The Reproach of the Cross

Listen Online:

Watch Online:

Transcript:

Most of you have probably had some kind of experience in your life with a bully. Either you were picked on in school. God forbid, maybe you were the one that was doing the picking on.

Maybe you were both. I think maybe for a lot of us, there were people who think we were bullies, and then there were people who thought we were the victims. I remember one kid when I was in seventh grade. I don’t know what his problem was.

but he liked to pick on everybody in gym class. It was not him. And one day I just had enough.

He spit in my face. I clocked him with my Bible and then we just kind of went our separate ways after that. Can’t carry a weapon in school, but I could wield that like one.

And I think back on his behavior and how he seemed to be determined to embarrass other people. and looking back on it now, I think it was because he felt bad about himself. And I would like to think that if he looked back on it now, that he would be ashamed of how he acted.

I know I’m not what I would call, I was not what I’d call a bully, but in school I do look back and I still cringe over some things I said and did that were not as nice as they should have been. And I’m ashamed of that. I think all of us can look back on our younger, dumber selves and cringe.

I won’t ask you to tell me stories, but we probably, some of you, I can see it in your reaction. Yes, we have those moments. And we realize that the things that we do to other people when we’re the aggressor, even if it’s designed to humiliate them, it really, in the long run, exposes what’s wrong with us.

It humiliates us. It brings shame on us. And that’s exactly what we’re going to see today in the next installment of our study of the book of Mark.

is when we get through all the trials, when we get through all the hearings, all the betrayals, when the final verdict that we talked about last week is rendered, and Jesus goes off to experience what they’ve sentenced him to, we’re going to see Jesus put through something that was designed to shame the condemned person. And particularly in the case of Jesus, it was particularly brutal in the case of Jesus, And it was designed to shame Jesus. But as we look at it in hindsight, as we look at it in understanding of who Jesus is and what came next, we can see that ultimately it didn’t shame Jesus, it shames us.

Because the cross is symbolic of the love of God. it’s symbolic of the and when I say symbolic please don’t hear something I’m not saying I believe Jesus was physically crucified I believe he shed his blood when I say symbolic I’m not saying oh it was just a neat theological story to teach us some kind of truth if you want that message this morning go to another church I believe Jesus literally died on the cross shed his blood died the whole nine yards. But when he did that, that cross also sent a message about the love of God, about the holiness of God, and about the ugliness of sin.

That’s what we’re going to see this morning. How these bullies who wanted to shame and humiliate Jesus ultimately shamed and humiliated themselves. So if you would turn with me in your Bibles to Mark chapter 15.

Mark chapter 15. We are getting close to the end of the book after all this time and we’re going to start in verse 16. If you don’t have your Bibles or can’t find Mark 15, it’ll be on the screen for you.

But once you find it, if you’d stand with me as we read from God’s word together, Mark chapter 15, starting in verse 16. Actually, I want to back up to verse 15. So Pilate, wanting to gratify the crowd, released Barabbas to them.

And he delivered Jesus after he had scourged him to be crucified. Then the soldiers led him away into the hall called the praetorium and they called together the whole garrison. And they cloaked him with purple and they twisted a crown of thorns and put it on his head and began to salute him.

Hail, King of the Jews. Then they struck him on the head with a reed and spat on him. And bowing the knee, they worshipped him.

And when they had mocked him, they took the purple off him, put his own clothes on him, and led him out to crucify him. Then they compelled a certain man, Simon, a Cyrenian, the father of Alexander and Rufus, as he was coming out of the country and passing by to bear his cross. And they brought him to the place Golgotha, which is translated place of a skull.

Then they gave him wine mingled with myrrh to drink, but he did not take it. And when they crucified him, they divided his garments, casting lots for them to determine what every man should take. Now it was the third hour, and that means about nine o’clock in the morning.

It was the third hour, and they crucified him. And the inscription of his accusation was written above the king of the Jews. With him they also crucified two robbers, one on his right and the other on his left.

So the scripture was fulfilled, which says, and he was numbered with the transgressors. And those who passed by blasphemed him, wagging their heads and saying, Aha, you who destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself and come down from the cross. Likewise, the chief priests also mocking among themselves with the scribes said he saved others himself.

He cannot save. Let the Christ, the king of Israel, descend now from the cross that we may see him and believe. Even those who were crucified with him reviled him.

And you may be seated. one thing that I found interesting as I started a couple of years ago my in-depth study about the crucifixion and the resurrection taking the things that you see on the grids in front of you if you picked one up at one of the doors to see how the the details in each of the gospels correspond to each other when I started doing that with the gospels for the entire period from the triumphal entry through the ascension. One thing I noticed is that none of the gospels go into great detail about the beatings or the crucifixion because they didn’t have to.

