The Death of the Son of God (Afternoon)
Download MP3So our scripture text this morning is, from the end, near the end of the gospel of Mark. We've been walking through this biography of Jesus for a long time and we're very close to the end. So we're going to be looking at Mark chapter 15 verses 33 through 39. And so you can turn there in your bible or you can find it on your worship guide. It's there on the inside.
Caleb Chancey:Mark 1533 to 39. Let me read our passage. And when the 6th hour had come, it was darkness over the whole land until the 9th hour. And at the 9th hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, lamasibachthani, which means, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And some of the bystanders hearing it said, behold, he's calling Elijah.
Caleb Chancey:And someone 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. And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in 2 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.
Caleb Chancey:This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we thank you for the gift of your word. As it tells us here of what was in one way, one of the darkest hours in your history, our history, we know it was also through your grace one of the brightest hours for us.
Caleb Chancey:And so I pray today that as we look at this story and what these things mean, you would impress on us the weight of what we've been forgiven of. And also the mercy and love that was willing to secure that forgiveness for us. I pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. So on February 12, 1993, Mary Johnson heard that her only son had been shot and killed in a fight by a young man named, Hoshea Israel.
Caleb Chancey:The guys didn't have any previous beef. They just got into a fight at a party and Hoshea shot her son. In Mary's telling, at Hoshea's trial, she said she forgave him because of her Christian faith, but she said later that in reality, bitterness set in and she spent years hating him and everyone. But years later, her heart began changing and finally she asked to be able to visit Hoshea in prison. They talked.
Caleb Chancey:He genuinely expressed regret for what he'd done. Suddenly, she found herself able to forgive him and even to hug him. She helped welcome him home in March 2010, and they spent years going around and sharing their story of regret, forgiveness and reconciliation. In her account of the story which can be found on the website of the forgiveness project, she says, he is my spiritual son. The man who murdered her actual son became her spiritual son through forgiveness.
Caleb Chancey:That's the closest real life illustration I could find to what we see on display today which is infinitely greater even than that. Because what we see happen today in our story isn't just one person forgiving and reconciling with 1 person for one wrong. It's 1 person serving the sentences as it were of every crime committed by a multitude of people. And so the depth and the immensity of Mary Johnson's forgiveness of Hosea is just a tiny picture. It's a candle pointing to the flame of what we see on display in God's forgiveness through Jesus today.
Caleb Chancey:See, on the night that Jesus was arrested to be crucified, he was praying in the garden of Gethsemane. He was facing what was coming, which culminates in what we saw today. And he prayed, Abba father. All things are possible from you for you. Remove this cup from me.
Caleb Chancey:Yet not what I will, but what you will. In other words, he asks God the father if there's any way that I don't have to face what's coming down here, please can we find it? But if there is no way, your will be done, not my own. And his choice of words is interesting because this future that he's staring down the barrel of that he's frightened of so frightened that the divine human son of God asked, is there another way? He calls it a cup.
Caleb Chancey:He says, I don't wanna drink this cup that's being held before me. Since then, we've seen Jesus abandoned by his friends and followers. 1 of his friends and his disciples denied even knowing who he was. We've seen him put through a sham trial and made a victim of a corrupt system of justice. We've seen him physically tortured.
Caleb Chancey:We've seen him crucified, so nailed by the wrists and ankles to a cross. The most painful degrading method of execution that had was had been indented to that point. We've seen him shamed and mocked from all levels of society. From the religious elite up top to the criminals who have been nailed beside him. He's faced abandonment, injustice, torture, shame, but today comes the bad part.
Caleb Chancey:That's not even really a joke because as we're going to see, those things were terrible but none of them was the cup that Jesus said, please can this be taken away from me. From noon to 3 in the afternoon, so that's what the 6th hour to 9th hour means, Jesus drinks the judgment of God. That's the cup. God gives us 4 signs that this is what's happening. The first sign is darkness at noon.
Caleb Chancey:So if you look at verse 33, we read When the 6th hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the 9th hour. So in the middle of the day, when the sun is highest and brightest in the sky, the world goes dark. This doesn't just mean it got cloudy. They knew what cloudy was. They knew weather and so that wouldn't have registered on their radar.
