Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of atonement and the death of Christ from Matthew 27:27-50.
“Then the soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him. They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand and knelt in front of him and mocked him. ‘Hail, king of the Jews!’ they said.
They spit on him, and took the staff and struck him on the head again and again. After they had mocked him, they took off the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him. As they were going out, they met a man from Cyrene, named Simon, and they forced him to carry the cross. They came to a place called Golgotha (which means The Place of the Skull).
There they offered Jesus wine to drink, mixed with gall; but after tasting it, he refused to drink it. When they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots. And sitting down, they kept watch over him there. Above his head they placed the written charge against him: THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF THE JEWS.
Two robbers were crucified with him, one on his right and one on his left. Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!’ In the same way the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders mocked him.
‘He saved others’ they said, ‘but he can’t save himself! He’s the King of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, “I am the Son of God.” ’ In the same way the robbers who were crucified with him also heaped insults on him.
From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land. About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’—which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ When some of those standing there heard this, they said, ‘He’s calling Elijah.’
Immediately one of them ran and got a sponge. He filled it with wine vinegar, put it on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink. The rest said, ‘Now leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah comes to save him.’ And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.”
This is the Word of the Lord.
I shall not begin with Jesus. I shall begin with David. David was a remarkable man: an able king, a first-class administrator, personally courageous, artistically gifted, a singer of songs, a leader of men, raised up by God, and declared by God to be a man after God’s own heart. Tragically, in his middle years, he seduced a young woman next door. Then when she was found to be pregnant, he arranged for the non-judicial liquidation of her spouse. David thought he had got away with it, but then he was confronted by the prophet Nathan.
Although Nathan was God’s mouthpiece, he knew enough not to deal with an autocrat except carefully. So he began with a parable. “Your Majesty,” he said, “upcountry there’s been a judicial misfiring. Two farmers live side by side. One is a dirt farmer who had one little lamb. The other is a filthy rich farmer who had sheep and cattle everywhere. Some people came by and, you know the hospitality of these parts, that big-name farmer had to provide a feast.
Instead of providing one of his own animals, he swiped the one little lamb of the dirt farmer.” David is outraged. “Who is this man? Just tell me who it is. We’ll sort this one out in a big hurry!” At this juncture, David is completely unaware of the irony of his words. However, God knows, and the writer and readers know, that everything that David is saying is deeply ironic.
Now we all know what irony is. It’s a literary device used by a lot of authors so that speakers say things not only other than what their words formally mean, but sometimes the precise opposite of what they mean, in such a way that the participants in the narrative often don’t have a clue what’s going on. Sometimes it’s intentional irony and sometimes unintentional, but the writer always knows. The readers, if they’re paying attention, also know.
Some irony is funny. Some of it is vicious. At its best, irony always gives you insight into the deeper movement of what’s going on in a narrative text. It enables you to see what is really going on as opposed to merely the surface sequence of events. So what you see, in the case of David, is that the man’s own moral bearings actually condemn himself. The man stands self-condemned.
Now in the New Testament, the two writers most given to irony are Matthew and John. Part of the problem is that we become so familiar with the biblical accounts that we don’t hear the irony anymore because we’re familiar with the text. You have to start thinking it through with fresh eyes, as it were, to start hearing it all over again.
Here, in this account of the crucifixion of Christ, what you have in front of you is, in fact, the ironies of the cross. Matthew very carefully lays them out. By recounting the crucifixion of the Master, in line after line of steeped irony, Matthew shows you, again and again and again, what is really going on.
I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the setting. Jesus has been in the public eye for two to three years. These were years of public ministry but, of course, he had fallen afoul of the religious and political authorities in Jerusalem. They resented his popularity, feared his power, and were suspicious of his motives. They thought that the rising number of his followers could foment a rebellion against the superpower of the day, Rome, and there could be only one end to that. So Jesus had to be crushed.
They arranged a kangaroo court, and they managed to secure the sanction of the Roman governor to have Jesus executed by crucifixion. The Romans had three modes of execution. Crucifixion was for scumbags, for non-citizens, and for slaves. No Roman citizen could be executed by crucifixion apart from the explicit sanction of the emperor himself.
Here, in the text, we pick up the account right after sentence has been passed. In those days, there was no judicial review after a capital sentence. The person who was so condemned was taken out immediately and executed. That is the point that we have reached. Here, then, are the ironies of the cross:
1. The man who is mocked as king is King.
Verses 27 to 31. Before I re-read these verses, it’s worth remembering that beating prisoners up, softening them up by means of severe beatings for the purpose of interrogation, was common in the Roman world. Jesus has already undergone that. Then after sentence is passed, it was common to beat the criminal again before taking him out to the place of execution. Jesus has already undergone that. What takes place here is not part of the regular proceedings. This is barracks-room humor.
