You’re getting a Good Friday ser uh sermon really on Palm Sunday, which is hardly fair, but uh but here’s where we are. If we want to get to John chapter 20 next week, and next week’s good. If we want to get there next week, then uh we have to go through uh what we’re going through this week with Jesus on the cross again. So last week, we we surveyed the various people that Jesus could see from his vantage point on the cross. all those indignant religious leaders who were all upset about the sign over his head and indifferent Roman soldiers who were gambling for his clothes and people who were just passing by who piled on scorn and then those griefstricken loved ones of Jesus his mom and and the gospel writer John and others who were standing there just suffering along with him and then lastly the two fellow thieves on the cross who were dying on their own crosses next to him. Now it’s it’s re revealing I think that well all four gospel writers of course they talk about the crucifixion. It’s such a such a core element of Christianity but none of them really highlight the physical pain of suffering. It’s the psychological it’s the spiritual suffering that they bring out. It’s the shame of the cross that really comes to the four. And there was a well- reggarded book put out um couple years ago lady named Fleming Rutled. It’s entitled The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. And she goes into great detail showing how Roman crucifixions carried a mark of shame that was really unlike any other form of execution. She writes of how the cross, the crucifixion, although it’s the central claim of Christianity, is oddly irreligious at its core. And here’s what she means by that. She says the cross is irreligious because no human being individually or human beings collectively would have projected their hopes, their wishes, their longings, their needs onto a crucified man. Dietrich Bonhaofer wrote that the weakness and suffering of Christ was and remains a reversal of what the religious person expects from God. So, it’s no surprise really that the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans, he’s compelled to write that he’s not ashamed of the gospel. You know, why would why would he have to write something like that unless the core of his beliefs carried a stigma that his readers would associate with deep shame? Philippians chapter 2, Paul also writes, “He, Jesus, emptied himself, taking the very nature of a servant, being born in the likeness of men, being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient on unto death.” And you almost hear him gasp then when he says, “Even death on a cross.” Even death on a cross. Just emphas emphasizing the scandal and the shame of dying by way of crucif crucifixion. So the death of Christ itself is not the scandalous shameful part of the gospel. A lot of people die for their causes and often times they might be executed. It’s the mode of death. It’s the way Jesus died. It’s outrageous. It’s obscene. Uh made the gospel message hard to swallow by residents of uh living in the Roman Empire. Rutled recalls that in 1998 Laram Wyoming, young man named Matthew Shepard. He was known to be a practicing homosexual. He was beaten within an inch of his life by two other men and then tied to a fence and abandoned. 18 hours later, near freezing weather, a passer by discovered this comeomaos figure uh mistook it for a moment for a scarecrow. And Matthew Shepard died in the hospital 5 days later without ever recovering consciousness. And Rutled writes that the particular cruelty of this death left people groping for words. He was tied up and left dangling like an animal, said one spokesman, recalling the old west practice of nailing a dead coyote to a ranch fence as a warning to intruders. The emphasis here is on the dehumanization of the victim, declaring another person less than human is the well attested first step toward eliminating that person or that group of people. The phrase like an animal is therefore apt. And she goes on, the strongest of all the statements, however, was this. There’s incredible symbolism in being tied to a fence. People have likened it to a scarecrow, but it sounded more like a crucifixion. And the speakers who compared Shepherd’s death to a crucifixion, they were stretching for the most powerful imagery they could possibly find. No other word in our vocabulary evoked such complex and resonance responses. Execution, assassination, murder. These items these these uh terms don’t come close to crucifixion. So the Roman crucifixion, it was a slave’s death. Those being crucified, they were put on display as being subhuman, hairy and naked, like the corpses of the apes, displayed out in the crosses in Planet of the Apes. Crucifixion, we have very sanitized pictures of it. But it was the final removal of any personal dignity of a person. Susan Sante suffered for years from the cancer that eventually killed her. And she says, “It’s not suffering as such that is most deeply feared, but suffering that degrades.” God’s law in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, it specifies that if a man’s taken to court and the judge decides that the man needs to be beaten, the law says he should be