Preparing for Jesus’ Death

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Preparation is important and it’s not necessarily one of my spiritual gifts. I come up with ideas and say, hey, why don’t we try this? And usually it’s, depending on the circumstances, it’s Charla or Christy or Stella that actually makes it happen because they know how.

I’m just, one of the teachers at the school used the term the good idea fairy. Maybe that’s me. But I am blessed with a wife who is very detail-oriented and very prepared.

we are in in a couple months we’re going to be making a trip to Louisiana for some classes and I’m going to take the whole family with me we’ve known since well we’ve known for a while that I was going to be going to this and my wife has been planning and preparing since August for a trip that’s coming up in May that that gives you some idea and but she has a lot of things to think about which kids are going to sleep where, how many, you know, what kind of bedding she needs to bring, what kind of noise machine she has to bring, because all of our kids are noisy, so they all have to sleep with noise machines so they don’t wake each other. It’s just, it’s a mess. But then Benjamin has joined in on it as well.

I guess it’s okay to tell this. Normally, I say one of the kids, so that y’all don’t know who, but he won’t care, has been planning for weeks all the kinds of Cajun food he plans to eat. That’s half our conversations right now.

Hey, I’m so excited to try this or do that. It’s gotten so bad, all this preparation at my house, that I walked into the boy’s room the other day and Charlie had out a toy suitcase and was shoving it full of stuffed animals. I said, what is he doing?

Benjamin said he’s packing toys so he has something to take with him to Louisiana. They have toys in Louisiana too. I’m sure we could find something.

But everybody’s preparing. Everybody is putting the way, except for me, I guess, the day before we leave, I’ll shove a bunch of clothes in a Walmart bag and be ready to go. But men pack differently, I guess.

But there’s a lot of preparation that goes into taking seven people away for a week. And so I’m thankful she puts all the preparation into that. But it’s a reminder to me as I’m reading the text that we’re going to look at this week, that things don’t just happen accident.

God has plans. God has plans that he has been telling his people about for thousands of years, and God has plans that he’s been preparing to carry out for thousands of years. And I bring this up to you, number one, because it’s where we are in our study of the book of Mark, is this period of preparation leading up to the crucifixion, but also because I have heard people in the last few years say, well, yeah, the crucifixion, that just kind of happened.

And when it happened, God said, oh, I think I can use this. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the idea. I’m not sure we should be comfortable with the idea of a God who wakes up in the morning and says, well, I didn’t see that coming, but why not make lemonade out of these lemons?

It’s not the biblical picture of God. The Bible tells us that he planned these things. He planned, and Jesus was aware of everything leading up to the crucifixion.

At what point he became aware of it, I don’t know. That’s a really deep theological question. But I know that by the time he was on his way to Jerusalem, he knew what was going to happen.

He knew it was the plan of God that he’d been working out for hundreds and thousands of years, and he went there deliberately to carry it out. And this morning, we’re going to look at a couple of stories that are squished together here in a few verses of Mark, but they all point to this preparation that the Father and Son were engaged in to come to the point of the crucifixion that we’ll be at in just a few weeks. So we’re going to be this morning in Mark chapter 14, and we’re going to look at the first 16 verses of Mark 14.

If you would turn there with me, if you don’t have your Bible or can’t find Mark 14, it’ll be on the screen for you. And once you find it, if you would stand with me as we read from God’s Word together. Mark chapter 14, as it talks about some of this preparation that the Father and Son were engaged in.

It says, after two days, it was the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Now that’s kind of an awkward way of saying that. What he means is two days, at this point it was two days until the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

And the chief priests and the scribes sought how they might take him by trickery and put him to death. But they said, not during the feast, lest there be an uproar of the people. And if you compare the other Gospels, and if you want to do that, there are the grids at each entrance where you can see how the gospels that cover this portion of the history, how they compare against one another.

But you see that they were concerned because the people had such a high regard for Jesus that they were afraid if they openly went and made a move against Jesus, if they went in public and tried to arrest him, they were afraid they would have a riot on their hands. Then we move in verse 3. It says, and being in Bethany at the house of Simon the leper, he sat at the table.

A woman came having an alabaster flask of very costly oil of spikenard. Then she broke the flask and poured it on his head. But there were some who were indignant among themselves and said, Why was this fragrant oil wasted?

For it might have been sold for more than 300 denarii and given to the poor. And they criticized her sharply. But Jesus said, Let her alone.