“Then the governor’s soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him. They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand and knelt in front of him and mocked him. ‘Hail, king of the Jews!’ they said. They spit on him, and took the staff and struck him on the head again and again. After they had mocked him, they took off the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him.”
Now their words are words of intentional irony. When they say, “Hail, king of the Jews,” they mean, of course, that he’s not. That was the charge; namely, that he was guilty of treason: claiming to be a king who would, in some sense, jeopardize the exclusive authority of Caesar. So to make mockery of Jesus’ claims they took these long Middle Eastern spines, wrapped them up in a vine, and squashed them on Jesus’ head.
They gave him a robe (to make him look as if he were wearing royal apparel) and a stick (a fake scepter), which they bash against his head, with endless bowings. They were screaming, “Hail, Your Majesty!” and bashing him across the face. This was barracks-room humor. “Hail, king of the Jews!” They think they are being funny and deeply ironic.
But God knows, and Matthew and the readers know, that Jesus is the King of the Jews. The theme, of course, has been introduced by Matthew from the beginning. What’s the first line of this gospel? “The origins of Jesus Christ the son of Abraham, the son of David.” Then the genealogy with its three series of 14, and the central series of 14 is the years of the Davidic dynasty before the exile.
Then, of course, Jesus begins to announce the dawning of the kingdom. In many of the parables that he tells, though not all, he is transparently the one who is the king. The matter has been brought up explicitly in the trial. Matthew 27:11 says, “Jesus stood before the governor, and the governor asked him, ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’ ‘Yes, it is as you say,’ Jesus replied.” The answer is nuanced. It’s an affirmation, but it’s a cautious affirmation because, in one sense, Jesus is not a king in exactly the same sense that Pilate means. Yet it is an affirmation.
Then how does the book end up? It ends up with Jesus’ claim that all authority is his, in heaven and on earth. He’s the King. In fact, in that last verse, you also have something of a broader New Testament theme. He’s not only the King of the Jews, but he’s the King of all. He’s the King of the men who are laughing at him, who are beating him. He’s your King and he’s my King, acknowledged as such or not. Every knee will bow to him; every tongue will confess his name one day.
He is the mediatorial King. According to 1 Corinthians 15, all of God’s authority is mediated through him. God mediates all of his sovereignty through the resurrected Christ. Oh, he’s the King, all right. God knows this; Matthew knows this, by the time he writes this; and the readers know this.
Yet here he is going to the cross. We’ve become so familiar with this that we don’t read the sheer ignominy in the juxtaposition of themes. Going to the cross and being King? Christians in the first three centuries made much of this irony and spoke of Jesus “reigning from the cross.” It is almost incoherent. You have to explain the gospel to a first-, second-, or third-century person after you’ve said something so bizarre as that! You don’t reign from a cross; you reign from a throne. A cross is for scumbags. Yet this is at the heart of the gospel.
Moreover, this is not merely something that belongs to Jesus alone. In one sense, it reflects the very structure of God’s order. It ought to reflect, even, how leadership is exercised within the church. Do you recall some of Christ’s own instruction in this gospel a little earlier? Matthew 20, verses 20 and following: “The mother of Zebedee’s sons came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him. ‘What is it you want?’ he asked. She said, ‘Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.’ ”
Now transparently, she had a notion of the kingdom that was triumphalistic. She had not envisaged the cross. She envisaged great David’s greater son ruling, and she wanted her two sons to be on the inside track: one, perhaps, as the minister of defense and the other as the minister of homeland security, or whatever.
“ ‘You don’t know what you are asking,’ Jesus said to them. ‘Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?’ ” By which, he is alluding to his suffering. They don’t catch it. They think this means “Can you experience what is coming to me?” without reference to suffering, by which they mean royal right. “ ‘We can,’ they answered,” with supreme self-confidence.
Jesus said to them, ‘You will indeed drink from my cup …” They’re going to face more suffering than they yet realize. “… but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.’ When the ten heard about this, they were indignant with the two brothers.” Only, of course, because they hadn’t got their dibs in first.
“Jesus called them together and said, ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave, just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.’ ” Thus, the cross, in Matthew’s theology, is not only at the heart of Jesus’ ransom mission but is the paradigm of genuine Christian leadership.