Caleb Chancey:It couldn't be an eclipse. 1, because it was a full moon and you can't have an eclipse on a full moon. 2, because eclipses, even the one that, you know, like we saw last year, they don't they last minutes. This was 3 hours of complete darkness that fell over the land. The light of the sun was cut off.
Caleb Chancey:Listen to this. This is a warning from the prophet Amos. This is from Amos chapter 8 verses 9 and 10. It says, and on that day declares the Lord God, I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation.
Caleb Chancey:I will bring sackcloth on every waist and boldness on every head. I will make it like the morning for an only sun and the end like a bitter day. So that day is something called the day of the Lord. This is something that developed kind of through the old testament as through Israel's history over and over again, they didn't just slip up in their relationship with God, they completely rejected him. So they went after other gods, which God described like a a wife cheating on a faithful husband.
Caleb Chancey:They completely ignored his commandments. They enslaved and oppressed their own brothers and sisters, their own people. They did this for centuries despite the warnings god gave them, despite the consequences he gave them along the way. They pursued this over and over. And so God's prophets begin warning, this day coming called the day of the lord, when God is gonna return and he's gonna put an end to all injustice and evil, but he's starting in the house of Israel.
Caleb Chancey:And so he says, if you think that you're immune to the day of the lord because just because you're an Israelite, think again. He says, it's a day of darkness and not light. If you have lived according to this pattern, you've completely ignored his will, his way and his word. So he says, if you're worshiping other gods, exploiting and abusing your own people, ignoring my will, the day of the lord is bad news for you. It's darkness, not light.
Caleb Chancey:He says, I'm going to make the sun go down at noon. I'm going to darken the earth in broad daylight. I'm going to make it like the morning for an only sun. Here, at noon on the day of Jesus's crucifixion, the day of the lord comes. But it comes not on the religious elite who crucified him.
Caleb Chancey:It comes not on the soldiers who tied him, tortured him, nailed him to the cross. The day of the lord falls on heaven's only son. It falls on Jesus in this moment. Heaven is mourning its only son in these hours. So that's the first sign that Jesus is drinking God's judgement.
Caleb Chancey:The second sign is in verse 34. And says at the 9th hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, Eloi Eloi, lamasibachthani, which means my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? See Jesus gives this loud cry that burns itself so deeply into its fa his followers memories that they remember and share it in Aramaic before they translate it into Greek. And so Mark interrupts the Greek that he's written in to give you this Aramaic phrase that's burned into his hearer's minds. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Caleb Chancey:This is a point that a pastor named Tim Keller makes. When I have a migraine, I'm tempted to just lay there and go, my head, my head. You know, my kids, if they get hurt, you know, they they have a stomach and they go, my stomach. My stomach. When we hurt, it kind of shrinks our world to focus on the point of pain, the point at which pain is entering our body and our soul.
Caleb Chancey:Jesus is nailed to the cross, but he doesn't cry out my hands, my wrists. He doesn't cry out my lungs because he's suffocating. The pain that shrinks his world to a point is my god, my god, why have you forsaken me? See, all through the gospels, these biographies of Jesus, he calls God father. He said my father, your father, the father.
Caleb Chancey:That's his favorite term for God the father. It's the core of his identity, which has been his identity from eternity past when he was, the son with the father in the beginning of time before he ever became a human being. Jesus never stops being God's son just like he never stops being God. So this isn't some kind of rupture in the trinity. But in these hours, as heaven goes dark, the day of the Lord falls on Jesus, he experiences what it would be like to be forsaken by the heavenly father.
Caleb Chancey:To be shut out from the face of God's goodness. See, one aspect of hell in the bible, one thing that makes it so terrible, is the complete and final removal of all hints of God's goodness and God's presence. C s Lewis puts it this way. He says, we're warned that it may happen to any one of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words, I never knew you. Depart from me.
