The Death of Jesus

[0:00] Our scripture reading this morning is from the book of Mark, chapter 15. We've been in the book of Mark for a long time now, almost a little over a year.

[0:18] And we finally come to the end, we're going to look at the death of Christ today, and then next week we're looking at the resurrection. And then I'll talk more next week about what comes after that.

[0:30] But today we're reading chapter 15 starting at verse 33, and reading to verse 41. Mark 15, 33.

[0:52] And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, lima sabachthan, which means, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

[1:11] And some of the bystanders hearing it said, Behold, he is calling Elijah. And some ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a reed, and gave it to him to drink, saying, Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.

[1:24] And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. And when the centurion who stood facing him saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, Truly this man was the Son of God.

[1:42] There were also women looking on from a distance, among whom were Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James, the younger, and of Joseph, and Salome. When he was in Galilee, they followed him and ministered to him, and there were also many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem.

[1:59] Amen. This is God's word. So this morning, we are looking at the darkest moment in the life of Jesus. And for several weeks, we've really been looking at just the last 24 hours of Jesus' life.

[2:14] And everything up to this point, if you think about the way that Mark has told the story, it's all been about how evil men have done this to Jesus. This is a story about evil men doing evil things to Jesus.

[2:26] And even the men who we thought were good, they abandoned Jesus. All his disciples abandoned him. So no one did good in this story. It's all about what evil men have done. But in the final moments of Jesus' life, what we learn is that as painful as the human betrayal was for Jesus, and as evil as all that was, that wasn't Jesus' deepest source of pain in this moment.

[2:51] The deepest pain, you see it, comes here in the form of a question. That's when Jesus says, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And part of the reason why that question makes sense, why it would be so painful, is it assumes something about God.

[3:12] It assumes that God could have intervened if he wanted to. Or it assumes that God could have at least given a word of comfort to Jesus to say, It will be okay, my son.

[3:26] He could have done all those things, and yet, as Jesus puts it, he was forsaken. He was forsaken by God. And it begs an obvious question, which is, Where is God at the cross?

[3:41] Where is God at the cross? In theology, there's a theological term called theodicy, and you may have never heard that word before, but instinctively you see it all the time.

[3:51] It's whenever somebody is suffering, or whenever someone sees suffering, and they say, How could God let that happen? If God is all-loving, and if God is all-powerful, then why did this happen?

[4:05] And theodicy is, how do you answer that question? Theodicy is any attempt to justify a good and loving God in the presence of so much evil in this life. How can he allow that?

[4:18] And the cross is the ultimate question of theodicy. How could God allow this to happen? How could he allow his son, who was perfectly righteous, to die humiliated on the cross?

[4:33] And if you want to answer that question, which we're going to try to do this morning, you've got to look at the three great moments of this passage. You've got to look at the cry, you've got to look at the curtain, and you've got to look at the confession.

[4:46] And that's what we're going to do for the next few minutes. Look at the cry, the curtain, and the confession. First, the cry. The cry is something that we almost understand intuitively. You see a man on a cross crying out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

[5:00] And there's something that we instinctively understand. We know that that must be painful. We relate to that in some way. But for any Jew who would have heard those words, that would have triggered a memory that would have been really significant.

[5:18] Because Jesus' cry, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? is not something that he coined himself. It's the first verse of Psalm 22.

[5:28] These would have been words that Jesus himself learned when he was a little boy growing up in the synagogue. You know, when my family was living in Scotland, we went to a church that had the habit of singing at least one psalm every Sunday.

[5:44] And the effect that that had on the people in that church is that the older you got, the more and more the psalms became kind of embedded in your heart. And they just became a part of who you are.

[5:58] And so the same thing was true in Jesus' culture. Anyone who would have heard Jesus cry, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? They would have thought, He's quoting the scripture. He's saying Psalm 22.1.

[6:11] And Psalm 22 is a lament if you read it. It's the prayer of a righteous man who cannot see God in what is going on in this moment.

[6:21] It's a righteous man who's been persecuted. And if you read Psalm 22, you should go and read it later today. It's eerie because it reads almost like a retelling of everything that Jesus went to on the cross.

[6:35] But it was written a thousand years before Jesus died. And so, for instance, in verse 17, it says, All my bones are on display. People stare and gloat at me. They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment.

[6:49] That's what David wrote a thousand years before Jesus. And then when Jesus comes, what do you find the Romans doing? They're casting lots for his garment. So Jesus takes Psalm 22 and he makes it his own.

[7:01] And it's obvious from the way that Jesus uses that psalm is that he's not just making a moral statement. He's not just saying, I am a righteous man being treated unjustly. It's personal, right?