Now it is very important to see that this does not mean that we all become wimps if we’re Christian leaders (unless you start thinking of Jesus as a wimp). Servant-leadership has come to mean, in much of the Western world, an awful lot about being a servant and not much about leadership. We don’t want to go down that track, unless you think that Jesus has no leadership and is only a servant.
At the same time, the servant-leadership that Jesus represents dies to self to do God’s will, to bring about God’s purposes, and to serve God’s design. God’s servant-leaders in the church of Jesus Christ must serve in exactly the same way: not triumphalistically, not bound up in their own egos, not trying to lord it over others, not merely trying to be cock-a-hoop, but going the way of the cross such that all of the authority that they do exercise is under the cross.
2. The man who is utterly powerless is powerful.
That’s the burden, of course, of all of verses 32 to 40. I can’t go through this line by line but will pick up two or three of the rapidly passing scenes. In those days, the upright of the cross was left in the public place of crucifixion, which was always by crossroads or by a main thoroughfare or the like. After you were condemned and scourged, then you carried out the crossmember on your shoulder to the place of execution.
You were fastened to it, either by nails through your wrists or by being tied to it, and then the crossmember was hoisted up onto the upright and then your legs were fixed as well. So by “carrying your cross,” what this meant was you were carrying the crossmember out to the place of crucifixion. That was what was going on.
Jesus is now so battered that he does not even have the physical strength to carry out this piece of wood to the place of his execution. That’s how weak he is, which is why the Roman soldiers used their judicial right to impress local citizens to give them a hand. They conscript Simon, here, to carry out Jesus’ cross (that is, the crossmember) to the place of execution. In other words, implicitly, this scene is declaring Jesus’ absolute weakness at this juncture. He’s not even strong enough, as he staggers out to the place of crucifixion, to carry a chunk of wood on his shoulders.
Then, of course, he gets out there, and they crucify him. All of our little crucifixes and paintings and so on, today, picture him decently clothed in a loincloth. That’s not the way it was. The Romans crucified you naked. They wanted it to be shameful. So Jesus’ remaining few things, the clothes on his back, are taken by the soldiers, who gamble them off. The man has nothing. He has only death and suffering in front of him. He is utterly stripped and powerless.
In earlier times, when the Romans crucified people, they sometimes just left them on the cross and walked away. There had been occasions, however, when the victim’s friends had come along and taken them down. So at this point in Roman history, it was imperial policy to leave a quaternion of soldiers there so that friends couldn’t come along and take Jesus down.
Jesus was now not only physically suffering, but there was no hope of escape. None. He’s guarded by a quaternion of soldiers who are drinking, looking around insolently, making their own rude remarks, and looking at the crowd, the rabble, whom they control. There on the titulus, above his head, is this same mocking charge: “THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF THE JEWS.”
More mockery, intentional irony, with the entire scene pointing out how utterly powerless Jesus is. That would strike you, in the first century, as more shocking than it does today because today, not least in the Anglo-Saxon world, we think of monarchy (if we think of it at all) in terms of a constitutional monarchy, but no one in the first century had any notion whatsoever of a constitutional monarchy. No one.
After all, if you were king, you were king by divine right. If you were king, you ruled. That’s what kingship involved. Today, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has almost no real power. She can dissolve Parliament, but if she chooses to do so without the sanction of her prime minister, then what she is doing is precipitating a national election and a small crisis. No one has done it in decades. She has some moral suasion, but in recent decades, for various reasons, she’s lost most of that. What power does she have? She’s great at riding in golden chariots.
That’s not what kingship looks like in the first century, however. So to have this placarded over his head, “This is Jesus, the king of the Jews,” while he’s executed by the most vicious means, the means reserved for scumbags and criminals and slaves.… The whole scene is meant to strip him down to nothing. He’s powerless. His situation is hopeless, and he hangs there to die while the crowds laugh.
Then, in case we have missed the point, it comes to a head in verses 39 and 40. “Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!’ ” In other words, they are accusing him of claiming to have astonishing power when, in fact, his circumstance shows that he is powerless.
Now this matter, too, had come up at Jesus’ trial. You find it in Matthew 26:59. “The chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for false evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death. But they did not find any, though many false witnesses came forward. Finally, two came forward and declared, ‘This fellow said, “I am able to destroy the temple of God and rebuild it in three days.” ‘ “
Now why would that be considered a useful capital charge? The reason is that since the Roman Empire was so pluralistic empirically (that is, there were so many religions in it), one of the ways that the Romans kept order amongst all of these religious voices was to make it a capital offense to destroy or to desecrate any temple. If you desecrated any temple, it was a capital charge under the Romans.