flogged with the number of lashes that his crime deserves. But then it adds this. It says, “But he not must not give him you must not give him more than 40 lashes, lest your brother be degraded in your eyes.” Yeah, it’s remarkable. This is a rough population of ex enslaved people in the wilderness, in the desert. God’s word protected the guilty, ensuring that he be viewed as a brother and not be permanently shamed in the sight of the one who was administering the punishment. Yet despite that provision that God made in his law for the punishment of an ancient Israelite, no such no such uh provision was made for his son on the cross. The shame was allowed to be turned up to full volume. And in writing about the the wasting disease of AIDS, Susan Sag again points out that things like heart attacks and pneumonia um things that do not damage the face or deform the face, they don’t arouse the most dread in us. But when the face is marred or disfigured, it’s so much worse. Isaiah 52:14, the prophet hundreds of years before the cross, describes the suffering Messiah as one whose appearance was disfigured beyond that of any man, and his form marred beyond human likeness. In the next chapter in Isaiah 53, it says, “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men. You know, as an act that’s often seen as a as a bit of a mercy, degree of mercy, people being executed by things like hanging or firing squads or electric chairs, often given hoods to wear so their faces won’t reveal the agony and the shame of their death. But Jesus was given no hood to wear. Romans spoke of someone dying on the cross as just the death of a beast, one unfit to live, one who wasn’t even human. And I think that helps explain why last week we read about those people who they I don’t think they had any skin in the game. They were just um traveling from one area to another and they passed by Goltha. They didn’t come for the spectacle, but it says they still hurled insults at Jesus and they shook their heads at him. It was like this is a big theater event and they know the part that they have to play. So they added their voices to that sadistic degrading of those subhumans hanging on the crosses. It’s the ritual extermination of people who are not even considered to be of the same species as the spectators or the executioners. In a PBS television series called the Christians, an impartial narrator states that Christianity is the only major religion to have as its central focus the suffering and degradation of its God. So that’s the shame of the cross. In our passage in in uh John 19, it goes on to say later knowing that all was now completed so that the scripture would be fulfilled. Jesus said, “I’m thirsty.” And well, we understand that. We understand that Jesus was losing his life drop by drop and his fluids had been depleted and gone through all the floggings and the hours of fighting for breath on the cross. And Matthew tells us that the final three hours of Jesus’ life, the skies mysteriously darkened, but there remained just that heat of a of a Mediterranean spring day. And Jesus was thirsty. Immediately before he was nailed to the cross, some well-meaning person had offered him an alcoholic concoction of wine and gall. And Jesus tasted it, but then refused to drink it. He wasn’t willing to um receive the sedative of a narcotic in any way. His spiritual task that he was facing was to drink dry the cup of God’s wrath against sin. And there’s something deeply ironic about Jesus suffering thirst on the cross since he had told the Samaritan woman at the well in John chapter 4 that he was the source of living water. He contained an abundance of living water to dole out to people and if they drank it, they’d never thirst again. And a spring of well, a spring of water would well up in them into eternal life. But Jesus himself was thirsty on the cross. He’d refused the sedative. His life’s very near shutting down. Says in verse 8 that he knew that all was now completed so that the sc and so that the scripture would be fulfilled. He cried out in thirst. It’s a bit of a challenge for us hidden in those words because how often in the gospels do we see Jesus guided and motivated, directed by God’s word, by the careful fulfillment of scriptures. Every time Jesus faced something, he handled it with the Bible. He constantly affirmed, “It is written.” So when he was tempted in the desert by the devil, he kept quoting scripture. When he was assaulted by the Pharisees, he told them they didn’t know either the scriptures or the power of God. Final hours before his arrest, during his arrest, when Peter grabbed a sword to defend him, he said, “Put it away. I could call all the angels I wanted to come and rescue me and defend me. But if I did, how then would the scriptures be fulfilled? Gospel of Luke, we read that on his way to the cross, some women were following and they were mourning and wailing. And Jesus turned and quoted a passage from the book of Hosea to them. On the cross itself, then near the end, Jesus famously uttered that cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And in doing that he was quoting the first verse of Psalm 22. And at that time there were no chapter or verse delineations in