Everyone who read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the generation or so after Jesus was crucified was familiar with what a crucifixion looked like. There are certain things that if you see that they are so horrific that they will stick with you for the rest of your life. that’s why countries have historically practiced public executions it’s to shock people that’s why the Taliban would drag people into the Olympic stadium and and execute people in front of them that’s why in North Korea today they have firing squads in the villages and they make people come out and watch they even make the families applaud they want these images to stick with you so that’s why there’s not a detailed description of the crucifixion that we can easily gloss over that.

And we have this picture in our minds of Jesus on a cross, and maybe there’s a little blood here and a little blood there, and we miss just how grisly it is. And I don’t want to spend the whole time this morning trying to shock you. That’s not my intent.

But we need to understand what they did to Jesus. They took him out and they scourged him. And this flogging that we read just briefly mentioned here is actually the second one that he’s been through.

And it’s more severe because the first one seems to be just kind of a warning. Hey, stop doing whatever’s causing a ruckus. And we’re going to send you on your way.

And then Pilate gets really afraid that the people are going to accuse him of disloyalty to Caesar. And he has to put on a show. He has to put on an exhibition for the people.

And so that’s when the Romans really get nasty is in this second being. They use, and some of you have probably heard of this by now, they used what’s called a cat of nine tails. It’s a braided leather whip.

It had these cords at the end of it, several that were, had at the ends of them pieces of pottery or beads or shards of glass or pieces of bone, things that were designed to inflict real damage when you whip somebody with it. that they would tear into the flesh and rip away as you rip the whip back. Jesus would have been tied to a post while they whipped him and tore his back to shreds to the point where you could see the muscle.

Jesus would have been bruised and broken before he ever got to the cross. Now, not a bone of his was broken, the Bible tells us, but the soft tissue certainly was horrifically damaged. And so Jesus is in intense pain from the first beating.

Now they go the second mile with this more intense beating. And they’re putting a purple robe on him. They’re mocking him.

They’re pulling the robe off when they’re done, which reopens the wounds. Then they give him what’s called a patibulum. That’s the cross beam of the cross.

In many cases, weighed over 100 pounds. And they make this man who has been up all night, who has been beaten severely, is already experiencing blood loss. And they make him carry the petibulum out to the place of crucifixion.

The Romans weren’t going to be bothered by that. This wasn’t unique to Jesus. They typically did this.

Made the criminal carry their own cross beam. Jesus, apparently from the severity of the beating, could not carry it. And stumbled, the other gospels tell us.

And that’s why Simon of Cyrene was brought in to carry the cross beam for him. He would have been taken to the place of crucifixion where there was already a stake in the ground upright and crucifixion victims were either tied or nailed to the cross. In Jesus’ case, we know from the descriptions, he was nailed.

They called it his hand in that day. Would have been likely this spot in here between the two bones of the wrist, the radius and the ulna, or between some of the metacarpals. Because if you put the nail right here, it couldn’t support his body weight.

It would have ripped right through. They knew what they were doing. They would have nailed him to the cross.

they would have raised that crossbeam up into place then they would have nailed his feet for very likely to either side of the crossbeam leaving him in a position where he would have had to raise himself up to breathe and you could watch somebody hang there and writhe there for days because again this was meant to send a message to people who were either considered awful criminals in the eyes of Rome or rebels in the eyes of Rome which seems to be the case with Jesus. The charge made against him was rebellion, insurrection. It was meant to send a message.

He would have to raise up for every breath. Not only would it be a struggle to do that, but his beaten body would have had to rub against the cross every time up and down. For six hours, he was there in complete agony.

Now there’s more to it, but those are the highlights. That’s the part that the Bible just kind of glosses over. Only because the ancient readers would have been familiar with it.

That’s what somebody typically went through in cases of crucifixion. What the gospel writers add are the little extra details. Where the Romans went the extra mile just trying to humiliate Jesus even more.

doing everything they could to try to shame this man. So we know from verse 15, they beat him savagely. We know from verse 16 and places in Matthew that it tells us they stripped him naked in front of a large crowd.

That’s humiliating in and of itself. That’s why a lot of us have those recurring nightmares where we’re showing up for a test or a class without any clothes on. One of my worst recurring nightmares is when I show up for church and I’m still in my jammies.