So if some people remember that Jesus said, “… destroy this temple …” then whatever he said later didn’t matter too much. He said, “Destroy this temple.” This sounds like a capital charge, doesn’t it? Then to go beyond that and say, “… and I will raise it again in three days”? Pompous power! How on earth are you going to do that?
As you recall, however, the witnesses couldn’t quite get their story together, so that did not become the charge that finally brought about the crucifixion, legally. Instead, it was a charge of treason because Jesus claimed to be king. Nevertheless, the matter had been brought up.
When you ask where the evidence is that Jesus actually said anything like that, it’s not in Matthew’s gospel. This is one of those providentially accidental alignments between one gospel and another gospel. It’s back in John 2. In other words, we’re coming to John 2 from the other end. Yesterday we looked from the reference to Jesus as tabernacle forward to what he says about the temple. Now we’re looking from the crucifixion back to what he says about the temple.
“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again.” His opponents didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. John says that his disciples didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. It wasn’t until after Jesus had risen from the dead that the disciples remembered his words and believed the Scriptures.
They finally understood that he was not claiming that he was going to take down this glorious hunk of gold-sheathed masonry that we call the “second temple” or the “Herodian temple.” No, he was talking about his own body. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again.” It was by his death and resurrection that he would be constituted the Temple of God, the meeting place between God and human beings. But it was a great point to make mockery, wasn’t it?
Have you seen some of the great temples or cathedrals of Europe? In no case did the initial architect ever see the finished product. It was just too big of a job for one generation. In John 2, this temple has been in the building process for 46 years, and that was merely for the re-beautification program! That wasn’t starting from scratch. It went on and was finished some years later and then, of course, was torn down in AD 70.
You could put up a small temple in the ancient world in two or three decades, but that was a pretty small temple. In the case of the Jerusalem temple, it was forbidden by law to actually chisel out any stone within the temple precincts. You weren’t allowed to hear the sound of a hammer anywhere in the temple precincts. So all the stones had to be carefully measured, cut, brought into the temple precincts, and carefully laid (without hydraulics). You weren’t going to re-build anything in three days.
Nowadays, of course … with things like Habitat for Humanity … if you throw in a decent foundation and have a whole lot of pre-fab, a decent crew, and a couple of informed engineers you can put up a house in a day or two. Even when I was a boy, we used to put up cabins in the North Woods on Christian campsites, and it would take us about a day to put one up.
Nowadays, the tools are better and faster. To plaster a house in older technology was a big job. Nowadays, with gyprock, automatic studs, and battery-packed screwdrivers with screws and plastic sheaths, even I can gyprock a small house in a day, and I’m no expert! But in the first century? Out of stone? By hand? “Oh, you are so powerful! You were going to knock down the temple and in three days raise it again. Oh, you are so powerful, aren’t you? Come down from the cross and we’ll see your power then!” He was mocked as utterly powerless.
But God knows, and Matthew and the readers know, that it is precisely by remaining on the cross and exhausting the powerlessness that he rises from the dead, displays his power, and the Temple is built: the great meeting place between God and human beings. The man who is utterly powerless is powerful, precisely by going through the ignominy, powerlessness, and shame of the cross.
This, too, Jesus has reflected on in ethical ways before we come to this chapter. In Matthew 16, the famous scene at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” “Some say this; some say that.” Jesus eventually asks, “What do you say?” Peter, speaking for the lot, says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Then we’re told, in Matthew 16:21, that Jesus, from that point, begins to talk explicitly (this is the first of five such predictions in Matthew’s gospel) of his path to the cross. He must go to Jerusalem. He must suffer beatings, torture, and persecution from the chief priests, the elders, and the teachers of the law. Then, on the third day after being crucified, he will rise again.
Peter, having scored once, thinks he will score again. He thinks he ought to instruct Christ in theology. “This shall never happen to you,” he said. Jesus wheels on him and says, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me, for you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.” In other words, even at this juncture, when Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, he does not mean quite what we mean by confessing that Jesus is the Christ.
When you and I confess that Jesus is the Christ, today, we cannot avoid thinking of Christ crucified. Peter is right to confess that Jesus is the Christ, and Jesus himself blesses Peter and says that this much truth has been disclosed to Peter by God the Father himself, yet Peter’s conception of the Christ at this juncture is still of a stripped-down Christ: a Christ without a cross. Peter believes in a Christ with a heritage of the Davidic line and who fulfills messianic promises of splendor, but he still has no category for a crucified Messiah.