[7:13] He's talking to God and asking God a question. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And that speaks to the gravity of what's going on here. Jesus, you know, there's so much mystery here, but Jesus feels the absence of his father's love in this moment.

[7:33] I think we can say at least that much. He doesn't feel the love of God in this moment. And you've got to think, this is the same guy who told his disciples, when you get anxious, don't be anxious.

[7:45] Because think about your father. Think about how your father cares for the lilies of the field. And think about how your father cares for the birds who are here today and gone the next day. If he loves the lilies of the field that much, if he clothes them with such beauty, don't you think he looks at you and loves you and watches over you?

[8:03] That no one, no one in history had ever had a closer relationship with God the Father than Jesus Christ. I heard one person put it like this one time, no father was ever more loving and no son was ever more lovable than the father and the son.

[8:24] And so for Jesus to look up and to say, my God, why have you forsaken me? That's scandalous, right? It's scandalous. Donald MacLeod, who's a theologian and scholars, he put it like this.

[8:35] He says, we cannot walk blithely by the cross as if there were nothing disturbing here. There is. And if we are not initially shocked and repelled by it, we shall never understand it.

[8:49] It has to be a scandal before it can become good news. Why is the Son of God hanging on that tree? Does God know? And if he does, why does he permit it?

[9:00] And why does he even leave himself open to the suspicion of being responsible for it? And that last sentence, I think, points to the real scandal here, that it isn't just that God turns his face away at the cross and walks away from it all, but all signs point to the fact that God the Father is the one, in the end, who truly brought Jesus to the cross.

[9:25] And sometimes the language of Scripture is uncomfortably vivid here. You think about, these are words that you probably know, Isaiah 53, 10. It was the will of the Lord to crush him.

[9:38] Or, as the KJV puts it even more painfully, I think, it pleased the Lord to bruise him. And those are hard words.

[9:48] And I think a lot of people and a lot of theologians would rather believe that God the Father was looking at the cross and he was just a helpless, he was just standing there helpless, rather than believe that he actually had a hand in bringing Jesus to the cross.

[10:04] But I think the Scripture is clear on this, that it was God the Father who brought Jesus to the cross. And any time that the Scriptures talk about God the Father bringing Jesus to the cross, it also tells us why.

[10:18] It's not just that there's a reasonlessness here. Isaiah 53, which we just read from, but here's another portion of it. It says, Surely he, Jesus, He took up our pain and he bore our suffering.

[10:31] He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Or Paul in Romans 8.32, he refers to God as He who did not spare His Son.

[10:43] He says, He who did not spare His Son, but gave Him up for us all. Or Paul again in 2 Corinthians 5, he says, God, God made Him, Jesus, God made Jesus who knew no sin to be sin for us so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.

[11:05] Now, all of that, everything we just read, all that's pointing to the paradox of the cross, which is that God the Father sends the most righteous man who's ever lived to the cross to be treated as the greatest sinner who's ever lived.

[11:21] And He's treated that way not just by the world around Him, not just by the Pontius Pilate and the chief priests. He's treated that way by God the Father. God made Him to be sin who knew no sin.

[11:36] So then, the question, where is God at the cross? Well, part of the answer has to be God at the cross is giving to sin what sin deserves.

[11:48] Not because He's vindictive, not because He's unhinged or uncontrollably angry, but because He's just. God is giving justice to the Son because the Son is bearing the weight of the world's sin on His shoulders.

[12:04] And if God had not done that, if Jesus had been the sin bearer and God had not punished Him as the sin bearer, He would have been unjust. But what does that mean for Jesus?

[12:17] That means for Jesus in this moment at the cross, when He says that cry, my God, why are you forsaken me? Jesus is literally going through hell in this moment.

[12:29] There's a, at the beginning of our passage, you may have read right past it, but if you've been standing there, you certainly would have noticed it. Mark says, it's about noon in the middle of the day and darkness has covered the face of the earth.

[12:43] And it's almost like Mark is telling us, I mean, this really happened, but it's almost like Mark is saying, the whole world is dark because the Son of God is sitting there dying on the cross. But that darkness, there's so many ways that you can read that.

[12:57] You know, when Jesus, whenever, one of the most common ways that Jesus describes hell in the gospel, you know, Jesus talked about hell more than anyone else in the New Testament.

[13:07] One of the common metaphors that he used to describe hell was darkness. He referred to hell as the outer darkness where you're kind of cast out from the presence of God. And so you could read this darkness as, this is where Jesus is.

[13:22] He's on the cross, but he is being cast out from the presence of God. And, you know, John Calvin, you know, we read in our Apostles' Creed, he descended into hell.

[13:32] And someone a couple weeks ago asked me, why do we say that Jesus descended into hell? And John Calvin argued, people debate this, but John Calvin argued that what we mean when we say that Jesus descended into hell is that on the cross, Jesus experienced hell because he's experiencing what someone would experience in hell, which is the wrath of God given over to sin.

