Jesus’ Final Moments

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Well, the final moments of something are usually noteworthy, and they’re often the most noteworthy part of the event. You know, we see this in history. People who know nothing else about the wars between the Greeks and the Persians will often know about the Battle of Thermopylae.

And if you’re saying, I don’t know about that, you probably know the movie The 300. I’m not recommending it because I don’t remember what all’s in it, and there may be parts that are not worth recommending. But people remember the story because those were the final moments of the Spartan army fighting off the Persian invaders.

You may not remember all the battles of the war between Texas and Mexico, but people remember the Alamo. Because for a lot of people, those were their final moments. Some of the things that we remember about presidents come from their final moments.

I know that I’m a little more into politics than your average person, but I hear people talk about all the time Washington’s farewell address. The last speech he made where he said, don’t break off into parties and don’t entangle yourself with other countries. You know, basically all the stuff we do now that he was right about.

Or Eisenhower’s farewell address. People talk about that. We do this in our own lives.

We mark the ending of something. And we’ll talk with the kids, I can’t believe this is your last day as a fourth grader. This is your last day as a fifth grader.

I can’t believe this is your last day in elementary school. As the kids have gotten older, as the older kids have gotten old enough to understand, we did this with each baby because they were old enough to understand. We would try to have a special dinner or have ice cream the day before Charlie would go in to have the baby and say, you know, we’re going to celebrate this, commemorate this, whatever you want to call it.

This is our last day as a family of five. This is our last day as a family of six. This is the last one we’re having.

Then Abigail got mobile. I can’t believe this is our last day of not being exhausted. You know, we mark those final moments.

They’re usually noteworthy. But whether there are little moments where they’re there and my goodness not counting not counting live sporting events I think the finale of MASH is still one of the most watched television programs in history because people who hadn’t been watching people who had tuned out for a few years had to come back and see how it ended those final moments are important but it doesn’t matter whether there are our final moments in in phases of our lives or phases of the culture none of these final moments are as momentous or as noteworthy as what happened in the final moments of Jesus’ life. And that’s what we’re going to talk about this morning.

As we’ve done this series, this study through the book of Mark for well over a year now, we are finally to this point, to this moment, to the end of what Jesus came to accomplish. Last week we looked at Mark’s record of Jesus being crucified and being nailed to the cross. And the humiliation he went through, the humiliation that was the goal of the Romans and the Jewish leadership together.

Their goal was not just to kill him, but to humiliate him. And where we left off, he is still on the cross, but ultimately we see that they have failed in their efforts to humiliate him. They have failed in their efforts to put an end to him as a threat to their power.

Because as we looked at last week, we see they’re all flailing around in this situation and it’s Jesus who is calm and in control. This is Him playing out His will and His plan for our redemption. And we see the conclusion, the completion of that today.

So we’re going to be in Mark chapter 15 and we’re going to start where we left off last week in verse 32 and read together through verse 41. It says 31 on the screen, but trust me, it’s 41. If you don’t have your Bible or can’t find Mark chapter 15, it’ll be on the screen for you.

But once you have it, if you’d stand with me, we’re going to read together from God’s Word. Mark chapter 15, starting in verse 32. And this is the chief priests and scribes and Pharisees talking about, as they’re mocking Jesus on the cross.

And they said, let the Christ, the King of Israel, descend now from the cross that we may see and believe. And by the way, just reading through that, you kind of miss how snotty they’re being and how sarcastic they’re being. We might say, oh yeah, if he really is the Christ, let him come down now so we can believe.

You know, they’re mocking him. It says, even those who were crucified with him reviled him. There’s something wrong with these people.

They’re nailed to the cross too, and still they’re finding the time and energy to make fun of people. They’ve got their own problems, I would think. Verse 33 says, now when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.

And at the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, which is translated, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Some of those who stood by when they heard that said, look, he is calling for Elijah. Then Someone ran and filled a sponge full of sour wine, put it on a reed, and offered it to him to drink, saying, Let him alone.

Let us see if Elijah will come to take him down. And Jesus cried out with a loud voice and breathed his last. Then the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. So when the centurion who stood opposite him saw that he cried out like this and breathed his last, he said, Truly, this man was the Son of God.

There were also women looking on from afar. among whom were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the less and of Joseph, and Salome, who also followed him and ministered to him when he was in Galilee, and many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem. And you may be seated.

