When we understand what Jesus truly suffered, we have a more accurate understanding of both the ugliness of our sin and the cost of God’s grace to save us from it.

Well, in just two weeks, we’ll be celebrating the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday morning together. There are two things that I cannot stress to you enough about this. The first is that Easter is a fantastic time to invite a friend to come to church who may not know the Lord. While it’s true that fewer non-Christians feel comfortable attending church services, Easter Sunday still holds some sway in our culture, and I can assure you that that morning will be both thoroughly biblical, as we always strive to be, but will also be welcoming to those who don’t yet know Jesus. So, invite your friends. And the second thing is, please, please remember that the service is not here. Please remember this. We will not be in this building. We will be at John Marshall High School and the service is at 10 a.m. We don’t even have a service at ten. It’s not 9:30. It’s not 11 like it is right now. Okay? It’s at 10 a.m.. Come early. Come at 9 a.m. there will be cinnamon rolls and sticky buns. That’s how special this is. It’s a two-pastry morning. It’s an Easter miracle. Okay, but it will not be happening here. This building will be as empty as the tomb. Okay, so you’re going to get to celebrate Easter, just not in the way you want, right? So set an alarm on your phone, put a sticky note on your steering wheel and bring a friend Easter Sunday morning.

All right. Two days before that, we will be here for our Good Friday services. And I really want to encourage you to come and worship the Lord with us that night. Because, of course, the only reason that we can celebrate Jesus victorious resurrection victory over death was because he was willing to endure death in the first place. And we’re going to gather that night to commune with our Lord, who became a sacrificial lamb, who was led to the slaughter on our behalf. And this morning, in God’s providential timing, we have come to the place in the Gospel of Luke, where Jesus foretells his death and resurrection to his disciples for a third time. Now, Jesus has alluded to his death in a few places throughout the book. For example, in Luke 12, he mentions his distress over his coming baptism, which is a reference to the cross. In Luke 17, and at Passover in Luke 22, Jesus mentions the suffering that he will have to endure. But there have been two times in this book, two other times prior to this, when Jesus took his disciples aside and he gave them insight into the cross, insight into what will happen in Jerusalem. And both of those mentions are in Luke chapter nine. Peter gets done confessing that Jesus is the Christ of God, the Anointed One, sent by the Father to save God’s people, and Jesus responds by telling them not to tell anybody yet.

And then he explains that he has to first be rejected and killed before he could be raised to life. That’s Luke chapter nine, verses 21 and 22. Just down the page from that, in verse 44, Jesus says, let these words sink into your ears. The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men. But it says that the disciples didn’t understand that, and they were too afraid to ask any questions. Neither of those passages goes into any detail of what will happen to Jesus. The most that we get is that he will suffer many things and be killed. Our passage this morning is the first time Jesus gives details about what is going to happen to him once he reaches Jerusalem. And it’s awful. It’s awful. The anger of the religious elite finally reaches a boiling point, and they use the Roman authorities to carry out the murder of Jesus. The way the Romans punished criminals was meant to deter other criminals. And so their methods are both public and brutal. They perfected their torture skills to inflict the most possible pain on their victim. Now, because Jesus tells this to the disciples, and because the disciples would have understood the details of what he’s talking about, I’m going to share with you details of what Jesus is describing. And it’s unpleasant. I don’t enjoy sharing the details of violence, but there are times when the raw truth can’t be avoided and the details matter.

You know, one of the reasons that Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ, had such a profound impact on culture 20 years ago was that it presented the cross with brutal realism, as it actually was, not in the slicked up, sanitized way that Hollywood usually depicts it. If you see a picture of Jesus with a crown of thorns on his head and a single drop of blood coming down his otherwise untouched face, you are not seeing the truth. So I’m going to say some things that are difficult for the squeamish this morning, but we need to know what Jesus really endured because he endured it for us. When we understand what Jesus truly suffered, we have a more accurate understanding of both the ugliness of our sin and the cost of God’s grace to save us from it. We’re in Luke chapter 18, verses 31 to 34 this morning. We’re going to walk through the details in five parts, beginning with Jesus reference to Old Testament prophecy concerning his suffering. And then we’ll look at humiliation, pain, death and resurrection. Here’s how it begins. And taking the 12, he said to them, see, we are going up to Jerusalem. And everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. The best way to understand the Old Testament is by understanding it the way Jesus understood it. Later, in Luke chapter 24, after his resurrection, Jesus will explain to two disciples who are walking home from the events that they just witnessed in Jerusalem on the day of Jesus resurrection, that all that they saw was a fulfillment of their own Hebrew scriptures.