That’s bad enough. they did this there was no reason to do that other than to try to humiliate him then we see that they they went out and they toyed with him they pretended to pay homage to him this whole thing about putting on the purple robe which they did twice and making a crown of thorns and putting on him which they did twice and putting a scepter in his hand they did all of this twice because everybody wanted a chance to shame the would-be king of the jews and so their idea was hey you think you’re the king of the Jews? Well, let’s treat you like one.

And they’re kneeling and they’re making a big joke out of it. Meanwhile, they’re mocking and they’re slapping at him, doing everything they can to show contempt for this man. Then they made sure to parade him in front of the crowd.

As he struggles to carry the cross, we know there was a crowd following him. And some of those people were his supporters that went with him watching to see. And Jesus talks to his supporters according to the book of Luke along the way, saying, don’t weep for me, weep for these people that are doing this.

But they made sure to parade him out there. And it was a huge spectacle to the townspeople as they continued to laugh and mock. Then they nailed him to that cross between two common criminals.

They made sure to tell him what they thought of him. Once he’s on the cross, they continued to mock. They continued to mock.

They continued to yell things. They even offered him this undrinkable concoction of whatever was in it. Apparently sour wine with different herbs that would have prolonged his suffering.

They would have had a little bit of a narcotic effect. They would have taken a little bit of the edge off. Wasn’t that nice of the Romans?

No. Their purpose was not to make him comfortable. Their purpose was to take just enough of the edge off so that he could survive it longer.

That’s why they offered him that drink. They mocked his messianic claims. They put up the sign, here’s the king of the Jews. Here he is.

Not only that, one of the gospels, if memory serves, it’s Luke, tells us they mocked him in every language they knew. They put the sign up there in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, just so everybody could be in on the joke. They gambled over his clothes in verse 24.

And folks, imagine the indignity. Imagine the inhumanity of watching a man dying and writhing in agony. And you’re trying to figure out, hey, I want his coat.

Hey, I want his shoes. They’re gambling over his clothes. I can’t imagine showing that kind of apathy over the suffering of an animal, let alone another human being.

They continued to verbally abuse him in verses 29 through 32 when he was up on the cross. And then Matthew 27, 36 tells us that they treated the whole thing like entertainment. They all just came out to watch.

Grab your lawn chairs, pack a lunch. It’s going to be a fun day. It doesn’t say that.

But that was their attitude. Let’s go enjoy the spectacle. Let’s watch the man get crucified.

All of that, all of this stuff that’s described through Mark, those are just the extras. That’s just the stuff that they did to get one more dig at him. For the Romans, this seems to have been personal on some level.

For the Romans, there was a desire here to humiliate anyone who rebelled against Rome. Now, it’s not that the Romans necessarily had anything against Jesus personally. But hey, here’s this guy who’s been accused of this.

We’re going to make him pay. They would have treated anybody this way, very likely, that was in the same situation. But they wanted to humiliate him.

Understand that. They wanted to do everything they could to shame him. The members of the Sanhedrin and the people in the crowd, they had the same agenda, but for them it was personal. Because the Gospels tell us even Pilate understood they put him there for envy.

They all wanted to humiliate Jesus. But as humiliating as this experience was, as shameful as this experience was, it ultimately backfired. Because what they did was shine a light on their own sinfulness.

What they did was leave this record for us to see how awful they were, how ugly their hearts were, that they were willing to do this. The cross shows the ugliness of sin, and it also shows God’s disdain for sin, God’s hatred for sin, if we can use that terminology. It’s bad enough that they would crucify somebody.

It makes it even worse that Jesus was innocent of the charges and everyone there knew it. They all knew it. The Sanhedrin knew, as we talked about last week, they were just making stuff up at this point.

They had to fabricate something that they could accuse him of when they had their trial. They broke every law they had in trying to convict Jesus of something. They hired people to perjure themselves. Finally, they came up with some charge they could use.

They said, oh, he’s guilty of blasphemy. Blasphemy. He needs to be condemned for blasphemy.

He’s guilty of blasphemy. They go to Pilate and Pilate says, what’s the charge? They say, insurrection.

Wait, that wasn’t the charge. So Pilate asks Jesus, are you the king of the Jews? He realizes he’s talking about a spiritual Messiah thing that Pilate doesn’t care about because it has nothing to do with the power of Rome as far as he’s concerned.

And brings Jesus out and says, I find no charge against this man, no evidence of guilt in any capital offense here. And so they just start making stuff up again. They start accusing him, just randomly, seeing if something will stick, some explanation.

Pilate saw through this. Pilate knew Jesus was innocent. He said so multiple times.