the scriptures. In fact uh the Old Testament books didn’t even have their own names. They weren’t named. So when a person would quote a section from scripture for those who knew it, they would immediately think of the of the surrounding context of that verse. And when Jesus quoted the first verse of Psalm 22, for most people, I think they could envision the context. And it’s an ancient psalm that’s just stuffed with crucifixion images. The psalm speaks of the mockery that Jesus received. But I’m a worm and not a man. I’m scorned by everyone, despised by the people. All who see me mock me. They hurl insults, shaking their heads. He trusts in the Lord, they say. Let the Lord rescue him. Let him deliver him since he delights in him. And then the thirst of Jesus is uh foretold in Psalm 22:14 and 15. I’m poured out like water. All my bones are out of joint. My heart is turned to wax. It’s melted within me. My mouth is dried up like a potur. And my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. You lay me in the dust of death. And then the nakedness and the gambling for Jesus’ clothes comes next in Psalm 22:17. All my bones are on display. People stare and gloat over me. They divide my clothes among them. cast lots for my garment. Highly plausible to consider that Jesus’ mind was locked in on Psalm 22 when he was on the cross. He directly quoted the first verse, but the rest of the psalm just lines up with everything that was happening to him, including the anticipation of great international glory that would come to the sufferer. Those are the last six verses of the psalm. says things like this. All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord. All the families of the nations will bow down before him. Posterity will serve him. Future generations will be told about the Lord. They’ll proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn. For he has done it. Entirely possible that Psalm 22 was being replayed in Jesus’ mind over and over on the cross. It was nourishing him and it was nurturing him through those hours of suffering. In in our modern world, it’s not uncommon to hear people say that, well, they have serious problems with the Bible. Maybe not with all of it, but they’ll look at and say, well, this could never have happened the way the Bible describes it, or this surely can’t be taken literally, or I like this part of the Bible, but I don’t care for that part, and some things in the Bible must be legends and myths, and other things are so socially regressive that I find them highly offensive. And Tim Keller said that when he was speaking on campuses or various places and he would hear questions like that, his response was this. What I always want to ask people is I want to say, do you believe Jesus is the son of God? Do you believe Jesus was Lord of heaven come to earth? Do you believe he was raised from the dead? Figure that out, would you? You decide whether he was the son of God. You decide whether he’s the Lord from heaven. You decide whether he was bodily raised from the dead. Because if he is, there’s absolutely no way to follow Christ, to admit that he’s the son of God without accepting the authority of the Bible. Because Jesus Christ submitted to the scripture. He loved the scripture. He knew the scripture. He bowed to the authority of it at every point. And if he is the son of God, you’re going to have to do that, too. If he’s the son of God, you have to deal with the authority of scripture or you can’t follow him. And if you love the son of God, you have to love the scripture because he loved the scripture. It’s what he was made of. On the other hand, if he wasn’t the son of God and he wasn’t raised from the dead, then who cares whether you can take the Bible literally, be offended all you want. I mean, why are you even struggling with it? You see, the authority of the scripture rises and falls with the person of Jesus Christ. It’s he who said he is. And if it it is it is if he is who he said he is and if he needed the scripture to face everything in life, how much more do you need it? You know, there’s kind of a surreal moment this week. Uh a woman who sits in parliament in Finland was convicted in court for a little booklet that she co-authored 22 years ago and it was based on her Christian convictions concerning sexuality. And she went through seven years of of uh court cases. in the court. Finally, the Supreme Court ordered that the booklet no longer be published and that copies of it be destroyed. I I read that little booklet this week and I found it completely innocuous. It’s it’s moderate in tone. It’s biblical. In one paragraph in that booklet, she says, “Over the years, I too might have torn out many portions from my Bible if I’d been authorized to build my own image or picture of God that suited my own sense of justice. I’ve noticed that this only reveals how limited and warped my understanding is. People who submit themselves to God’s guidance in the Bible are repeatedly amazed at how the very Bible teachings hardest to understand contain God’s deep wisdoms. One of the most absurd parts of of her case was leveled against her was that simply sharing a Bible verse on social media and then taking part in some discussions on