When Jesus unpacks it, he then says this in Matthew 16:24: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Now we’re so familiar with this expression take up your cross that it no longer seems shocking to us. We may actually speak sometimes of all of us having our crosses to bear.
Runaway kid? Ingrown toenail? Miserable in-law? Round of cancer? “We all have our crosses to bear. Live long enough and you’ll suffer. The only alternative is not living long. We all have our crosses to bear.” Yet sometimes, we say these things even with a bit of a twinkle in our eyes as if it’s a joke. Nobody joked about the cross in the first century.
There is a remarkable book by Martin Hengel, called Crucifixion, in which he goes through the sources of the first century that talk about crucifixion to show how cross and other crucifixion-related terms were never, ever used in joking ways or lighthearted ways. The thing was considered so bizarre and so ugly that it was inappropriate to joke about it. You keep language like that away from children. You don’t talk about crucifixion. You avoid the public places of crucifixion. You don’t let the children see it because it’s all so hideous.
Yet today, of course, our bishops wear crosses around their necks. We have crosses on some of our buildings. We have crosses printed on our Bibles and crosses dangling from our ears and crosses in our lapels. Nobody is scandalized! Socially, in the ancient world, this would have been equivalent, today, to wearing a fresco of the mass graves of Auschwitz as a lapel button. It’s so bizarre that it’s obscene. Yet nobody is shocked today because our cross today is so domesticated.
Then Jesus has the cheek to say, “If you want to be my disciple, you take up your cross and follow me.” That, in a context in time where taking up the cross meant that after judicial sentence has been passed upon you, you take the crossmember on your shoulder, you go out to the place of execution, and the only thing waiting for you is nakedness, shame, torture, and death. “Now if you want to be my disciple, that’s what you do. Daily.” Talk about a crowd-pleaser! It’s remarkable, isn’t it?
The vast majority of us are never called to lay down our lives in some physical sense, although there have been more Christian martyrs in the last century and a half than the previous 18 centuries combined. However, all of us are called to die daily because we rise to newness of life precisely in dying to ourselves. Apart from that, there is no following of Jesus. It’s a very graphic way of getting across the fundamentals of repentance. It’s no longer my way; it’s his way. We follow a Master, a King, a reigning King, who dies first, literally, by crucifixion.
3. The man who can’t save himself saves others.
Verses 41 and 42: “In the same way the chief priests, the teachers of the law, and the elders mocked him. ‘He saved others,’ they said, ‘but he can’t save himself! He’s the King of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him.’ ” There’s this “king” theme recurring.
Of course, we’re Christians. Many of us are Christian ministers. We’re familiar with save language. In broader culture, however, there are many people who, if they use the verb to save, use it in decidedly non-theological ways. We save up money for retirement. If we’re into sports, we make a fabulous save, and our team wins. If we are computer nerds, save is something you jolly well had better do unless you want to lose a lot of data.
What does Matthew mean by the verb to save? Once again, he has told us. This is a theme that has been developing through the whole book. It starts in the very first chapter. Joseph is told, “You shall give him the name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” Jesus is merely the Greek form of Joshua, which means Yahweh saves. “You will call him ‘Yahweh saves,’ for he will save his people from their sins.”
Because that’s placarded at the very beginning of the book, there is a sense in which you need to read the entire gospel of Matthew as the gospel in which Jesus saves his people from their sins. Thus, when you find him preaching the Sermon on the Mount … with all of that ethical instruction and its relationship to the Old Testament, all of this disclosure of what the kingdom of God is really like, and its relationship to Old Testament Law and Prophets … it’s bound up with the project of saving his people from their sins.
When you read Matthew 8 and 9 with the long list of miracles … healing people, casting out demons, and actually saving (in this comprehensive sense) even Gentile servants … what he’s doing is saving his people from their sins, because sins have consequences in illness and death and disaster and pain. This is why, in chapter 8, Matthew himself relates the healing ministry of Jesus back to Isaiah 53.
People sometimes ask the question, “Is there healing in the atonement?” Because we sometimes want to avoid the kind of wildest extremes that claim that we have every right to be healed today, many of us say, “No, of course not. That comes later.” But re-read Matthew 8. Of course there’s healing in the atonement. There’s also, for that matter, a resurrection body in the atonement.
