cross beaten, mocked, and scorned. Tormented, gasping, and bleeding. In the book of Nahum, we read that the Lord is slow to anger and great and power and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty. Who can stand before his indignation? Who can endure the heat of his anger?
His wrath is poured out like fire and the rocks are broken into pieces by him. All sin, even the sins that I diminish or excuse or overlook demand God's just wrath because he is just that holy. He is just that good. He is just that righteous. And his wrath isn't arbitrary like my anger often is.
It is perfect and it is just, and it is working towards his perfect and good ends. His wrath poured out like fire is like the determination of a doctor who is cutting away the cancer that is killing his patient. And our good physician, he hates this cancer. He's going to rid the entire universe of it. But if he would rid the entire universe of sin, he would have to rid the universe of us.
Right? Unless unless our God would do the absolutely unthinkable and unimaginable. Unless the very same God who called down judgment and woe upon the religious leaders would willingly endure the heat of his own anger against sin and come under his own judgment and woe. Unless the very same God who cursed the ground with thorn and thistles would take up a crown of thorns and bear the curse of sin upon himself, and though he was without sin, would be willingly numbered with the transgressors and pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities. That is exactly what our God did for you and for me.
Galatians 313 says Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree. Our God laid upon Jesus, the iniquity, the sin of us all. Jesus on the cross, he drank down the very wrath of God, receiving in himself the curse of God by becoming a curse for us. On the cross, Jesus opens his heart to sorrow, to suffering, to guilt, to despair, to horror, to shame, to everything that cannot be escaped. And though he was able, he did nothing to escape it.
He turned to it and he claimed it all instead. He claimed it as his own. He said, this is mine now, let me take this from you. He embraced it with everything that was in him. Each dark act, each dripping memory as if it was something precious.
On the cross, Jesus became our rebellion. He became our pride, our lust, our greed. Everything that is evil. And God laid upon him the guilt and shame that was due to all of us. Why would Jesus do it?
Isaiah 5311 gives us the faintest hint. We read out of the anguish of his soul. He shall see and be satisfied. By his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. See on the cross, Jesus saw the whole human crowd.
Past, present and to come. And he accepted absolutely everything that we had to throw at him. Everything that we feared and we knew in our heart of hearts that we deserved. And he believed and was satisfied that by his death, you and I might be set free. That he would be beaten.
That by his wounds we might be healed. That he would be condemned though he was innocent. So that we though guilty might be set free from the curse of the law. That he would be stripped bare, that we might be clothed in his righteousness. That he might receive a crown of thorns, that we might receive crowns in glory, that shame was heaped upon him so that we might know that everyone who believes in him will never be put to shame.
As Colossians 2 tells us, you who were dead in your trespasses and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him having forgiven us all our trespasses by the canceling of the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in him. See, Jesus was the king who came to save us just not in the way that we thought. Jesus was the martyr who laid down his life for the greatest most glorious of causes.
Our redemption and the redemption of the whole world. That our record of debt would be marked paid in full and nailed to the cross. That we would bear it no more. That the precious blood of Jesus would be spilled out so that the curse of sin would have no more hold upon us. His life was poured out unto death for you, for me, for every single sinner who comes to him in repentance and faith, because it is only sinners that Jesus came to die for.
And if you are here tonight and you think that your problems are always someone else's fault, or if your sin always has an excuse, or you come before God proudly standing on your own record, and the cross condemns you. You stand in judgment before a holy God. But his arms are open wide ready to receive you if you would but run into them. And if you are here tonight and you feel crushed under the weight of your sins and failures or your shame, if you can't believe that you keep going back to the same sin over and over and over, Then Jesus wants you to know something tonight. That he knew it all.
He knew every sin that you would ever commit. And he said, I would die that death for you and take it all upon myself. My mercies are new every single morning. You have no idea the height and the depth and the length and the breadth of my love. It would swallow you whole.
Come, you who are weary, heavy laden, come find your rest in me. Know that you are beloved. See, the cross was not the death of a failure. It was the death of the one who loved us more than we could ever hope or dream or imagine. It was the death of sin and shame.
It was the decisive triumph of good over evil once and for all. My friends, wherever you are this evening, I urge you, I plead with you to turn your eyes to Jesus the Christ, the king of Israel and the king of kings and Lord of lords, Who took a crown of thorns for you? See and believe in the one who will not curse you, but was cursed for you. Who did not come down from the cross so that you and I might be saved. Let's go to him now in prayer.
Jesus, we don't have words that would do justice How grateful we are that you would love us while we were yet sinners. And I pray that if there is anyone here tonight who does not know you, they would see your love poured out on the cross. They would repent of their sins and trust in you and they would find new life in you. If there are brothers and sisters here who are overwhelmed by their guilt and their shame, I pray that they would hear the words of Isaiah where you said, come now let us reason together though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be washed whiter than snow. I pray that we might see and believe that you are the Christ, the son of God, the king of kings, Lord of lords and our savior.
We love you Jesus and it's in your name we pray. Amen.