Why do you trouble her? For she has done a good work for me. For you have the poor with you always, and whenever you wish you may do them good.

but me you do not always have. She has done what she could. She has come beforehand to anoint my body for burial. Assuredly, I say to you, wherever this gospel is preached in the whole world, what this woman has done will also be told as a memorial to her.

And here we are telling that story again, just like Jesus said. Verse 10, Then Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, went to the chief priests to betray him to them. And when they heard it, they were glad and promised to give him money.

So he sought how he might conveniently betray him. So shortly after this, this incident where the woman anoints Jesus, Judas goes off and says, you know, I’ve got to do something about this. And it may be connected to the story in John just about four days before where someone else had anointed Jesus in Bethany at a supper.

And in that instance, Judas is the one who said, why all this waste? And I believe John even says Judas wasn’t actually concerned about the waste. He was concerned about having his hand in the money bag.

And so if we held on to this money, he could have gotten his cut. Now they’re all after this woman for the waste, which makes me suspect that maybe Judas was sniping about it behind Jesus’ back for all these days. So when it happened again, they were all upset.

And Judas is looking at this saying, I’m tired of this, and goes to the authorities with a plan to betray Jesus. They’re only too happy to do it because now they have a way to do it in secret where they can do it out of the view of the people. So we come to verse 12.

It says, Now on the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the Passover lamb, his disciples said to him, Where do you want us to go and prepare that you may eat the Passover? He sent out two of his disciples and said to them, Go into the city, and a man will meet you carrying a pitcher of water. Follow him.

Wherever he goes in, say to the master of the house, The teacher says, where is the guest room in which I may eat the Passover with my disciples? Then he will show you a large upper room furnished and prepared. There make ready for us.

So his disciples went out and came into the city and found it just as he had said to them. And they prepared the Passover. And you may be seated.

Now the next time we’re together to discuss the book of Mark, we’ll start to see some of the things that took place at the Passover. We’ll see the instance of Jesus identifying his betrayer in Mark. Before that even happened, John records, though, the very beginning of the supper, that Jesus got down like a servant and washed their feet.

Even knowing that Judas was about to betray him as he did, he washed their feet. Even knowing that Peter was about to deny him, he washed their feet. Even knowing that they all were going to run and hide, he washed their feet.

Even knowing that Thomas was going to doubt his resurrection, he washed their feet. And so we see throughout the Gospels this incredible love that Jesus had for his disciples, and we see the incredible love that he has for us, which is his whole purpose in going to the cross. And that’s what we see that he’s doing here.

He is preparing himself to be crucified. That’s one of the things that he’s doing in preparation. He’s preparing himself to be crucified.

Verses 1 and 2, there at the beginning, and verses 10 and 12 talk about the Sanhedrin’s plots, how the leaders said, we’ve got to find a way to arrest him. We’ve got to find a way to take him into custody and get rid of him. And we see later on in verses 10 through 12, Judas’s plot, you know, I can deliver him to you secretly.

We see this plan coming together for Jesus to be crucified, for him to be arrested, for Judas to betray him so that it can happen. Jesus was not ignorant of this. The very next section of Mark, as I said, talks about him pointing out the betrayer and not just saying, I have the feeling somebody’s going to betray me.

He says, somebody is about to betray me. And they say, who is it? And he says, the one who dipped his hand in the dish with me, the one that I gave the bread to.

He’s identified exactly who is going to do it and tells Judas, go out and what you’re about to do, do quickly. Jesus had told the disciples months for months that he was going to be crucified. Now, I believe Jesus knew even before that, but he had been telling them openly for months that he was going to be crucified.

This was not a surprise to him. Months earlier, he was on the road near Caesarea Philippi. And if you’re familiar with the Gospels, it’s around the same time on that same journey where he asks them, who do you say that I am?

And Peter says, you’re the Christ, you’re the Messiah, the son of the living God. On that same journey, There’s a discussion about where he’s headed. And he told them, it’s recorded in Matthew 16, Mark 8, and Luke 9, that he was going to go to Jerusalem.

He was going to be mocked. He was going to be beaten. He was going to be spit on.

He was going to be scourged. He was going to be crucified. He was going to rise again.

He told them that months earlier. Now, Peter just loses his ever-loving mind over that. Lord, don’t say such things.

You know, we will never let that happen. And that’s when Jesus, who had just told him, blessed are you because my father has revealed this to you, now says, get thee behind me, Satan. Because he says, you’re not thinking about things from God’s perspective.