Caleb Chancey:We can be left utterly and absolutely outside, repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored. In this moment, that's what Jesus experiences. He experiences being forsaken by the father. Now, that's not all that's going on here. This isn't just a random phrase that Jesus cries, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Caleb Chancey:Is the first line of Psalm 22. And at the end of our sermon, we're gonna come back and we're gonna see the meaning of that in greater depth. But right now, let's move on and look at the third sign that Jesus is drinking the judgment of God. Let's look at verse 36. It says, and someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine.
Caleb Chancey:They put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink. So, sour wine, which is wine mixed with vinegar, would have been kept nearby in crucifixions. It's cheap wine that soldiers might drink while they're, doing their work, and it could temporarily satisfy the thirst of a crucified victim. That sounds like a mercy, but it's actually another torture because it would keep you conscious and awake that much longer to have your thirst saturated. So this isn't an act of kindness.
Caleb Chancey:At best, the people are curious to see if Elijah's going to come if he sticks around a little bit longer. But like so many things in this story, like the sign that was put over Jesus's head that said the king of the Jews, it's an action that was meant as one thing, but that God used to mean something different. See, hear these words from Psalm 75. It says, it is God who executes judgment, putting down 1 and lifting up another. For in the hand of the Lord, there is a cup with foaming wine well mixed, and he pours out from it, and all the wicked of the earth shall drain it down to the dregs.
Caleb Chancey:See, in this Psalm, God executes judgment. He establishes a form of justice in the world. The psalmist describes this justice as a cup of wine in God's hand that he pours down the throat of the wicked. God uses this same metaphor in a lot of the prophets. Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel.
Caleb Chancey:Jeremiah is given a vision where he God hands him a cup that he calls the wine of wrath, and he sends Jeremiah to go up among the earth to make the peoples drink the judgment that they've earned for themselves. Now, when I was younger, this idea of God's judgment was one of the biggest stumbling blocks to people considering the Christian faith. It may still be today. I'm not saying it's not anymore. But especially in this is the late nineties, the early 2000, kind of the prevailing cultural idea was, yeah, no one's perfect, but we're all we we all mean well.
Caleb Chancey:Everyone's doing okay. And so, this idea of like a judgy God just feels a little much for us. But in the last 10 years especially, it seems like our cultural mindset has shifted. I'm not exactly sure why, but whatever our beliefs, it seems like we've been confronted with too many things that we don't have a better word for than evil. We're so inescapably aware of sexual abuse, murder, exploitation, corruption and greed that as one man put it, not being angry feels morally irresponsible.
Caleb Chancey:Frederick douglass, who escaped from slavery in the south and became a famous abolitionist in the civil war era, tells the story of his grandmother who served, her master's family faithfully for years. She had one that she served from his cradle to his grave. She's passed on as part of an inheritance to a new family, and because she's old and not useful anymore, this new family, they build her kind of a ramshackle hut out in the woods and they just send her out there to die. They don't provide her with anything, they just send her away, so she'll stop being a nuisance and stop being a burden on them. Douglass kind of recounts this story and then he asks in his his memoir, will not a righteous God visit for these things?
Caleb Chancey:In other words, can a righteous God see evil like this in the world and just do nothing? This is the cup of which Jesus said, father, I don't want to drink this if I don't have to. This is the cup of the god who sees every murder and rape. Every act of injustice, every person abused by someone they trust, every secretly indulged desire for selfishness and evil. Jesus himself intensified the 10 commandments to shine a light on our hearts.
Caleb Chancey:He said, you've heard don't murder. But if you're angry without cause with your brother or sister, then you've committed murder in your heart. You've heard don't commit adultery, but if you indulge in lust in your heart, it's the same sin in many ways in God's eyes. That's what God sees with no whitewashing or excusing or explaining away. He feels the injustices against his own creations and against himself.
Caleb Chancey:If you're reading through the yearly bible plan, we keep making jokes about not long ago, you read in Psalm 7, God is a righteous judge and a God who feels indignation every day. See, God's anger isn't like ours. It doesn't blind him or make him lose self control. It's not petty or self serving like my anger basically always is. God's anger is his complete burning opposition to evil in all its forms that one day is going to wipe it out of existence.