faith and marriage and human identity. For that, she was interrogated more than 13 hours by the police and eventually charged with three criminal offenses under the section of the law dealing with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Now, she she hasn’t lost her job. She’s still in Parliament. Many view her conviction as ridiculous. Uh over a 7-year period, all the lower courts acquitted her, but three of the five judges in the Supreme Court uh that was enough to convict her and uh she’s been given a small fine to pay. in in a moment of levity, she says that during the interrogations with the police officers uh in a scene kind of reminiscent of the old Soviet Union, these police officers would read her scripture passages and then look at her and say, “Explain what that says to us.” And that led people to joke around saying PY was going to go to the police station for another Bible study again. And you know, this went on over 13 hours. it on the cross as John relates it Jesus who feasted on the word of God says knowing that all was now completed so that the scripture would be fulfilled then said I’m thirsty and a jar of uh wine vinegar was there maybe something the soldiers would sip from during the supervised hours of crucifixion we read a jar of wine vinegar was there they soaked a sponge in it put the sponge on a stock of the hissip plant lifted it to Jesus’ lips when he’d received received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.” And without he bowed his head and gave up the spirit. Now we read that Jesus knew that all was completed. He was aware that every step necessary on the path he had come to earth to walk was now done. Everything to complete the design that he and his father had for saving people like you and me. And he took a sip of wine vinegar and he said, “It is finished.” And those three words translate a single Greek word, tetilsti. same uh verb that’s a verb form that’s used two verses before when it says Jesus knew that all was completed. And that verb doesn’t just mean oh it’s over or the end like we see in old movies. It meant everything has been complete. Everything that needed to be accomplished has now been accomplished. And as Jesus said much earlier in John chapter 10, he said no one would ever take his life from him. He would lay his life down of its own accord. So when he cried out, “Tetilstste all that has needed to be accomplished has been accomplished says that Jesus gave up or he handed over his spirit.” The shameful death of God. You know, how can that be part of any religion? That’s the most irreligious thing that could ever occur. In Islam, Jesus is regarded as a great prophet, but it’s unfathomable that he would be crucified and would be led to die that way. So a key passage in the Quran reads, “They said, we killed the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, the messenger of God, but they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, though it was made to appear so to them. Rather, God raised uh him up himself.” So their tradition holds that Judas or someone else other person was really the one on the cross. only appeared to be Jesus but in fact Jesus already been raised up by the father and made made good his escape because the death of God doesn’t make any religious sense unless we know what was actually occurring on the cross. Fleming Rutled tells of this revered American writer named Joseph Mitchell and he was raised in the Church of the South and he knew that language and the last decades of his life. He frequently attended Grace Church in New York and he once told a group of his fellow parishioners of a conversation he had with his dying sister in North Carolina. As he sat by her bedside, she asked him, “Buddy, what does Jesus death on the cross a long time ago have to do with my sins now? And Rutled writes, “Mitchell, who was an instinctive theologian, certainly not a trained one, he struggled to find the right words, as you would expect a meticulous writer to do. And finally, he said with his characteristic, occasional stammer, said to his sister, somehow he was our representative.” And Rutled goes on, academic inquiry must hold its peace for a moment in the space between that question, that response. Joseph Mitchell and his sister were in a sense better readers of the Bible than many highly trained scholars because her question and his answer were wrenched out of their guts. They weren’t coolly considered in a classroom. So Jesus was on the cross somehow are representative meaning he took on himself what we deserved. Shame that had been heaped on him is the is the shame that should have been heaped on us. Sin we carry is shameful. If any of us uh ever had the fullness of all that we’ve said or done exposed to the rest of this group this morning, we’d be so embarrassed. We’d be devastated. But on the cross, Jesus was our representative. He took what should have been ours so that we could have what had always been his, his righteousness, complete purity in the sight of God. So we read in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, therefore, if anyone’s in Christ, he’s a new creation. The old has gone, the new has come. All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. So