[13:55] Okay, so why are we talking about this? This is not, this is not a happy thought, right? Why talk about this this morning? One reason why we have to look at this, why we have to stop for a moment and think about it is because nothing else in Scripture, no other image in Scripture, no other moment in Scripture paints the gravity of sin so clearly as the cross.

[14:18] In the cross, God is showing you and I the gravity of sin more than anywhere else that he is in the rest of Scripture. you know, growing in faith, we imagine, the gospel is good news, right?

[14:30] And we grow in faith and we come to rejoice more and more in that good news. But part of what it means to grow in faith is actually, counterintuitively, growing in our awareness of sin.

[14:44] You know, growing in our awareness that our sins are costly and what it means for Jesus Christ to bear our sins so that ironically, the more you become convinced of your own sinfulness, if you're a Christian, the more you can rejoice because you see more and more how much Christ actually saved you from on the cross.

[15:07] And, you know, one of the greatest challenges that each of us have, myself included, is it's so easy to forget in our day-to-day lives what the gravity of sin is. You know, I was at the Rotary Club a couple weeks ago and we had the chief of police come and he was talking about the drug problem in Colombia.

[15:23] and there were several questions that revolved around, well, how can we help these people? How can we help people that are dealing with addictions which are real? And one of the points that he made was it is so hard to help someone who's dealing with a drug addiction until they can see the gravity of it themselves.

[15:41] Because isn't it the case that so often a person can be so unaware of the damage they're doing to their own life and it's so obvious to everyone else around them that they can't see it and until they can see it they can't reach out for the help that they need.

[15:57] And what the gospel says is that is you and me. God can see so clearly how damaging our sin is to our own lives and to our fates and yet if we can't see it we can't reach out for the help that Jesus Christ offers.

[16:14] But let me say this and this is going to our next point. the Bible wants you to be absolutely convinced of the gravity of your sin and it never leaves you there though.

[16:26] Isn't it beautiful that the moment of the greatest revelation of sin that we get in the whole Bible is also the revelation of the greatest mercy that we find in the whole Bible. And that brings us to the second image that we have in this passage which is the curtain.

[16:41] The curtain. It says here that the curtain was torn in the temple and it's a dramatic moment and you could say well maybe that's just highlighting the drama of this moment because surely if the Son of God is dying on the cross it wouldn't be surprising if something crazy happened at the temple that's dedicated to that God.

[16:59] But there's more going on here. Just like Psalm 22 would have been a signal to any Jew about how to understand Jesus on the cross the temple in the same way the tearing of the curtain would have been significant to any Jew because they would have said I know what that curtain means.

[17:16] It doesn't say a curtain it says the curtain and the curtain in the temple is significant because it was always understood as a symbol of our relationship to God.

[17:32] You probably know what the curtain means even if you don't know what the curtain means if you know the story of Exodus. God redeems his people out of Exodus because all the way back to Exodus he redeems the people brings them he makes them into a nation on Mount Sinai he gives his people the Ten Commandments but whenever God makes the nation of Israel whenever he saves the people out of Israel there's one problem it's a big problem the problem is God is so holy that he cannot dwell among sins so the question is how can God dwell among the Israelites if they're sinful people and what he does is he gets Moses and the people to build a tent a tabernacle and that's where his presence dwells because he's so holy that no one can actually come face to face with his presence and so he dwells among his people by being in the tent but no one is allowed inside the tent except for the high priest who can go in there once a year to make atonement for the sins of the people and the moment that Jesus dies

[18:40] Mark makes a point of saying that the curtain was torn in two now what is the curtain was the curtain that hung between the outside world and the holy of holies the presence of God and it was there as a way of saying your sins are so great that if you were to pass through that curtain and you were to step into the presence of God you would die instantly because no unholy person can see God face to face and when Jesus dies on the cross and the temple the temple curtain is torn what that means is Jesus is acting like a high priest and he is atoning for the sin of the people once and for all so that the temple curtain can finally be torn and the presence of God now where it was for thousands of years blocked away from view now it can go out into the world and we can we can come face to face with God for the first time so another question where is God at the cross well part of the answer is he is at the cross reconciling us to himself that's how Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 5