We’re going to stop there for this morning. We’re going to look at this, and we’re going to look at it in comparison a little bit with the record and the other Gospels. If you didn’t pick one up, there are my grids that I make each week as we compare the Gospels at these two doors here, so that you can see how the Gospels complement one another rather than contradict each other.

I get frustrated with this constant claim, oh, the Gospels contradict each other. I haven’t found where that is. I’ve been through them piece by piece, sometimes word by word.

I’m not saying there aren’t complicated areas, but there’s always an explanation. Sometimes you just have to look. I’ve given you those so you can compare these details and see how these accounts fit together.

But as we look at this, we see the moment where Jesus comes to his final breath and he breathes his last and he gives his life on the cross. These final moments of Jesus, and I say final moments, they’re not really his final moments, they’re just his final moments of his earthly ministry. Spoiler alert, he comes back, okay?

We’re going to look at that next week. He comes back. But these are the final moments of his earthly ministry.

This is the culmination of everything that he’s done. And this finale, if you will, these final moments are the most important, among the most important moments in history. And I would put the moment of the resurrection right up there as well.

But these moments have done more to change history than any other moments because of their earthly effects and because of what they mean to us in eternity. But let’s look briefly at what took place here. We see there in verse 32, the people are against Jesus.

They have turned against Jesus because of his claims to be God. The Pharisees, the scribes, the elders, the priests, they are all angry with Jesus. And they’re not angry.

Listen, listen, they’re not angry because Jesus came and taught us to be nice to each other. That’s not what they’re mad about. And if we today distill the message of Jesus down into just be nice to each other and love one another, that’s true as far as it goes, but that was not the meat of his message, and that is not what got him killed.

The focus of Jesus’ message was that he was God, he was God the Son, and he was the one and only way for us to be reconciled to the Father, and that’s what made them angry. That’s what will make people angry if we claim it today. They had turned against him because of his claims to be God, that’s why they’re mocking him on the cross.

Let the Christ, if he is the Christ, they’re not questioning his name. Okay, that’s a title. It means Messiah, what he claimed to be.

If he is the Messiah, let him come down and we’ll believe it. And even the others who were nailed to the cross alongside him mocked him. Luke tells us that one of the criminals who was hanged next to him blasphemed him saying, if you are the Christ, save yourself and us.

Now that might sound like a reasonable statement, a reasonable request. If you’re the Messiah, help us. Except Luke records that he said mocking way. He wasn’t asking for help.

Now Luke goes a step further and tells us about the other one who changed his mind midway and asked Jesus, Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom. He had no right to ask Jesus for forgiveness. He had no right to ask Jesus for his favor.

He had no right to ask for a place in the kingdom, but he cried out to Jesus and Jesus said, I tell you the truth today, you will be with me in paradise. But we see here that the people have turned against Jesus because of his claims to be God. Then in the next couple of verses, in verses 33 and 34, we see how the Father has turned away from Jesus because he bore man’s sins in himself.

There’s this moment where Paul talks about the one who knew no sin was made to be sin for us. Jesus had no sin. None.

Jesus was God in human flesh. You say, how is that possible that he didn’t sin. I can’t even get out of bed in the morning without having sinful attitudes.

And Jesus lived all these years with having no sin. It’s because he’s God in human flesh. God can do things that you and I can’t do.

And so he had never sinned. He had never experienced what it meant to sin and have sin in your account. And what that means is that we are separated from God because God is holy.

God is perfect. To the world that sounds harsh that God would keep us at arm’s length because of sin, because we might look at our own lives and say, well, it’s just a little sin. It’s nothing major.

How much garbage are you willing to have on your plate at the restaurant when you leave here today? It’s just a little bit. We would all send that back, right?

And probably leave. Our sin is offensive to God because it is a rejection and a repudiation of His nature and character. And so it’s offensive to God, and that sin puts a gulf of separation between us and a holy God.

And at this moment, that afternoon, during this time, the skies darken, and the darkening of the skies is a picture, it’s a visible image of God’s judgment that they would have seen and understood. And during that time is what Paul talks about, he became sin. Our sin was taken and put on him.

The responsibility for our sins was taken and put on him. So every time, if you recall last week, I talked about sin being idolatry at its root.