Caleb Chancey:The sour wine Jesus is drinking here is a sign going back to those old testament prophecies that he's drinking the cup he didn't wanna drink. He takes his own righteous hatred of sin and turns it on himself. Feeling in his human body and his divine soul, the heavenly rage against evil. The sour wine is a symbol of the cup of wrath that's poured out in the day of the lord on Jesus himself. That's the third sign.
Caleb Chancey:The final one is Jesus's death. Mark tells us this so simply in verse 37. Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last. The other gospel writers tell us what this cry was. It was, father, into your hands I commit my spirit.
Caleb Chancey:So after Jesus has completed this work of drinking God's judgment, he is reconciled to the father and he returns to him. But Mark doesn't focus on that because he's focusing in his narrative on this final sign of judgment. Jesus' human body dies. His human nature tastes death. Death is the final act of decreation.
Caleb Chancey:It's the total reversal of God giving us the gift of life. The apostle Paul called it the final enemy in 1st Corinthians, quoting JK Rowling in the last Harry Potter book. You know what I mean. It's the sign of people who live under judgment instead of blessing. In the Christian story, death took over the world because of our ancestors sin.
Caleb Chancey:This shows that Jesus drank God's judgment to the last drop. He took the punishment for his people's sin to the end, to the decreation of his human nature. Though he was completely innocent of sin with no guilt that could make him deserve death, he gave himself up to it. Jesus drinks the cup of judgment. God's righteous wrath against his people's sin.
Caleb Chancey:The day of the Lord falls on him. He experiences being forsaken by the father. He takes the wine of wrath. His human body dies. We've spent most of our time here because Mark does and because we need to feel the weight of this.
Caleb Chancey:We need to understand what Jesus endured and why. Because whether you're here today as a Christian or someone who's considering Christianity on some level, understanding Jesus rightly requires understanding his suffering in this moment and realizing that it's suffering that I deserve and that you deserve, that we all deserve. But in the last verses, we see some hints that this isn't the end of the story. That it's not Jesus drinks God's judgment and it's over. We start to see what that judgment makes possible.
Caleb Chancey:Look what happens right after Jesus dies in verse 38. It says, the curtain of the temple was torn in 2 from top to bottom. Now, what's this about? There was a room in the Jewish temple. It was called the most holy place or the holy of holies, which was the point at which, in a sense, heaven touched earth.
Caleb Chancey:It was the closest that sinful human beings could come to the direct presence of God. In the first version of the temple, which was built by King Solomon 900 years before this, the most holy place had held the Ark of the Covenant and the lid of the Ark was called the mercy seat, and it symbolized the throne of heaven here on earth. That temple had been destroyed and the ark lost to history as anyone who's watched through Indiana Jones knows, But in this version of the temple, the room still had the same function. The most holy place was separated from the rest of the temple by a curtain that the Jewish historian Josephus tells us is 60 feet high and 30 feet wide. So for reference, our sanctuary ceiling is about 30 feet high.
Caleb Chancey:So it's 2 sanctuaries tall, this curtain is. It would have been at least 4 or 5 inches thick, if not, you know, close to a foot. And this curtain, in a sense, separates heaven from earth. It was a sign that God's presence symbolized there in the most holy place is so holy that we can't enter it without being killed. There was only one time a year that a human being could pass through the curtain into the holy of holies.
Caleb Chancey:So Yom Kippur or the day of atonement was a yearly ritual that atoned or paid for the sins that the people of Israel had committed over the past year. And the capstone of that day was that the high priest would spend days purifying himself, then he would symbolically lay the sins of the whole people for the whole year on a goat. It would be sacrificed, and the priest would bring some of its blood into the holy of holies, and sprinkle it on the mercy seat. So the high priest goes through the curtain, enters the holy of holies, carrying the payment for the sins of the people, And he places it before God's throne to show that something has paid the debt that they owe through their sin. And then because of that, the people are redeemed.
Caleb Chancey:They're declared holy instead of guilty for another year. They're reconciled to God. So this 60 foot curtain in the temple separates heaven and earth. It's a barrier that separates the holy God from sinful humankind. And in the moment Jesus dies, that curtain is torn from top to bottom.