[19:46] God is at the cross carrying away the curtain so that there's nothing that separates his people from himself not because we're righteous but because our sins have been paid for in Jesus Christ God sends the son to the cross so that you and I can be with him in a way that we never could have been before now again so another what do we do with that what do we do with the with the tearing of the veil which seems so inconsequential to our lives well here's one thing that we do with it we remember this being forsaken is being forsaken and feeling forsaken are not the same things you know often times we can feel forsaken by God in the same way that often times a child can feel forsaken by his parents just because for a moment they can't see them I remember when we used to drop our daughter off at preschool she would cry every single day and I always wondered if it was because she can't comprehend the fact that we haven't really left her we just walked away for a few moments and she can't see that we're still there or when a child is disciplined by a parent the child can feel forsaken the child can interpret that as my parents don't love me anymore when in reality what's going on is the parents out of their great love are disciplining the child but sometimes we can feel forsaken by God we can feel like

[21:10] God has walked away from me for good and it's good in those moments to say feelings are not do not always correlate with what is true you know sometimes we feel like our sin is small and the Bible says our sin is not small but sometimes we feel forsaken by God and what does the Bible say Jesus Christ came and his death brought down the barrier that separates us from God brought down the barrier that our sin created that separates us from God Jesus was Jesus was forsaken so that you might never be forsaken if you trust in him he removed the curtain and this is these are the promises that God makes throughout all of scripture Deuteronomy 31 he will not leave you or forsake you let's repeat it again in Hebrews sometimes I think we live as if there is still a curtain in the temple as in we live as if Christ died for us which is great but we've still got to fix something we've still got to make things right before God can love us and what the gospel says is if the temple is torn the temple is torn and all you have to do is trust in that and all the change that God we look at our lives and we say

[22:30] I am not a righteous person I am a sinner I do things that I wish I did not do and we look at that and we say this is why I cannot come to God and what the gospel says is there is change that's possible but it's only after you see and you trust in the tearing of the veil that you see and you trust in what Jesus Christ has done Carly and I were at a concert last night a Christian concert don't worry it was a Christian concert we were at a Christian concert in Gulfport last night and one of the songs that really stuck stayed with both of us the chorus that was repeated over and over again were our sins they are many his mercy is more and sometimes it's as simple as just remembering that you know sometimes we are so overwhelmed by the weight of our sin and it's true our sin is overwhelming but we forget the other side of that statement our sins they are many but his mercy is more and that's what's being shown to us on the cross here let me close briefly with this so you've got you've got the cry you've got the curtain and finally you've got the confession you see the confession there in verse 39 from the most unlikely of places is the centurion standing at the cross and he says in verse 39 surely this man was the son of God now if you read through

[23:54] Mark all at once you realize that's a really significant moment because Mark in verse 1 says this is the in verse 1 chapter 1 he says this is the gospel of Jesus Christ the son of God and it's not until the very end of chapter 15 that you finally hear someone within the story say this is the son of God and it comes from the centurion who is standing at the cross and it says that he looked at the way that Jesus died and I wonder what that means but whatever it was in seeing how Jesus died makes the centurion say this really was the son of God and you know the question that we've been thinking about this morning is where is God at the cross and you can't fully answer that question without thinking about who is on the cross you know the guard could have said this man shouldn't be on the cross he is a righteous man and a lot of righteous men have gone to the cross before who should not have gone to the cross for whatever they did but that's not what he says he says surely this man was the son of God and so to the question where is God at the cross we also have to have a place to say he is at the cross he is on the cross and in Jesus Christ the son of God in whom all the fullness of deity dwell in Jesus Christ

[25:20] God becomes a man takes on a human nature and God himself goes to the cross to save his people and you know one way to talk about the cross is to say Jesus is a victim here he is a victim of the violence of men and we can talk about Jesus like he is a victim but you also have to say in another sense he is very much not a victim because Jesus Christ chose to go to the cross a lot of theologians who were more liberal theologians get really angry about the way that we sometimes talk about the cross and they see the cross as what they would call divine child abuse how could any father ever let his son go to the cross but you have to remember Jesus Christ is just as much God as God the father is they are both truly God and Jesus Christ of his own will and volition goes with the full backing and authority and love of the father to the cross they make that decision in covenant together to save their people

[26:24] God in other words what does that mean it means God did not send someone else to save you God became a man and went to the cross in order to save you from your sins in Christ God came down Emmanuel God with us he came down and did something that you and I could have never done for ourselves and I'll just I'll close here with this do you know that love you know in any human relationship we say we know this right intuitively the measure of a person's love for someone else is how far will they go to love them how far will they go to save them how far will they go to take care of them if all you have if all you know about God is the cross and all you know about God is that he went to the cross to redeem you of your sins what does that say about his love I think anyone who truly sees the love of God at the cross for what it is cannot help but be themselves filled with a love that no earth can produce no earthly love can produce let's pray heavenly father we thank you for your goodness we thank you for the wondrous mystery of the cross that we cannot comprehend and yet what little of it we can see what little of it you give us insight into fills us with wonder at the love of God displayed in the love of Jesus Christ help us to live lives that are abounding with joy because of your great love in your son's name we pray amen we pray