You’re just looking at it from your own. I have to go and be crucified. It was part of his plan.

But just so that they didn’t think that Jesus spoke rashly here and said some things he didn’t mean. You know, we all do that, don’t we? Have you ever said anything you didn’t mean?

Sometimes we have to explain our friends or our loved ones and say that he didn’t mean that. Jesus was not that way. Jesus didn’t say things he didn’t mean.

But to make it clear that he’s not saying something in the heat of that moment that he didn’t mean, he repeated it just a few days before this when they were on the road to Jerusalem, when they were making that last fateful journey down from Galilee to Jerusalem so that he could go and be crucified. It’s recorded in Matthew 20 and Mark 10 and Luke 18, that he said the same thing again. I am going to Jerusalem because I need to go there so I can be beaten, so I can be mocked, so I can be spit on, so I can be betrayed, so I can be crucified so that I can rise again from the dead.

He’s telling them the whole time that this is the plan. And so when we see these things coming together that the Sanhedrin, they are so furious with him, the ruling council, they’re so furious with him over the way they have been their ignorance has been put on display. Their corruption has been put on display.

Jesus has come and exposed everything that’s going on in the hearts of the religious leaders, and they’re furious. They cannot deal with it anymore. They’re ready to have him gone, and Judas is at his wits end for whatever reason, and it’s enough.

We just need to put a stop to this, and suddenly they’re working together. For Jesus to go there and succumb to this is not an accident. It’s not a coincidence.

It was the plan. So for Jesus to even be here at all, he was preparing to be crucified. These events that are taking place all throughout this week are preparing for the main event.

My kids, my older kids are working in school on something with literature. And they were asking me, what’s the climax of the story? I don’t know how to, I didn’t really teach English.

So I don’t know, I know what it is, but I don’t know how to explain it. So I was trying to tell them it’s the high point of the story. It’s when the action is ramped up to its greatest point.

If we’ve got an English teacher in here, other than my wife, you can explain it to me later. But I said, I’ll give you an example. In the Gospels, we read how the pressure just builds and builds and the tension just builds.

And then you go to the cross and it continues to build. And then there’s that moment where Jesus says, it is finished. He cries out, it is finished.

And he gives up the ghost. And from there, it’s just, it’s over. Now there’s another high point at the resurrection. But what I’m telling you is everything in the Gospels is building to that moment where Jesus lays down his life for us.

And Peter explained later on that this was part of the plan. When he’s speaking a couple of months later to these people in Jerusalem, many of the people in the crowd he was speaking to were among those who had put Jesus to death. And he says to them in Acts chapter 2, Men of Israel, hear these words.

Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs, which God did through him in your minds, as you yourself also know. He said, Jesus Christ came here on God’s behalf. You know this.

You saw the miracles. You understand what he did and what the purpose was. Him, being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, have crucified and put to death.

He said, that man that God sent, you took him with your own law-breaking hands. You put him to death. You killed him.

But it was all part of God’s plan. It was the determined plan and foreknowledge of God. He says, by the way, you think that was the end of it?

He says, whom God raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that he should be held by it. You had your plan, he says. God had his plan.

Your plan played into God’s plan. and then God trumped your plan. But that was always the plan, was for Jesus to come and be crucified.

He did it willingly. This is always where his ministry was destined to lead. And we see this in the way that the pieces are starting to come into place.

How God thought of this, how God moved all these pieces. We hear the phrase a lot, if you listen to political news, you hear the phrase, oh, so-and-so’s playing three-dimensional chess. Listen, I can barely figure out two-dimensional chess, all right?

How God orchestrated all these human pieces on the chessboard of eternity in order to work things out for Jesus to go and fulfill this plan is incredible. But it’s the plan and it always was. So Jesus was not only preparing to be crucified, he was preparing to be buried.

And verses 3 through 9 talk about this with the anointing, which I’ve already read to you. He goes to this supper in Bethany. Four days earlier, Jesus had been to another supper in Bethany that I already mentioned.

It’s recorded in the book of John. There is a third instance of an anointing of Jesus in the New Testament. It’s recorded in Luke chapter 7, I believe.

But it takes place in Galilee, in a completely different person’s house. So I believe there are three different incidents. First one early in Jesus’ ministry in Luke, the one in John just before the triumphal entry, and the one here in Matthew and Mark a few days before the crucifixion.