Caleb Chancey:Top to bottom means first, completely. So someone or something rips this 60 foot curtain, this 2 sanctuary tall curtain in half in a moment like me tearing this piece of paper. It's like that. 2nd, it's top to bottom, which means that it's not torn from the side of earth up. It's torn from heaven side down.
Caleb Chancey:This is God ending the separation here in this moment. Listen to how the letter to the Hebrews describes it. It says, when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, he entered once for all into the holy places. Not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood. Thus securing an eternal redemption.
Caleb Chancey:So do you hear it? A high priest enters not a physical holy of holies, but the throne room of heaven itself. He passes the true curtain, not with the blood of an animal but with his own completely innocent divine and human life. He comes as the true lamb and he secures not 1 year's redemption to be renewed again in the future, but an eternal once for all time redemption to God. That's what the curtain tearing from top to bottom means.
Caleb Chancey:Our high priest, a man who is also God, gave his own life and entered heaven, the real holy place to secure forgiveness for us forever. We started by seeing that the consequences of our sin are far worse maybe than we had thought or we like to think. Here, we see that God's love is at least as deep, if not deeper even than that. See, the writer of Hebrews goes on to say that we now have confidence to enter the holy places through the new and living way that Jesus opened for us through the new curtain, which is his flesh. So the judgment that Jesus endured, the breaking of his body and soul, opened the way to heaven for us.
Caleb Chancey:He endured hell so we could enter heaven. And this is where we'll close. I mentioned earlier that when Jesus said, my God my God why have you forsaken me? He was quoting Psalm 22. Psalm 22 is a lament, which is a prayer of pain from a righteous servant of God who feels abandoned by God and surrounded by people who are attacking him like wild beasts.
Caleb Chancey:It has lines like, all who see me mock me. They make mouths at me. And they've pierced my hands and feet. I can count on my bones. They stare and gloat over me.
Caleb Chancey:They divide my garments among them and for my clothing, they cast lots. If that sounds familiar at all, it's because those are things that happened that we saw last week in the last passage of Mark. So Psalm 22 is a lament from a servant of God who is righteous and feels abandoned, destroyed, surrounded by danger. But that's not where the psalm ends. Listen to where it goes.
Caleb Chancey:It goes on to say, you have rescued me from the horns of the wild oxen. I will tell of your name to my brothers. In the midst of the congregation, I will praise you. The servant goes on to say, all the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord and all the families of the nations shall worship before you. In Hebrew literature, my brothers means other Israelites and the nations means non Israelites or Gentiles.
Caleb Chancey:This servant says, I'm going to tell other Israelites of God's glory and all the families of the nations shall come and worship the Lord. When Jesus dies, a new way to heaven opens in the Jewish temple. But look at the first voice that recognizes that something special has happened. In verse 39, it's a Roman soldier who helped crucify Jesus who says, surely this man was the son of God. See, when heaven opens, both Jews and now Gentiles can see and worship God on equal footing.
Caleb Chancey:This is the reason that Jesus endured hell. He endured God's judgment. He drank it down so that a new people could enter heaven. So that a new people could be forgiven of their sins, not once a year, but once for all time for eternity. So they could come boldly into the presence of God in heaven through him.
Caleb Chancey:So they could see and worship the father, son, and holy spirit who redeemed them for all time. When we see Jesus for who he is and place our faith in him as our savior and king, we become part of this people. No longer under judgment but under grace. No longer outside forsaken but welcomed into the family. And the son of God we see now by faith, one day we'll see in worship face to face for eternity.
Caleb Chancey:Jesus endured hell for us that we might enter heaven with him. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we thank you for drinking a cup of judgment that we deserve. For being experiencing being forsaken by the father. For taking in the wine of wrath.
Caleb Chancey:Even forgiving your human body over to death so that we could be welcomed in, so we could receive blessing, and we could be brought into your presence. I pray that we would be humbled by how much we need this grace, but also that we would be encouraged like the writer of Hebrews says to come boldly into your presence because you have provided it once for all time and that is never going to be taken away. We belong to you by faith. And I pray that we would experience that reality. Amen.
