Matthew 27:27–42

The crucifixion of Christ on the cross, what an irony.

Jesus has been in the public eye for two to three years. These were years of public ministry but, the religious and political authorities in Jerusalem resented his popularity, feared his power, and were suspicious of his motives. They thought that the rising number of his followers could form a rebellion against the superpower of the day, Rome, and there could be only one end to that. So Jesus had to be eliminated.

So, they arranged a kangaroo court, and managed to secure the sanction of the Roman governor to have Jesus executed by crucifixion.

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 where the text is at this point.

Jesus who is mocked as a king, really is the King.

It was part of standard procedure in those days to interrogate a person by beating them up first.

Then after sentence of crucifixion was passed, the prisoner was beaten again. That was standard procedure. But here we see something that was not regular practice: barrack-room humor.

A robe was put on Jesus. They took these Middle Eastern thorns, wrapped up the vine, and scrunched it down on his head. They put a stick in his hand as if it were a scepter and smashed it against his skull again and again. Everybody was laughing uproariously, spitting on Jesus, and mocking him: “Hail, Your Majesty, great king of the Jews!”

But Matthew knows, and his readers know, that this is the King of the Jews. How does Matthew begin his book? “The origins of Jesus Christ, the son of Abraham, the son of David …” And then he gives the genealogy, the Davidic dynasty.

Scripture promised again and again that one day, great David’s greater son would come. Then Jesus announced the coming of the kingdom, and in the parables that he told, many of those parables pictured himself as king.

In the trial, this matter of Jesus’ kingship had surfaced again. v11: “Are you the king of the Jews?” Pilate asked him. Pilate was interested in knowing only whether or not Jesus was some sort of threat to the empire, to Caesar

But Jesus answers truthfully, “Yes, it is as you say.” Yet Pilate detects that Jesus is not some immediate political threat. He’s ready to put Jesus aside. But he is executed on this ground: that he is a political threat, he is the king of the Jews, and “We have no king but Caesar.”

Then, the written charge against him placed above his head on the cross: “This is Jesus, the king of the Jews.” They meant this with irony: “This is what happens to your so-called kings; they die the death of the most odious criminal. This is Jesus.” They meant it to be an ironic assertion. But Matthew means it to be an irony behind the irony: “This really is Jesus, the King of the Jews.”

Jesus who is utterly powerless, yet is the most powerful

Look how the theme of Jesus’ weakness recurs and recurs.

Once a person was carrying his cross out to the place of execution, it was a sign that he was beyond hope, no reprieve was possible, the sentence had been passed. There was only suffering and death left.

Jesus, now is so weak, so powerless, and so exhausted that he doesn’t even have the strength to carry a piece of wood on his shoulder outside the city gates.

So the Roman soldiers have to impress a passerby, Simon, and he carries the crossmember out to the place of the skull. Then once he’s crucified, a group of soldiers just sit there and watch him.

They take his few remaining belongings, throw a few die, and as a result, they divvy up his few things left. They watched him, in the past some people had taken the crucified down and they lived.

They watched him, and there is no picture, in all of the New Testament, of greater shame and weakness than that: someone just hanging on a cross.

“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!’ ”

This was also a charge raised against him at his trial. This fellow said, I am able to destroy the temple of God and rebuild it in three days. Under Roman law, desecration of a temple was a capital offense. So this man, who had walked on water, who had healed the sick, who clearly had multiplied loaves, who had all of this power, was now talking about destroying a temple and building it again in three days. What kind of power was that?

But now how much power did he have? He barely had the power to pull with his arms and push with his legs to open up his chest cavity so he could breathe, then collapse again

The irony here, of course, is that while people are sneering, You, who will destroy the temple and build it again in three days, come down from the cross if you are so powerful, it is precisely by his staying on the cross that the temple is destroyed and built again in three days so that he would be the very temple that reconciles human beings to God.

Jesus who can’t save himself saves others.

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! If He’s the king of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him.

Matthew prepared the way for this verse in the very first chapter, he started off, “Joseph, you are to name this baby Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.

So that when he is healing someone, he is saving his people from their sins, for sickness and death are part of this fallen order that stand under the curse.

When he raises someone from the dead, what is he doing? He comes to save his people from their sins. When the paralytic is let down through the roof, Your sins are forgiven you.

When Matthew 24 and 25 (the great Olivet Discourse) look forward to the final consummation, the dawn of the new heaven and the new earth, and the home of righteousness (a theme expanded upon greatly throughout the Bible), what is this that Jesus is doing? Well, he is coming to save his people from their sins.

Where is the whole narrative in this gospel going? It is going to the cross and to the empty tomb. Why? Because Jesus came to save his people from their sins. A theme so fundamental you do not play around with in a sports metaphor.

Remember what Jesus said, Do you not know that even now I could call twelve legions of angels?” He had the power, even now, to save himself. In that sense, they were profoundly mistaken. But the deep irony is that, in a way they did not understand, they were right. He could not save himself and others. If he had saved himself, he would not have saved others.