All the blessings that we receive come to us from the atonement. The question is not whether there is healing in the atonement but whether we get it all necessarily today. The answer is no, not necessarily, just as we don’t get resurrection bodies today. However, it’s still in the atonement. It’s secured by the cross.
In Matthew 8:16 and following, Matthew carefully makes sure that his readers understand that Jesus’ healings during his ministry were bound up with Isaiah 53. They were proleptic, anticipatory announcements of the reversal of sin, the undoing of sin, because he came to save his people from their sins.
“He was wounded for our transgressions. He was wounded and bruised for us, and by his stripes we are healed.” All of his healings were part of the anticipatory announcement of what finally comes out of the cross. “By his stripes we are healed.” Because, you see, he came to save his people from their sins.
Then you get to Matthew 10 with a kind of trainee mission … with people being sent out, learning to preach the gospel and given special authority against the powers of Gentile persecution and against the powers of darkness … this too is part of the Master’s plan to save his people from their sins.
When you get to chapter 13 with the parables of the kingdom … the child of the kingdom comes slowly, not quite yet with a bang, but slowly, with the weeds and the tares growing up together, with seed being sowed in various kinds of ground … this is part of the Master’s plan. The bang comes at the very end. It isn’t here yet, and he’s doing it this way because he’s come to save his people from their sins.
You can see this all the way through to this cross, this passion narrative, to the resurrection that follows, because he comes to save his people from their sins. However, when the mockers say this, they think they are engaging in intentional irony. “He went around saving people, and he can’t save himself. It’s ironic, isn’t it?” But God knows, and Matthew and the readers know, that these people are speaking more truly that they know.
Jesus can’t save himself and also save others. If he saves himself, he can’t save others. By can’t, the mockers meant he was physically incapable of stepping down off that cross, but God knows, and Matthew and the readers know, that Jesus is still able to call for 12 legions of angels. What keeps him on the cross is not that he can’t now save himself physically but rather the sure and certain knowledge that if he does come down off that cross he is not doing his Father’s will and he is not saving people.
When I was a boy, I had an even more perverse imagination than I have now. There were many stories I read.… I don’t know why I did this. I still do it sometimes; it’s a terrible habit. You read a story only so far and then you think it through in your imagination, you envisage it, and then you think through how the story would have become twisted if you tweaked two or three little bits. You change them; then what would happen in the story? Am I the only one with that kind of perverse imagination?
Of the biblical stories I often thought about, this one took pride of place. “Come down from the cross now, and we’ll believe!” So Jesus said, “All right,” and he came down. Do they believe? Well, in one sense, it would be pretty impressive. In one sense, they’d believe. There would be a lot of backpedaling (“Whoops, sorry!”), but there would be belief in that sense. But trusting in him as the substitute for sinners? Placing their confidence in him as the sin-bearer, as the one who is wounded for our transgressions?
I suspect that one of the reasons why we have trouble thinking through this one, really understanding it, is because there’s less and less heritage, not least in the Western world, of what is meant by moral imperative. Did some of you see the film Titanic when it came out, or are you so separated from the film industry that you don’t go to films? In which case, let me tell you what it was like.
In this depiction of the Titanic, when the great ship is beginning to sink, there’s a scramble for the lifeboats, and everybody knows that there are too few. On board are the “fat cats” of the time, the ancient equivalent of the Forbes 400 list. The richest people in the world were on board. They really were there.
In the film, these fat cats, these men, started pushing and shoving to get on board these boats first. The women and children were being shunted aside. So the sailors brought out their handguns and fired them up in the air, saying, “Women and children first!” so that the fat cats were squeezed back and the women and children could get on board.
Now that is so ludicrous that it would take the film industry to pull it off. Most British policemen don’t carry firearms. Sailors on board a cruise ship certainly don’t! In any case, all of the witnesses who survived said that this isn’t what happened. The universal testimony of the survivors was that, although all the fats cats of 1912 were there, in fact, none of them scrambled for the boats.
John Jacob Astor was there: the Bill Gates of 1912, the richest man in the world. He was there. He dragged his wife to one of these little boats and shoved her on board. Someone said to him, “Sir, you should go too.” He replied, “No, this is for women and children.” He stepped back, and he drowned. Guggenheim was there, but he got a message to his wife, saying, “Tell my dear wife that Ben Guggenheim knows his duty,” and he drowned. But there isn’t a reported single instance of any of these fat cats scrambling for the boats to squeeze out the women and children. Not one.
When the film reviewer from the New York Times reviewed the film, he asked the obvious question, “Why did the producer and the director conspire together to change history in this way, when everybody knows what happened? Why did they rewrite history in this way?” Then he answered his own rhetorical question. “Because,” he said, “if they had told the truth today, nobody would believe it.”