Every time that I have taken something that is not God or someone that is not God and put them on the place in my life that only God should occupy and only God deserves, whether I’m worshiping money, whether I’m worshiping power, whether I’m worshiping self, whatever it is that is not God that I’m putting ahead of God, every one of those things, every one of those moments where I have rejected God in my attitudes, in my behavior, in my thoughts, in my words, every one of those moments when I’ve rejected God and every one of those moments where you have rejected God, the responsibility for that was taken from us and was put squarely on Jesus Christ. And suddenly, now for the first time in eternity, God the Son experiences what it is like to have that fellowship with God the Father broken and experiences that separation.

And he cries out in anguish in fulfillment of the prophecy from Psalm chapter 22, verse 1. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? We sing songs about how the Father turned his face away.

It doesn’t mean that the Father rejected his son. It doesn’t mean that he stopped being the son. But it means in that moment our sin stood between them and Jesus felt for the first time what you and I experience every day when we feel like God is distant or that we’ve run too far from God.

Then we move on and the people continue to reject Jesus. At this point it’s become clear by the fact that he has taken responsibility for their sins and for our sins. He is dying.

He is clearly dying for our sins. They still didn’t understand that. We have the benefit of hindsight.

But even as it’s clear to us now that he’s dying for their sins and for ours, they continue to mock in verses 35 and 36. The irony here is that they continue to reject Jesus as he’s dying for their sake. He is giving them the greatest gift that anyone has ever given them or could ever give them.

And while he’s doing that, they are continuing to mock him. He’s calling out Eli or Eloi, depending on who records it. It’s a dialectical difference between Mark and Matthew.

It’s recorded here in Aramaic. And we also know from the Gospels that Jesus and the disciples apparently had a Galilean accent that the people in Jerusalem thought was funny. So I don’t know how much of this is them really misunderstanding, how much of them is how much of it is them making fun.

But as he cries out for Eloi, they mistake it or pretend to mistake it for Eliyahu, which is Elijah. And they begin to mock again. Listen to him.

He’s crying out for Elijah to come get him off the cross. There was a prophecy that Elijah would return that I think is referring to John the Baptist, but they missed that. They missed a lot of things when it came to prophecies.

There was also a tradition that people could call out to Elijah in times of need. And so they’re mocking. Part of the reason when he says, I’m thirsty and they offer him the drink, part of the reason why they give it to him is it says, let him be.

Let’s see if Elijah comes to rescue him. Let’s give him a little bit of liquid to keep him, to refresh him and keep him alive. And let’s just see what happens is their attitude.

He’s up there crying out to Elijah. Let’s just see if maybe Elijah comes and does something. They are still mocking.

Even as he, even as everything he is experiencing, even as everything they are inflicting on him, he is doing for them, because it’s their sin being punished. When Isaiah 53, when Isaiah writes about the crucifixion 700 years before it happened, and he says it is the will of God to crush him, it’s not because the father suddenly got mad at the son and said, you know what, I think I’ll be mean to him today. It’s his will to crush him because he’s punishing our sin.

So everything they’re inflicting on him is for their sake and yet they continued to mock. But we get to verse 37 and Jesus completed the sacrifice. He completed what he had come there to do.

He completed what they didn’t understand but had been his plan, his purpose in coming all along. It says in verse 37, Jesus cried out with a loud voice and breathed his last. Now that’s momentous enough that Jesus would cry out and he would draw his last breath. If you’ve ever been in the presence of someone when they’ve drawn their last breath, you know what a dramatic moment that can be sometimes.

Sometimes it can be subtle, but in many cases it’s a dramatic moment. Some of the other gospels go a step further in giving us more detail. Mark, being the first gospel written, he’s in a hurry.

Sometimes he gives us very short details of what happened, and he says immediately a lot. He’s just moving from one thing to the next to get it down on paper. Some of the other disciples come along later and fill in some of the details.

John is one of those who writes that one of the things Jesus said right before he died. It included in this final cry in John 19. 30, he cried out, it is finished, and then he died.

With his death, he accomplished everything he set out to do. He accomplished everything that was necessary for you and me to be reconciled to a holy God. And don’t miss what that word means as it is finished.

You know, sometimes we’ll do a project and we’ll say, well, it’s finished. It’s finished-ish. My chicken run is still finished, it’s finished, but we still need to go put some netting down along the back.

We’ve still got, you know, here we’ll work on things around the building and say, it’s good enough. You know, not like it’s going to cave in or anything like that. Just we’ll do that with projects.

