Today is Palm Sunday. This is the day when Christians have traditionally celebrated the Triumphal Entry, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, acclaimed by the crowds as a great rabbi, and perhaps the longed for Kingly Messiah. Christians focus on the kingship of Jesus on this day.
But today, we are going to fix our attention on the crucifixion of Jesus as recorded in Mark’s gospel. It is appropriate to consider the crucifixion on Palm Sunday, because the kingship and crucifixion of Jesus cannot be separated. The prophet Zechariah said:
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem, behold your King is coming to you; he is righteous and having salvation, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
But when Jesus rode into Jerusalem to the acclamation of the crowds, he knew – if no one else did – that he was riding to his death, so when five days later he hung on the cross, what happened was that the king of heaven and earth was giving his life for us sinners.
That reality sheds light on the cross, and helps us respond to it appropriately: We sing: Amazing love, how can it be that you, my king, should die for me.
The suffering of Jesus began well before the nails went into his hands. The Bible recounts
- his arrest and trials;
- he experienced betrayal, abandonment, injustice, spitting and mockery, and the extreme suffering of beating and flogging.
- his friends failed him,
- the religious leaders of his countrymen condemned him,
- and Pilate the governor gave him over to death.
The people who acclaimed him on Sunday, the people who came to hear him on Thursday, suddenly awoke on Friday to find that overnight he had been arrested, found guilty, sentenced to death by Pilate, at the mercy of the soldiers, who proceeded to dress him up as a king, stick a crown of thorns on his head and, as a cruel joke, bow before him. They beat him on the head with a staff, and spit on him. Only then do they get around to the business of his crucifixion.
As they lead him on the street, the residents of Jerusalem see him for the first time since Thursday afternoon. Luke tells us that there followed him a great multitude of the people and of women who were mourning and lamenting for him.
Victims of crucifixion were traditionally led through the streets of Jerusalem carrying on their shoulders the cross-beam of their own cross. As Jesus is carrying his cross, he collapses under its weight. The Roman soldiers conscript someone out of the crowd to carry the cross for Jesus. (His name is Simon, from Cyrene, an area in Africa, just west of Egypt.)
The procession made its way out of the city to the place of crucifixion: a hill called in Aramaic ‘Golgotha’, or in Latin ‘Calvary’, both of which mean ‘skull’. The hill was outside the city, probably near the highway going into the city, as Romans liked executions to be public, to serve as a warning to people.
When they got here, someone offered Jesus a drink of wine mixed with myrrh. This was a narcotic, given to dull the senses to the pain of crucifixion. But Jesus refuses the drink. He is not taking any shortcuts around the suffering of the cross. Not because he is a hero, but because it has always been his practice to be consciously fully present and available to his Father’s will.
The Book of 1st Peter says, Be clear-minded and self-controlled so that you can pray. Jesus does not want his senses dulled and it’s a good thing. Some of the greatest things Jesus ever said, he said from the cross:
- when he prayed for the forgiveness of his executioners.
- when he offered grace and forgiveness to the thief on the cross next to him.
- when he committed himself into the hands of God his Father in the ultimate expression of trust – ‘Into your hands I commit my spirit’.
Even in great suffering, Jesus refused to let anything hinder his availability to his Father and to his mission, nothing to cloud his mind, nothing to dull his sensitivity to people.
Then they crucified him.
And what they would have done to Jesus was lay him down on the cross beam, and lashed his arms to it. Probably they would drive a spike through each wrist. (The bones of the hand would not be strong enough to support his weight on a nail.) The crossbeam would be set on the other beam. Then the cross, with Jesus on it, was planted in the hole prepared for it. A single spike would be driven through both feet. Then the ropes were removed and the only things that held him there were the three nails, two in the wrists and one for his feet.
Crucifixion was an intensely painful means of execution. The suffering of the cross was so severe that there was no word in English to capture it and so we had to create one: ex-cruci-ating, a literally ‘out-of-the-cross’ kind of pain. Add to the pain the element of public humiliation, of being crucified naked, which they almost always were, and being subject to public scorn..