Tetilstei it’s finished. And when Jesus hung his head and gave up his spirit some very weird things began to happen that demonstrated how new life was now going to emerge from the death of Jesus. I mean, the gospel writers provide extraordinary details like a sudden earthquake happening that shook the earth and split rocks and even broke open some tombs. And as soon as the son of God died, Matthew relates that many holy people who had died were resuscitated and they walked out of those tombs into the city appearing to many people. I mean, how strange would that be to watch? It’s like a march of zombies, you know, coming into the city. But they’re not zombies. their holy people who had been resuscitated for a time, made alive again. And when Jesus died, we we read the story of how the curtain in the temple that separated the people from the Holy of Holies where God dwelled, that that was mysteriously torn from top to bottom by unseen hands. Uh representing a new way for people to now be able to approach God through Jesus Christ. Jesus died. The ro the lead Roman soldier on the scene, the centurion along with everyone else was terrified by the earthquake, what was happening. And he cried out, “Surely this was a righteous man. Surely he was the son of God.” And John sets us up for Easter morning with one delicious little final scene. It was Friday. In a few hours, the Jewish Passover would begin, the Jewish Sabbath, rather. And this would be a special Sabbath because it was associated with the Passover festival. And for the Jewish people, at least on this occasion, they would like an exception made to the normal crucifixion practice. Normally, the Romans would leave crucified men and women on the crosses until they died and then leave their rotting bodies in place to be devoured by vultures for days. But in the Jewish law, in Deuteronomy chapter 21, we read, “If a man guilty of a capital offense is put to death, his body’s hung on a tree, you must not leave his body on the tree overnight. Be sure to bury him the same day because anyone who’s hung on a tree is under God’s curse. You must not desecrate the land the Lord your God has given you as an inheritance.” Now, that would mean nothing to the Romans. They didn’t care about that. But for the Jews, especially on this special Sabbath that they were having, it was important that their land not be desecrated. So, as a concession to the Jews, the Roman soldiers decided to make the exception, hurry things up. They would take an iron mallet and smash the legs of the victims. And that made it impossible for people to keep pushing themselves up so they could open up their chest cavity and breathe uh without the use of their legs. They would affixiate uh pretty quickly. So, the soldiers did that to the two thieves. But because Jesus had died and all those weird things had happened afterwards, they simply ran a spear through his body just to make good and sure that they’d finished their job. And that itself was a fulfillment of scripture. His body would be pierced. None of his bones would be broken. Then last scene, two men, members of the Jewish Sanhedrin, the ruling council, they likely risked their careers by asking the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, for the body of Jesus. One of them, Joseph, is described as a secret disciple of Jesus. And the other, Nicodemus, that’s the guy who visited Jesus at night in John chapter 3. That’s the one that Jesus had said to him, “You need to be born again.” Those two men, those two men did something very courageous when they asked for and received the body of Jesus. And then they did something extremely humble, something that men would never do because it was it was always women’s work to wash and anoint a corpse and prepare it for burial. Yet these two brave guys brought huge amounts of spices and strips of linen and they did the best they could with the body of Jesus. We know on Easter morning the ladies are going to come to do the do the job properly when they when they show up. But these guys, they did what they could and they placed him in an unused tomb that g that Joseph himself owned. Something very beautiful about Nicodemus being part of this this bold masculinity and asking for the body and then probably doing the most feminine thing he had ever done in caring for the corpse. Boldness, humility, those are two pretty good signs of what it means to be born again as Jesus had told him he needed to be. And that’s that’s where John, the gospel writer, leaves us this morning. The shame of the cross, the death of the savior, burial of the son of God. If you want to know the rest of the story, you’ll have to come back to it’s pretty good, but you’ll have to come back next week. Let’s just take a few moments to pray a few of the things uh that we looked at today. You might want to thank Jesus that for the joy that was set before him. It says in Hebrews, he endured the cross and he despised the shame. Ask God to give you a deeper confidence and trust in his word to guide and direct your life. And praise God that in Jesus we have become the righteousness of God. This is your your your moments with uh with your Lord right now and then I’ll close us off.