The kids do that. Have you finished cleaning your room? Yes.

Wait, have you finished to your definition or to my definition or to mama’s definition? Because those are three different things. This is not finished in that sense.

Now, I’ve taught for years that this word, this Greek word, tetelestai, means paid in full because I read that somewhere that it was an accounting term. But when I went searching for it again, I couldn’t find any evidence of that. So I’m going to quit teaching that.

But it does come from a word that means the end, the stated goal, the telos. When Jesus said it is finished, he’s talking about he accomplished absolutely everything he intended to do. He met the goal. He completed the task.

It’s done. It’s not done enough. It’s not done-ish.

It’s not done to within an acceptable margin of error. It’s not done to the extent that mama doesn’t look behind things. It’s done.

Everything that needed to be done, all the payment that needed to be made, all the punishment that needed to be born, all the sacrifice that needed to be offered to fulfill God’s justice and keep God’s holiness intact while purchasing our forgiveness of sins, everything that was required to accomplish all of that was done. Three little words in English, one big word in Greek, it is finished, but it says so much, it was all done. And so often the question is, well, now what do I need to do?

He did it. Believe what he said. He accomplished everything that necessary for us to be right with God.

And then we come to verse 38 and verse 39, and we see that the Father accepted the sacrifice. Because honestly, from a skeptical point of view, anybody could die and say it’s finished. I could die and tell you I was dying for your sins, but they saw evidence of this.

People in Jerusalem, not just the disciples, they saw evidence of this when the the veil in the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. And we’re not talking a little lacy curtain thing. We’re talking big, heavy fabric, a tapestry.

The temple represented the presence of God among his people. If you wanted to go worship God in a significant way, you would go to the temple. If you wanted to make offerings to be right with God temporarily, you would go to the temple.

But in their understanding, the presence of God was really symbolized by the Holy of Holies. The Holy of Holies was separated from everything else in the temple by this heavy curtain, this veil. And only the high priest could enter into the Holy of Holies, and only at certain times and for certain reasons.

For ordinary people like you and me, there was always a separation between us and God. And yet at the moment that Jesus Christ died, that curtain in the temple was torn in two. That means the Holy of Holies was thrown open, and it was torn from top to bottom, because it wasn’t man that threw the Holy of Holies open.

It was God himself. Because he accepted the sacrifice of Jesus Christ as the only possible payment for our sins. And then we see there in verse 39 that some people who had been on the fence actually started to believe.

As this centurion says, this man was the son of God. And as you read it there in Greek, I think it would be, it fits the text and probably his understanding better to say a son of God. That doesn’t mean that I believe Jesus is one of many.

But the Romans, keep in mind, did not have the same one God idea that we have. What I’m saying here is I think the centurion, he may not have understood everything that we understand about who Jesus is. But I think the centurion is standing there looking and saying, I think we got this wrong.

This guy claimed to be God. This guy claimed to be divine. That was the whole thing of the conversation with Pilate.

Are you a threat to the emperor’s claims to be a son of the divine? I think Jesus might actually be whatever he claimed to be. Did the centurion understand the whole gospel?

I don’t know. But the centurion watching these things recognizes that Jesus is more than the crowd thought he was. That there’s something spiritual, there’s something supernatural going on here that he couldn’t explain.

And we see here in these final moments, these crucial moments of history, that God was at work even when people didn’t see it. You see, the crowds had just cordoned God off from the whole thing. They’re just having a good time putting to death somebody they didn’t like.

But there’s really God at work. We see this in the darkness that covered the land for three hours. And people will tell you, oh, that couldn’t have happened because it’s impossible to have a solar eclipse during Passover.

True. That’s true. The Bible nowhere says it was a solar eclipse.

There was darkness. There’s all sorts of things that can cause the sky to grow dark. I mean, we live in Tornado Alley.

We’ve seen the sky get dark in the middle of the day, right? But for it to get dark for those three hours leading up to the death of Jesus was a definite picture of God’s judgment. God’s judgment on sin as it was placed on Jesus Christ. God’s judgment on Israel.

God’s judgment on this whole scene. He was active. We see in verse 38, the veil is torn.

That is a direct action of God. There’s nobody in the Jewish temple that would have gone and torn that veil for fear of being stoned to death. Nobody.