The later first century Jewish historian Josephus called crucifixion ‘the most wretched of all ways of dying’. Roman citizens could not be crucified. It was reserved for slaves or enemies of the state. And so Jesus, charged with being an enemy of the state who accepted the title ‘King of the Jews’, was crucified. Philippians chapter 2 says that Jesus
- left his place in heaven and came to earth (which itself would have been humbling enough!), leaving behind the glory of heaven.
- But not only that, he surrendered his divinity and came as a human.
- But not only that, he surrendered his kingship and came as an ordinary man.
- But not only that, he came as a servant.
- But not only that, he subjected himself to death.
- But not only that, but death on a cross, the greatest humiliation…
From the greatest glory, far greater than we can imagine, to the greatest humiliation.
We have no idea how significant that passage would have been to the first century Christians. That Jesus willingly died on the cross in obedience to his Father captures his life of consistent and absolute submission.
Having put him on the cross, the four soldiers took his clothes, and rolled dice to see who would get them. It was the custom that the executioners would get the belongings of the crucified man.
It was the third hour (9:00 AM), Mark says, when they crucified him. There is a sign nailed to the cross, over Jesus’ head. It was Roman practice to identify the charges in this way, so that any passerby would see, ‘Oh, he’s a crucified slave who ran away’, or ‘He’s a rebel against the state’. Jesus’ formal charge was one of treason, but specifically, as we’ve already said, he accepted the title ‘King of the Jews’. And so a sign to this effect was nailed to the cross.
(You have probably seen ‘INRI’ on the paintings of the crucifixion. They simply stand in short form for the Latin ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’.)
There were two other crosses on the hill that day, too. Two robbers were also crucified, and Mark uses the phrase, ‘one on his right and the other on his left.’ It reminds us of Mark 10:37, when James and John, two of his closest disciples, boldly ask to sit one at his right and the other at his left, in his glory. Jesus’ response was they didn’t know what they were asking. Could they ‘drink the cup’ Jesus was going to drink? This is a reference to his death, for in the Garden Jesus prayed, ‘Let this cup pass from me.’
The cup: It was a Biblical picture of the terrible wrath of God in many prophecies of the Old Testament. Jeremiah paints the most complete picture in Jeremiah 25:15-29 which describes the wrath of God – the cup (25:17) – being drunk by Jerusalem, Egypt, Philistines, Babylon and a dozen more, representing the whole known world. Jeremiah brackets this passage with these words:
Thus the LORD, the God of Israel, said to me: ‘Take from my hand this cup of the wine of wrath, and make all the nations to whom I send drink it. They shall drink and stagger and be crazed because of the sword that I am sending among them [v15-16]… If they refuse to accept the cup from your hand to drink, that you shall say to them, “Thus says the LORD of hosts: ‘You must drink! For behold, I begin to work disaster at the city that is called by my name, and shall you go unpunished? You shall not go unpunished, for I am summoning a sword against all the inhabitants of the earth,’ declares the LORD of hosts.” ’ [v28-29]
Revelation 14:10-11 also pictures the cup of the wrath of God poured on those who have chosen against him –
‘… he also will drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented by fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever.’
Jesus pleaded with God his Father to remove this cup from him: ‘Father, if it be possible, if there is any other way to do this,please let this cup pass from me. But’, he said, ‘not as I will, but as you will.’ And he obeyed his Father. We were destined to drink this cup. We were by nature objects of wrath, God’s supreme wrath. But Jesus drank the cup for us.
Do we understand the nature of sin?
The answer is: no, we do not. We do not have the capacity to comprehend the horror of stepping away from God, even for just a moment. We are fundamentally unable to realize the nature of any sin, let alone all sin. We do not realize how this angers and hurts God, but we are thankful that Jesus understood and drank the cup for us!
Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘So! You who are going to destroy the temple and rebuild it in 3 days, come down from the cross and save yourself!’