Now do not misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting for a moment that all the rich people in 1912 were Christians, but there was still enough preserve of Judeo-Christian ethical mandate in the culture that people assumed that those were the right sorts of things to do. There was a kind of internal moral imperative that required that you act in this sort of way. A moral imperative.
Today, however, with less and less consensus as to what is right and wrong … where the distinction between right and wrong is determined, at the end of the day, by my volition and my preferences and nothing more … then the only way of keeping peace in a diverse culture is by having more and more police. You have more and more guns. It’s the only possible way. Unless you have great moral consensus in any nation, the only way you can keep some modicum of order is more and more guns.
The point is that the mockers thought Jesus was physically incapable of coming down from the cross. They didn’t have this category for Jesus’ moral imperative, depicted powerfully in the garden of Gethsemane. “Not my will, but yours be done.” He is morally committed to doing his Father’s will. That’s what keeps him on the cross. Without such moral commitment, Jesus would not have saved others. He saved others precisely by not saving himself.
You see, at the end of the day, this is also anticipatory of what the gospel does. The gospel does not come to us and merely give us a new fresh set of rules. It transforms us from within, so that that things we did not want to do, we now begin to want to do. God help us, the old nature is not gone yet.
But on the other hand, we begin to sympathize with what the slave trader, John Newton, could say as he looked back on the transformation in his own life. “I am not what I ought to be. I am not what I want to be. I am not what I will be. But I am not what I was, and by the grace of God, I am what I am.” That’s what the gospel is about.
Do you know one of the great dangers of confessing evangelicalism today? We see decline, and our solution to decline is often simply to preach more law. Now do not misunderstand me. The law of God does come along and brings about conviction of sin. Do not misunderstand me. But the law is not the transforming agent. You do not finally transform men and women unless their hearts have so been regenerated by the gospel that they want to do what is right.
How are you going to stop men in the church from endless exposure to porn on the Net? Oh, I know when there are horrible addictions you sometimes have to take some of these chaps apart and say, “If you’re serious about holiness, you have to put some ground rules in place.” You leave your computer out in the open. In the worst cases, you make sure that only your spouse has the password to get it on. I’ve been involved in helping men come out of some of these wretched addictions.
But at the end of the day, what is needed, above everything else, is so much of the transforming power of the gospel, so much love for Jesus, so much shame before sin, and so much contrition before the ugly that the holy is beautiful and the sin is disgusting. That’s what frees you. It’s a moral imperative that is brought about by the power of the gospel. If, at the end of the day, you want to shunt the gospel aside and just bring about more rules, all you will do is bring about more guilt, but you will not bring about more transformation.
This, too, is already exemplified, after all, in the Master himself, who cannot come down from that cross. It is not because he physically cannot, but because of the moral imperative that is his very nature and which, in some measure, becomes our nature in regeneration, in anticipation of the day when we will sin no more. Not in all of eternity.
This will not be because there will be so many rules everywhere and so much omniscience watching everything we do, ready to beat us down every time we step out of bounds, but because the consummation of this transformation will have taken place and sin will simply be unthinkable.
What we want to see in the proclamation of the gospel is the hearts of men and women so transformed that sin becomes disgusting and holiness becomes beautiful, so that the moral imperative takes over, again and again and again. God help us, we still have that old nature that we still will be fighting. We will have to put up some blockades for ourselves and be mutually accountable in all kinds of ways. But at the end of the day, what we must have is the moral imperative in Christ himself, or we have nothing but rules.
4. The man who cries out in despair trusts God.
Listen to the sneering condescension that is picked up in verse 43 and that controls the passage all the way to the end of verse 50. The mockers are continuing. “ ‘He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, “I am the Son of God.” ’ In the same way the robbers who were crucified with him also heaped insults on him.”
They smell a hypocrite. In the midst of this sneering condescension that mocks his ostensible trust … by which they mean, in intentional irony, that he’s not trusting at all; now he’s a writhing wreck on a cross.… Jesus himself cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Does that mean they’re right?
The whole account is against it: The line after line after line of steeped irony, the whole narrative that has brought Jesus to this place precisely because he does trust his Father and because he does want to perform his Father’s will. That’s what brings him here. God knows, and Matthew and the readers know, that when Jesus cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” it’s not because he is so succumbed to despair at the wisdom of his Father’s will that now he’s abandoning all hope and feels himself cut off.