That was God tearing the temple from top to bottom, giving us the freedom to enter into his presence. That’s why the Bible tells us that because of Jesus, we are able to come boldly before the throne of grace. Imagine the audacity of walking into the throne room of God and saying, I’m here.

Here I am, Lord. But we’re able to do that, not because we’re good and deserve it, not because we did anything to earn it, but because Jesus paid for it. Now we can come before our Father.

We don’t have to have an appointment. We don’t have to call first. We don’t have to knock first. We have access to the Father because Jesus paid for it. And there’s an interesting little detail in Matthew 27 where the graves shook open at the moment that Jesus breathed his last. And Matthew compresses the story a little bit.

We may talk about this some next week. I believe that he’s not telling it in chronological order, but in thematic order, keeping the whole story together. So I believe the graves shook open at the moment of Jesus’ death, and I believe when he rose again, some of the dead saints got up and started walking around.

But the fact that these graves are shaking open, the earth began to shake violently, and the graves opened up at the moment of Jesus’ death foreshadowed the fact that Jesus was going to come back and conquer death on the third day. We see God at work. We have the benefit of hindsight to see God at work.

They didn’t want to see it, and so they missed it. But the most important thing that we need to see out of these moments is that Jesus accomplished his mission. He accomplished what he set out to do, which was our forgiveness, whether the crowds approved of it or not.

whether the crowds were in agreement or not. And I noticed for the first time, be very careful when somebody tells you that, okay? I don’t pretend I’m the first one who’s ever noticed this.

This is not a new thing that nobody’s ever seen in 2,000 years. This is something that I’ve never noticed before. But going back over this again this week, I noticed how this passage is bookended by two different views of belief.

The priests said, we’ll believe if you do what? What did they say? Back in verse 32, come down off the cross.

If you’ll come down off the cross and show us how strong you are and show us how in charge you are, if you’ll do this parlor trick, then we’ll believe. By the way, no, they wouldn’t. They did this all the time with Jesus.

He’d done numerous miracles. He had even raised people from the dead. And they kept saying, well, if you’ll do this, we’ll believe.

No, because you’ve already seen all this other stuff. You have the scriptures that testify to me. You just don’t want to believe.

He said the ultimate sign you’ll get is the sign of Jonah. He’s talking about the resurrection. If you won’t believe that, you won’t believe anything.

Guess what? They didn’t believe, many of them. Some of them did.

But for many in the crowd, this was just a matter of not wanting to believe who Jesus is. Because if Jesus is who he claims to be, then what he says is true, what he says about us and our sin is true, what he says about God’s holiness is true, what he says about our need for forgiveness is true, and we in our flesh don’t like those demands being put on us. The crowd was saying, come down off the cross and we’ll believe.

The centurion’s response, though, in verse 39, was to look at the way he died and believe. Jesus didn’t prove himself to be God by coming down off the cross. And Jesus doesn’t have to do whatever test we put him to today in order to prove who he is.

He proved who he is. He gave us all the evidence we need with his death and resurrection. And so for us today, the answer is not to look at this and say, well, if he would do this, I hear people today say, well, if he would put a neon sign, Jesus saves up in the sky, I’d believe, no, you wouldn’t.

No, let’s be honest, you wouldn’t because he’s given us his resurrection. He has conquered death. There are historically verifiable reasons to believe that this man was crucified and came back to life three days later.

What he did is there for anybody who has eyes to see and wants to see it. Even the centurion, even one of the men responsible for putting him to death, looked at this and said, okay, I think he was telling the truth. We just have to be willing to take an honest look at what he said and what he did.

What he did was to die on the cross to pay for our sins in full. If your idea this morning is to try to get right with God, try to overcome that separation by being good, it’s good to be good, but it’s not going to get you there. If your idea is I’ll go to church and God will love me and accept me, it doesn’t work that way.

I mean, we’re glad you’re here. Hope you come back. but coming and sitting in this room isn’t earning points with God toward a relationship with him giving money going through religious rituals being kind to people none of these things are going to make us right with God because they don’t address the root of the problem which was our sin but in Jesus Christ our sin was laid on him and punished in him so that our slate could be wiped clean so that we could be forgiven and he rose again three days later to prove it all that’s left for you to do is to believe that he is who he claimed to be, that he paid for our sins like he said.

He rose again to prove it and ask his forgiveness, and you’ll have it.