The chief priests and the teachers of the law mocked him ‘among themselves’. Even the robbers crucified on either side of him also ‘heaped insults on him.’ Literally, adding insult to injury, here hangs Jesus, bloody, beaten, and they ‘kick him while he’s down’, hurling insults at him, heaping insults on him. This is a very real part of the suffering of Jesus. Over time, one thief repents and finds mercy, but the other does not.
This goes on for some three hours. The next three hours summarize, in just a few words, ‘At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour’ (noon until three).
Remember the plagues God sent upon Egypt? God was going to deliver his people from slavery and the final plague was the death of the firstborn son of every Egyptian and Israelite for those who rejected God’s redemption. Before that, before the death of the firstborn, the ninth plague, was the plague of darkness. Darkness preceded the great judgment of God on sin, on the enemies of God’s people. Darkness preceded the great deliverance of God’s people from the slavery they had always known.
As Christ dies as a sacrifice for sin, bearing the judgment of God that we might live, as he dies to effect the deliverance of people from the slavery and oppression of sin, first darkness falls. The plague in Moses’ day pointed to the darkness preceding the great deliverance that Jesus won for us sinners.
At the end of the three hours of darkness, as light returns, Jesus knows that this is it. He feels fully the separation from God that sin entails. For that’s what sin does: it cuts us off from God, here and for eternity.
And in Jesus taking our sin on the cross, he experienced the consequence of sin, the judgment for sin, in that he was cut off from God, for the first time in eternity. The pain of that separation is unbearable, and he cries out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ It’s a quote from Psalm 22, a psalm of lament.
Then, with a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.
‘… a loud cry’… It was exhaustion and asphyxiation that killed the crucified, not the pain or blood loss. The way they hung, in order to breathe, they’d have to push themselves up with their feet to take a breath. Over time, usually a day or even a couple days, they eventually lacked the strength to do that, and they would be unable to breathe and they would die. The thing they’d be most unable to do just before death is ‘cry out with a loud voice’. But Jesus does. He does not die of utter exhaustion, a victim of the cross. He chose the moment of death.
‘It is finished,’ he said. ‘Everything you required of me, from birth to now, I have obeyed you. What you told me to say, I said it. What you told me to do, I did it. I have kept the Law. I have surpassed the Law. I have spoken the truth about you. I have perfectly revealed you. Now I offer my body as the perfect sacrifice. I’ve done everything you required of me. It is finished.’ And with a loud cry – ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit’ – he crossed the line into death. Divinity, the source of all life, died.
He was not killed, so much as he laid down his life. (We read that Pilate was surprised that Jesus had already died.)
At the moment of his death, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The curtain separated the main room of the temple from the Holy of Holies, where the dwelling place of God was. The curtain was a barrier. No one could approach God except the high priests, only once a year, and only according to strict protocols. It emphasized the perfection of God, and the absolute unworthiness of sinful people to stand before him. Anyone who violated this, died.
Now, at the death of Jesus, the curtain is torn. The barrier is gone. The sinfulness of humanity is atoned for, removed, and once again there is free access to God. Where sin cuts us off from God, the death of Christ brings us near. Where our sinfulness estranges us from God, through the death of Christ we are reconciled and made his children.
What the religion of the temple (or church) could not do, Christ did in his death: brought us back into the presence of and relationship with God, which is both what we are made for, and what we most deeply long for.
Since Adam and Eve’s first sin, the story of humanity is the story of a people far from God, and the ruin and emptiness that brings. We have a deep-seated thirst that can only be quenched in God. So, we try to quench it by everything but God, filling our lives with relationships, stuff, success at work, addictions, busyness, in the frantic pursuit of what will finally content us.
(And sometimes we are really stupid about all this. If you set before me, on the one hand, God, the only Sovereign, who has power beyond belief, creative power, who laid down his very son for me, and who loves me and has mercy upon me despite all my sin,… and on the other hand, a chocolate bar, I sometimes – literally! – choose the chocolate bar.)
But only God can satisfy, and now because of Jesus, God draws us back to him and we can come, our sins no longer separating us from him. The curtain is torn.