Even Herod, as messed up as he was, knew Jesus was innocent. That’s why he sent Jesus back to Pilate. The Sanhedrin who were making the charges knew Jesus was innocent because they were having trouble making stuff up.

He was brutally murdered, not because of anything he had done, but he was brutally murdered because of the envy of the Sanhedrin, because of their hatred in their hearts for who he was and what he taught. And he was brutally murdered because of the cowardice of the Roman governor. Who could have at any point said, knock off this foolishness.

He’s not guilty and you know it. And if you want to make something of it, I’ve got legions here and we can do this now. But instead, Pilate gave in and had an innocent man put to death.

And what we ultimately see here is the ugliness of the human heart. on full display in the way this innocent man was brutalized. All the things that they did to him were an outflow of the evil and the hatred that was within them.

Not only what they did, but the way they sat back and enjoyed it. See, the people who maybe didn’t swing the whip maybe didn’t pound the nails, maybe even weren’t there to be all crucified, but sat there and enjoyed every minute and mocked him, they were just as guilty. They exhibited just as much hate toward Jesus.

And it shows us what kind of ugliness dwells in the human heart. We can look at that and say, well, not me. I wouldn’t have done that.

we could go through example after example after example of people all throughout history normal people upstanding people who have done monstrous things that they never thought they would do when given the opportunity or because they were following orders that’s why the prophet jeremiah said that the human heart is desperately wicked it’s why Jesus compared anger compared hatred really to murder their sin in each of our hearts they just had an opportunity to put it on display but the treatment of Jesus shows what human beings are capable of. But it also, on the flip side of that, it shows how God feels towards sin. It shows God’s perspective on sin.

The world would very much like for God to not take sin seriously, for God to look at sin and say, I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me a bit. As a matter of fact, it was about 10 years or so ago, there was an article in Christianity Today that I consider borderline blasphemous.

making that same case called God a drama queen for taking sin so seriously. Folks, that was the point of the cross was that sin is ugly. Sin is offensive to God and sin has to be punished.

And that’s why the apostle Paul says that Jesus, who knew no sin was made to be sin for us. We’ll see next week how Jesus took, I think it’s next week, how Jesus took our sin on himself. He took responsibility for it.

And that’s why he was punished. Yes, God knew how these men would work. God knew what these men would do, but it was the plan of God for Jesus to go to the cross and for these men to do what they were naturally inclined to do.

So that when the responsibility for our sins was laid on Jesus Christ, that our sins were punished in Jesus Christ. Everything he went through was bearing the punishment, the condemnation for our sins. If you ever think that God is okay with sin, look at how he was willing to punish it. Look at how it needed to be punished in the person of Jesus Christ. That’s why the prophet Isaiah describing the crucifixion 700 years before it happened in Isaiah 53 said it was the will of God to crush him.

Because that sin had to be punished. that sin had to be paid for. And I know to us, the idea that God takes sin so seriously, it sounds harsh.

It sounds unloving. It sounds unfeeling. But we need to look at sin from God’s perspective and what it is.

Now, the Bible explains sin as law-breaking, but the Bible also, and that’s a good definition of it, anything that displeases God, anything that disobeys God. But the Bible ultimately gives us a picture of the root of sin, which is the reason why God takes it so seriously. You look back at the first sin.

Did Adam and Eve condemn humanity because they ate a piece of fruit? No, it was the rebellion behind it. It was the idolatry behind it.

It was Satan’s lie of saying you can’t trust God, and if you’ll eat from this fruit, you can become like God. Idolatry is when we want to take anything or any person, even ourselves, and put it in the place that only God should occupy. If you want to think about it this way, there’s a throne in each of our hearts.

And God alone deserves to sit on that throne and rule. but we will find everything under the sun to put and put on that throne instead of god sometimes it’s ourselves sometimes I’m in charge of my own life and our idolatry is about worshiping ourselves and what we want sometimes it can be a worship of money sometimes it can be a worship of popularity sometimes it can be a worship of of sexual activity sometimes it can be a worship of power. But you think that especially the things going on in the culture war right now that the world looks at and says, oh no, God wouldn’t be bothered by that.

Why do you think God’s bothered by that? Because it is looking at what God has said he wants and how we are to worship him and how we are to live by his standards. And we say, no, I don’t want that.

I want to do what I want to do. We are taking God off the throne right here and putting ourselves or something else in place. And we’re repudiating God.

We’re saying, I don’t want you. I want what I want. And that messes up the relationship.