Did you see the film Titanic when it came out a few years ago? In it, as the great ship is sinking and people are rushing for the lifeboats, pistol-packing sailors start firing shots off into the air to keep away the rich men so that the women and children can get into the boats first. But do you know what really happened? All the survivors are at one on this point; there is not a dissenting voice in the historical record.

That great ship had 400 of the world’s wealthiest men on board, and not one of them scrambled for a boat. Not one. John Jacob Astor was there: the Bill Gates of a century ago, the richest man on earth. He pushed to the boat with his wife in tow, got her on board, stepped back, and drowned. Guggenheim was there. He was separated from his wife but got a message to her saying, “Let no one say Ben Guggenheim does not know his duty.” Not one rich fat cat tried to make his way to the boat. All who were saved were women and children.

When the reviewer of this film in the New York Times related the discrepancy, he asked the question, “Why did the producers and directors feel it necessary to distort history at this point?” Then he answered his own question, “Because if they had told the truth, no one today would have believed it.”

Jesus who cries out in despair continues to trust God.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

He trusts in God. Again they are speaking ironically; they don’t believe it to be true. They think that he really is another hypocrite who doesn’t really trust in God. “Look at him now. He makes all these claims,” and now the narrative goes on, and he cries out in absolute despair, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” They say, “Where is the trust now,

In fact a lot of contemporary commentators pick up on the first irony and once again, miss the second. A lot of commentators look at this cry of desolation, as it is called, and do you know what they try to learn from it? They try to learn this: If even Jesus can be pushed so far to the brink that he loses trust in God, then it’s not too surprising if we really hit the skids and we lose faith in God too. So don’t worry. It’s not too bad after all. If Jesus can do it, it’s okay if you do it.

In every case there is a kind of bringing with it of the context, so he’s not just quoting the words of Psalm 22:1, but of all of Psalm 22. When you read through Psalm 22, from about two-thirds of the way down, you discover that even as David is crying in his own individual experiences, “God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” it is not as if he is turfing him out and won’t have anything to do with him.

The cry comes precisely in the agony of his despair in the context of a full-body trust in God. David himself is trusting God as he cries. When Jesus quotes the words, he’s quoting the whole psalm. How can you possibly think that David, whose words show that he is trusting God even while he cries in despair, is doing something more than the Lord Jesus?

Of course He is trusting God, even while he is crying in the agony of despair. Then, why the despair?

Oh, yes, there is the physical suffering of the whole thing, of course; it’s awful. But the surrounding narrative tells you more than that. We’re given the symbolism of the darkness for three hours from about noon until three, the sixth hour until the ninth hour in the ancient way of counting, a way of saying that God is shutting down his face of blessing on his own dear Son as his Son bears our sins on his own body on the tree.

The agony as he feels the condemnation of his own eternal heavenly Father on himself is absolutely crushing. Still, he trusts God. Isn’t that what Gethsemane is about, “Not my will but yours be done.” Still, he trusts God. When he dies, that this is the right understanding is confirmed by the fact that the veil of temple is rent in twain. Verse 51. It was a way of saying that because of Jesus’ death, we have free and open access to the very presence of God. For Christ himself has borne all our guilt. We can stand in his presence, just in his eyes.

So did Jesus trust God? Or at the crucial moment, did he slump down in such despair that all his confidence in God dissolved? That’s the way this text is regularly read today, you know. Jesus becomes a kind of psychological encouragement: if even Jesus can slump into profound despair when the going really gets tough, it shouldn’t be too surprising if we do, too. So don’t feel too badly about it.

At the words of institution, he takes the bread and says, “This is my body, which is broken for you.” He takes the cup, and he says, “This is the blood of the new covenant.” In the garden, he cries, “Not my will, but yours be done.” He knows, from beginning to end, where he is going, why he is going, and what he has come to do.

The passage does not ascribe magical powers to blood. After all, the life is not in the blood apart from the rest of the body, and the strong prohibition against eating blood could never be perfectly carried out (since no matter how carefully you drain the blood from an animal there is always a little left). The point is that there is no life in the body where there is no blood; it is the obvious physical element for symbolizing the life itself. To teach the people how only the sacrifice of life could atone for sin, since the punishment of sin is death, it is difficult to imagine a more effective prohibition.

We recall its significance every time we participate in the Lord’s Table.

The truth is that it is precisely because he trusts in God that he cries this prayer.

It is the Father’s will that he should be rejected by the Father. It is precisely because he trusts this all-wise plan of his Father, because he is committed to carrying out that plan, that he endures the agony of separation, almost unimaginable, in the Godhead itself, to bear my sin in his own body on the tree.

How deep the Father’s love for us,
How vast beyond all measure,
That he should give his only Son
To make a wretch his treasure.
How great the pain of searing loss—
The Father turns his face away,
As wounds which mar the Chosen One
Bring many sons to glory.