Mark epilogues his account with the details of Jesus’ burial: as sunset approaches there is some urgency to get Jesus off the cross. Deuteronomy 21:23 says that anyone hung on a tree must be buried before sunset. Failing to do so would be to defile the land. So Jesus is quickly wrapped in linen and placed in a tomb.
And so ends the Bible’s account of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, the central event of the Bible, and of history: We preach Christ crucified, Paul would later write to the Corinthians.
Jesus of Nazareth, that Friday afternoon – the day in which the eternal and divine son of God, the Lord and king of heaven and earth – that Friday, willingly gave his life for the sake of sinful humanity.
Jesus died in our place. The Bible is explicit about that, repeatedly.
- Isaiah 53 – God laid on him the iniquity of us all…
- Romans 4 – Jesus was given over to death for our sins….
- 1 Peter 2 – He bore our sins in his body on the tree.
In other words, he took upon himself the punishment our sins deserved. It. Is. Finished. Pick your metaphor. The Bible has many:
- Jesus served your sentence.
- Jesus paid your debt.
- Jesus bought your freedom.
- Jesus made you clean from your filth.
- Jesus gave you the right to become children of God, not enemies.
- Jesus has given you life for death.
- Jesus, in our thirst, brought us living water.
Pick one. Whatever. But he died a substitute in our place. This is the heart of the Christian gospel.
Jesus’ death was sufficient. It was enough to atone for sin, period. He died for the sins of the world. The life of the divine son of God, of infinite worth, is sufficient to cover the infinite offense of our sin. It is finished. This is a life transforming truth.
Think of it: whatever the sin that keeps us from God, Jesus’ death is sufficient to offer forgiveness. The Bible and history is replete with murderers, adulterers, enslavers, demonic, all evil people who have found that the amazing grace of God could forgive and transform them.
The Apostle Paul: oppressor of the church, imprisoner and murderer of Christians, by his own admission a ‘violent man and a blasphemer’, became the most passionate proclaimer of the grace and love of God. John Newton, foul and wicked man of the slave trade, wrote later of the amazing grace he had experienced. Me: critical and lustful and angry, I have been saved by Jesus and have found life in him.
Whatever your sin – past, present or future – is forgiven by virtue of your faith in Jesus. There is nothing we can add to gain more forgiveness, or to make it complete. Christ’s death is sufficient. I do not care what you have done, or are doing now, or your sins in the future. If you are convinced that even God can’t forgive you, that your heart is too black, that your failures are too frequent: the death of Christ is enough.
- He does not need to add your willpower to it to get it done.
- He does not need your religious acts to complete it.
- He does not need your goodness to validate it.
The death of Christ is sufficient. If you want to, you can be forgiven.
Today.
Right now.
Jesus died in your place, and his death was sufficient. It is finished!
So, some questions on this communion Sunday:
- Have you had an encounter with Jesus? Today might be your day. On this communion Sunday make a decision: in your own heart or shared with a friend, whether you are a Christian or not, ask Jesus for an encounter with him.
- Are you feeling cut off from God? Well, God doesn’t like being cut off from you either. Jesus’ death alone can restore you.
- Have you sinned ‘too much’? Forgive me, but who are you to call God a liar? When he says, ‘Your sins are forgiven’, who are you to say, ‘Actually no, they’re not.’ There’s no such thing as ‘too much’ for God’s mercy.
- Are you dirty, dead, enslaved, or guilty? Don’t let that keep you from the bread and the cup! That’s like cleaning yourself up before you step into the shower. Jesus died exactly for the sake of people like me and you: sinners. Don’t desecrate this communion by not taking it, somehow saying to God, ‘What you did is not good enough.’
- Are you able to drink the cup of God’s wrath? No. No for me. ‘No‘ to Peter, Paul, nor Billy Graham and Mother Teresa. ‘No’ for all the people who sit around you right now. None of us can drink the cup of God’s wrath. So we do what we can: we can praise and worship him:
Amazing love! How can it be that you, my King, should die for me!
This is why we call the Friday on which Jesus was betrayed, arrested, tried, flogged, humiliated, crucified, and died – we call it ‘Good Friday’.
Amen.