You can’t have a relationship like that. If I was constantly telling my wife, I don’t want anything to do with you. How’s that marriage going to go?

Y’all were scared to say. It’s not going to go well. I can give you an illustration.

We started raising chickens and ducks and guineas. and I knew going into this that guineas cannot be domesticated but I loved them anyway they were so cute as little keats which is guinea chicks I learned that terminology too they were so cute and I raised them and I loved them and fed them and tried to pet them just like the chickens and the chickens will come to me the chickens will follow me the ducks will sometimes come to me they are like charla but the chickens are mine and I feed them and I care for them and they will follow me around and they’ll see what I’m doing. I’m out on the riding mower, and they just watch me.

I don’t know that animals love like we do, but I feel like the chickens love me. The guineas, they don’t care. I come in, I try to feed them, try to take care of them, try to do all the same things I do for the chickens.

They claw. They peck. They run.

I think I heard one of them hiss. last weekend last weekend or the weekend before trying to take care of them one of them just jumped up and flew at my face the guineas now live with someone else right there’s a difference in the relationship as I was taking care of the chickens by and large they do what they’re supposed to do and they’re concerned about what I’m doing and where I’m sending them and what I’m trying to feed them the guineas didn’t care the guineas looked at me and said we could care less. We could not care less.

Sinning is like the guineas. We’re looking at God saying, I don’t care who you are or what you’ve done for me. I don’t care what your will is.

I want to do what I want to do and I’m going to peck and claw and do whatever I have to do to do what I want to do. You don’t matter to me at all. That’s what sin is.

That’s the attitude of idolatry behind sin. Does that make a little more sense why God gets so worked up over the times that we disobey Him? Sin is offensive to God because it’s a rejection of Him.

But what is so incredible, I could cut it off here and leave you with that heavy point that I hope is as convicting to you as it is to me. But I would do you a disservice this morning to leave it off there without the beauty of where this passage leads. And that’s the fact that in spite of the ugliness of our sin, in spite of our disdain for God, that is part of our nature, despite our rebellion, despite sometimes our cruelty to one another, all these things that displease and dishonor God, in spite of all of that, God loved us enough that Jesus was willing to come and die.

He was willing to go through all of this on the cross so that our sin could be punished, so that the people who reviled him could find salvation by believing in him. Because some of these same people, as he is in the process of dying for their sins, Mark closes this part of what we’ve read in verse 32, saying they reviled him. And yet Jesus prays, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Now, they knew what they were, in a sense, they knew what they were doing. But I don’t think they understood the gravity and the magnitude of what they were doing. They could not have possibly understood the eternal implications of what they were doing.

Jesus kept that perspective in mind and died for the very people who were crucifying him. And some of those same people, some of those same people were in the crowd. Some 50 days later, when the apostle Paul began to preach about this man, Jesus, that they had crucified with their own wicked hands and that God had raised from the dead.

And they were pricked in their hearts. They were convicted by the power of the Holy Spirit to the point that they cried out and said, what do we have to do to be saved? What can we possibly do to find forgiveness?

And he told them to repent. He called them to Jesus. Jesus died so that those who reviled him could find salvation by believing in him.

Salvation would be open even to these people who put him on the cross. And in our lives, we have all disobeyed God. We have all reviled him.

If not in word, most of us would. . .

It’s hard to imagine any of us standing in a situation like this where we’d stand at the foot of the cross and shout obscenities at Jesus like they did. But with our attitudes and our actions, there’s not a person in this room that God’s word says has not reviled him, has not rebelled against him. And that salvation is available to you because of what Jesus Christ did.

The ugliness that put Jesus on the cross was paid for by the fact that Jesus Christ went to the cross. That’s the beauty of this is that Jesus offers forgiveness from that sin that separates us from God, that sin that drives a wedge between us and a holy God. Jesus Christ paid for that.

And he offers forgiveness to us as a free gift, not because you can earn it or deserve it. I mean, how do you come back from that and be good enough to undo what they did? What must we do?

Turns their attention to Jesus. And this morning, it does not matter what you’ve done. It does not matter how far you’ve strayed from God.

The things that nobody in this room knows. The things you wish God didn’t know. His grace is deep enough and wide enough to forgive.

All that’s necessary is for you to come to that point of repentance. Where you acknowledge that He is who He says He is. That your sin has separated you from God and that Jesus Christ is the one and only Savior.

who came to pay for your sins in full and rose again to prove it. If you believe that, if you acknowledge that this morning, you can be saved, you can be forgiven from any of it, from all of it, in fact. And you can have that right relationship with your Father that you were created to have.