But four days earlier, Jesus had gone to this supper in Bethany where Mary, who’s known as part of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, Mary had anointed him for his burial. He told Judas in John 12, 7, Let her alone, leave her alone. She has kept this for the day of my burial. Now there’s another instance just before the crucifixion. He tells everyone listening that he’s going to be buried soon.

He says of this woman we just read about in verse 8, She has done what she could. She has come beforehand to anoint my body for burial. I think they still don’t understand the gravity of what’s about to happen. Because even to the last minute, they are shocked when he’s arrested.

I don’t know what they thought it meant when he said, I’m going to be arrested and I’m going to be killed and all that. But it’s clear to me that there was something in them that still did not understand that was about to happen. But Jesus said, I’m going to be buried.

And I’m preparing myself for the burial. We forget about the burial frequently because it just seems to be wedged in between the crucifixion and the resurrection. But the burial is immensely important for a couple of reasons. There’s Old Testament prophecy in Isaiah 53, 8 and 9.

Talking about the Messiah and says, He was cut off from the land of the living. For the transgressions of my people he was stricken. And they made his grave with the wicked, but with the rich at his death, because he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.

There’s this prophecy in the Old Testament 700 years before Jesus saying that the Messiah, contrary to everybody’s expectations, would be killed and would be buried. And you might say, well, of course he’d be buried. What’s so important about that?

It is very rare that somebody who was crucified would be buried. To the point that skeptics for hundreds of years have said, oh, that’s a plot hole in the story. They didn’t bury crucified people.

Crucified people were criminals. They were usually not Roman citizens. They were viewed by the Roman government as trash.

Nobody was burying crucified criminals. That never happened. In 1967, they discovered the calcaneus bone, the heel bone, of a Jewish man named, I’m not going to try to pronounce the name.

I’ll say the English equivalent is Jonathan. This man who had been crucified in the first century and still had the Roman spike through his heel. Since then, they’ve found a handful of other instances.

The reason that’s important, it is very rare that somebody who was crucified would receive a proper burial as opposed to just being thrown on a garbage heap. But it did happen. It did happen sometimes.

So it would have been noteworthy that Jesus would be crucified and then buried. That’s why there’s a prophecy about it, that he was crucified and buried, which in and of itself was unusual. But on top of that, Jesus’ burial is a key part of the argument for the resurrection. Because if he wasn’t buried, if his body, just like so many other crucified individuals, was just thrown out on the garbage heap, then the story of the empty tomb means nothing.

And yet the earliest Christians knew that he had been buried. 1 Corinthians 5, 3 through 7 says, I delivered to you for, this is Paul speaking to the church at Corinth, I delivered to you first of all that which I received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures, that he was seen by Cephas, Peter, then by the twelve. After that he was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remained to the present, but some have fallen asleep, and after that he was seen by James, then by all the apostles.

Now that may not mean a whole lot to you, especially if you’re skeptically inclined. I don’t have time to go into all the reasoning for it this morning. But we can date the wording of that text that Paul shared with the church at Corinth.

We can date that to an oral tradition to no later than the year A. D. 35.

Within two years, it was part of the creed of Christianity, part of the basic beliefs of Christianity within two years of the crucifixion and resurrection that Jesus Christ was crucified, buried, and rose again from the dead. That is not time for a legend of the empty tomb to develop. And so it’s incredibly important for us to realize that he was buried and that those who were so close to the story knew he was buried and said it and taught it.

And there was never a whisper of contention from people on the outside saying, no, that’s not true, he wasn’t buried. As a matter of fact, the authorities acknowledged that he was buried and came up with their own conspiracy theories about why the tomb was empty. They said, oh, the disciples came and stole the body.

In a few weeks we might talk about why that doesn’t work, but it didn’t work then, it doesn’t work now. Jesus Christ was buried, and it’s important that he was prepared for that to fulfill prophecy and to provide evidence of his resurrection. And here Jesus honors this woman for the role she plays in preparing him for his burial by anointing him, because he was preparing himself to be buried as well.

We see in the final part of this passage that Jesus was preparing to be offered for us. That he wasn’t just preparing to die. He wasn’t just preparing to be buried.

But he was preparing to do this for us. It speaks to the purpose of all of this. Because he sends his followers to go and prepare for the Passover.

And as we read on, he draws parallels between the elements of the Passover supper and himself. And we’ll look at this more in depth in the coming weeks. But most of you are familiar with this.

He breaks the bread and tells them, this is my body that is broken for you. He hands them the cup of the wine and says, this is my blood, which is shed for the remission of sins. Understand that that’s why he’s telling them to go and prepare the Passover.