That’s the way a lot of modern commentaries on Matthew are written. “The moral lesson to learn from this,” they say, “is that if even Jesus could be down in the dumps, it’s not too surprising if we’re down in the dumps too sometimes.” So what you learn from the cry of dereliction, according to this, is that you’re excused if you have a little pity party now and then since Jesus had a little pity party on the cross. It’s grotesque. It undermines the entire sweep of the narrative.
Jesus is there on the cross precisely because he does trust his Father. So what, then, is this agony that he’s facing? He understands that he is facing what Isaiah the prophet predicted that the suffering servant would face. “He would be wounded for our transgressions. He would be bruised for our iniquities.”
The very darkness of the heavens themselves, as the whole scene is plunged into darkness, bespeaks the weight of sin on Christ and the judicial rejection of him by the Father, even while the Son knows, even while God knows, even while Matthew knows, and even while the readers know that this is God’s will.
The words, of course, are themselves quoted from Psalm 22. When David feels rejected, the psalm still ends with an affirmation that he trusts God anyway. Should great David’s greater son have less confidence in his Father when he cries these prayers? This is not the mark of the kind of despair that says, “This isn’t right. I deserve a pity party.”
This is the mark of the depth of the agony of the Son of God who, knowing full well he is doing his Father’s will, faces the abandonment of judicial rejection as he carries my sin in his own body on the tree. Otherwise, what will you do with the passage we read earlier, Matthew 20:28, which says, “He came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
One of the most moving commentaries (for lack of a better word) I have ever read on this passage is in the poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning called “Cowper’s Grave.” The reference is to William Cowper, who was a friend of John Newton, the hymn writer. Cowper was a great scholar and wrote many essays that were required reading at Oxford and Cambridge universities in the eighteenth century.
At the same time, Cowper was a devoted Christian and wrote numerous hymns, some of which we still sing, of course, today. He cooperated with John Newton, who gave us “Amazing Grace,” in the production of what came to be called Olney Hymns.
What is sometimes less well-known of him is that he suffered from what we would call today deep, deep suicidal, clinical depression and had to be institutionalized in an insane asylum for four lengthy periods of his life. When he came out he would be taken in by the church, especially one particular woman in the church, who nurtured him back to health. That’s how he lived out his life.
A century later, Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes a three-page poem called “Cowper’s Grave” in which, in her wonderful language, she describes his scholarly abilities, his influence on young minds through the universities, his immense grasp of ancient literature, his critical essays, his widespread intellectual influence, and then also his hymns, teaching the people of God to sing.
She describes it all and then begins to allude, very cautiously and lightly, to his brokenness, to his deep despair. Then right toward the end of the poem, she writes these lines:
Yea, once, Immanuel’s orphaned cry his universe hath shaken—
It went up single, echoless, “My God, I am forsaken!”
It went up from the Holy’s lips amid his lost creation,
That, of the lost, no son should use those words of desolation!
Do you hear what she’s saying? Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” so that for all eternity William Cowper wouldn’t have to. Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” so that for all eternity Don Carson wouldn’t have to. So here they are, then … the ironies of the cross:
On that wretched day the soldiers mocked him,
Raucous laughter in a barracks room,
“Hail the king!” they sneered, while spitting on him,
Brutal beatings on this day of gloom.
Though his crown was thorn, he was born a king—
Holy brilliance bathed in bleeding loss—
All the soldiers blind to this stunning theme:
Jesus reigning from a bloody cross.
Awful weakness marks the battered God-man,
Far too broken now to hoist the beam.
Soldiers strip him bare and pound the nails in,
Watch him hanging on the cruel tree.
God’s own temple’s down! He has been destroyed!
Death’s remains are laid in rock and sod.
But the temple rises in God’s wise ploy:
Our great temple is the Son of God.
“Here’s the One who says he cares for others,
One who said he came to save the lost.
How can we believe that he saves others
When he can’t get off that cruel cross?
Let him save himself! Let him come down now!”—
Savage jeering at the King’s disgrace.
But by hanging there is precisely how
Christ saves others as the King of grace.
Draped in darkness, utterly rejected,
Crying, “Why have you forsaken me?”
Jesus bears God’s wrath alone, dejected—
Weeps the bitt’rest tears instead of me.
All the mockers cry, “He has lost his trust!
He’s defeated by hypocrisy!”
But with faith’s resolve, Jesus knows he must
Do God’s will and swallow death for me.
Let us pray.
Forbid, merciful God, that we should ever stand unbroken beside the cross. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