Yes, I know that as an observant Jew, that was part of what he was supposed to do. But Jesus was going to present the Passover a little bit differently this year. And it was to make it clear the purpose for the crucifixion, the purpose for the burial, the purpose of everything he was about to do.

Jesus Christ did not just get killed because he irritated the wrong people. Jesus Christ did not just get killed because he was a threat to stability within parts of the Roman Empire. Jesus Christ did not get killed because he upset the Sanhedrin.

Jesus Christ offered himself as the ultimate sacrifice for our sins. And it’s not a matter of God looking at it afterwards and saying, well, I can use this. It was his plan.

It was his plan all along. And that’s why the Apostle Paul later on, who, by the way, hated Jesus and hated his followers prior to his own encounter with the resurrected Christ. At this time, not a fan of Jesus. We don’t have him recorded.

He doesn’t show up in the Gospels, but we know he was around and we know he hated Jesus. He later on called Jesus Christ our Passover, sacrificed for us in 1 Corinthians 5, 7. And all of this leads me, I know we’re looking at a few very short accounts of events here that all seem crammed together and we think, okay, those are there so we know what happened, but what can we learn from them?

The main thing I want you to understand from all of this today is that Jesus’ death was not an accident of history. It was God’s plan. It’s not just something that happened.

It is what God from the Garden of Eden on was working toward. Everything that God did among his people was to point forward to this. When God gave them the laws, when God gave Israel the laws that are seemingly impossible to keep, and when you get to the condition of the heart behind them, you might be able to keep them outwardly in your behavior, but the condition of your heart will never be in line with what God’s laws expectations are.

The purpose of that was to help us see how far short we fall of God’s holy standard and why we needed Jesus Christ to come and be the sacrifice for us. When God instituted the sacrifices, it was a picture so that when Jesus came, people would understand the idea that the shedding of blood is needed to cover the sins of the guilty. The blood of the innocent covers the sins of the guilty.

So that the world would have a frame of reference for understanding what Jesus was doing. When God ordained the temple, it was the idea of the dwelling of God among His people, that Jesus Christ would come and be the presence of God among His people. Everything that God did up to this point was drawing people’s attention to Jesus Christ. And everything that God has done since, whether it’s sending the Holy Spirit, whether it’s instituting the church, whether it’s giving the Great Commission for us to go out and preach the gospel, everything God has been doing since has been to point people back to Jesus Christ. Jesus did not come and die as an accident of history.

Jesus Christ came to die as the fulfillment of God’s plan, the voluntary fulfillment of God’s plan, so that you and I could experience eternity with him, so that you and I could have a relationship with him. When you read back to the earliest pages of scripture, there was a relationship and there was a fellowship between God and man that he created us for. Adam and Eve went for walks with God.

I don’t even know what that looks like, but it’s a fascinating concept of having that relationship where you just walk and talk with the Lord in the garden. And then sin came along, that disobedience that we are all guilty of. And that’s not me being mean to you.

That’s what the Bible says. It says you’re guilty. It says I’m guilty.

It says we’re all guilty. That sin, any disobedient action, thought, word, it separates us from a God who is holy. That’s why Adam and Eve hid in the garden.

That’s why they needed the covering of skins. You and I don’t have the same fellowship and the same relationship with God that we were created to have. And every man-made religion throughout history has been trying to find some way of getting back that connection with God.

And they all say, if you’ll just do this, if you’ll just check all these boxes, if you’ll just fulfill all these religious obligations, you can get back to where need to be. The Bible shows us what the religious obligations are and what the condition of our heart needs to be behind it so that we’ll realize we never can get there on our own. We cannot do enough good to erase the wrong we’ve done and come back to meet God’s standard of absolute holiness.

Jesus Christ came for the express purpose of taking responsibility for everything that you and I have ever said, done, or thought that was disobedient to God. He took responsibility for that. The thing about right now.

He took responsibility for that too. And he suffered, bled, and died in your place to bear all the punishment that we deserved so that we could be forgiven, so that we could be right with God. That was his whole purpose in coming, to seek and to save that which was lost. And this morning he offers that forgiveness, that salvation.

He offers that relationship with the Father, not by us doing anything, not by us going to church, not by us giving money, not by us being nice people, but simply believing that He died in our place to pay for our sins in full, believing that He rose again to prove it, and humbling ourselves to ask for that forgiveness. This morning, you can do that, and you can have what He’s promised.