It says he took them on a journey through the Bible. Wouldn’t you love to have been there? As Jesus takes these two guys on this journey to understanding their scriptures as he understands them, showing them that what they just witnessed was predicted. They just hadn’t put together yet, that God’s promises and pictures of the coming Messiah in a way that would show them Jesus. They just. They hadn’t done that piece yet. And that’s what he gives to them. And that’s how we should understand our Old Testament. Jesus and the good news of his kingdom is the interpretive key, because everything throughout all of history leading up to him, was preparation for him. So when Jesus turns to his disciples and says, okay, guys, we’re almost to Jerusalem, and everything that the prophets said will happen is about to happen. This should not be a surprise to the disciples. It might be confusing to them, but it shouldn’t surprise them. Peter has already confessed his belief that Jesus is the Christ of God, as I mentioned before. So they know Jesus is the one that they’ve been waiting for from the Hebrew Bible. But what they don’t yet grasp is that the Messiah who will reign as king, is also the suffering servant sent to take away the sins of God’s people.

They haven’t put those pictures together yet. They don’t know Jesus is the fulfillment of the sacrificial system. They know he’s the fulfillment of the Davidic king promise, but not yet of the sacrifices. They’re not yet including scriptures that show the reason that God came to be with us as a man. Emmanuel. Jesus is preparing them here for that. They’re about to see the full picture of the Messiah as the prophets foretold. Remember Genesis 3:15, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. So Satan is told he will be crushed by the descendant of the woman. But in the process, the descendant will be bitten by the poisonous snake. So killing Satan will deal a fatal blow to the very heel that defeats him. The method by which Satan is destroyed will destroy the destroyer. Remember Exodus 12. Your lamb shall be without blemish. A male a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats, and you shall keep it until the 14th day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight. Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts, and on the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.

So the Lord provides a way for his people to escape the coming death. He gives them a lamb and the lamb’s blood goes on the door. It covers the household in this way. Every member of the house then eats the lamb inside the house obediently, and by receiving God’s plan for mercy and grace, his people are saved. Remember Isaiah 52:13 and 15: behold, my servant will act wisely. He shall be high and lifted up,and shall be exalted. As many were astonished at you. His appearance was so marred beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind, so shall he sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths because of him. For that which has not been told them they see, and that which they have not heard, they understand. So God’s servant will be so exalted above the kings of the earth, right? But he will also be so beat up and marred that his physical body will no longer resemble a human being. Remember Isaiah 53, which I’m going to read this morning in full. And as I’m reading this, see if you can pick out why people throughout the history of the church have called Isaiah the gospel of the Old Testament. Who has believed what he has heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground.

He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way. And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and he was afflicted. Yet he opened not his mouth like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent. So he opened not his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away. And as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him.

He has put him to grief. When his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offering. He shall prolong his days. The will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied. By his knowledge shall the righteous One, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many. And he shall divide the spoil with the strong. Because he poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors, yet he bore the sin of many and makes intercession for the transgressors. So when Jesus says he’s going to go to Jerusalem and fulfill all the prophets said would happen, this is what he’s talking about. He’s going to be numbered with the transgressors to intercede for the transgressors. Do you know what that means, church? He’s going to die like a criminal at the hands of sinners to save those very sinners. He’s going to be led like a lamb to slaughter. And he’s not going to open up his mouth and defend himself. Because if he did, they couldn’t kill him, and he would fail in his mission to save people who hate him. He’s going to endure so much suffering at the hands of the people that he’s saving, that they won’t even recognize him as a human being when they’re done with him.

And he’s going to go to Jerusalem willingly. Nobody’s making Jesus go to Jerusalem. He’s going there because it’s the will of the Lord to crush him. This is God’s plan. The process of crucifixion is designed to bring about humiliation, pain, and death. And this all happens throughout the humiliation and the pain. It happens throughout the process leading up to death. But we’re going to look at this in the order that Jesus presents it here in our passage. The first is humiliation, for he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. The Pharisees and the Sadducees were the first to humiliate Jesus. They held an unjust sham trial. They beat him and they put a blindfold on him and then they told him to prophesy who was beating him, mocking him. And then they wanted Jesus crucified, but they didn’t have the authority to carry out a legal execution under Roman rule and so they needed the Romans to do it. This is why Jesus is handed over to the Gentiles. They said Jesus claimed to be a king, which sounds like an insurrectionist to Rome. So they needed him to be a criminal under a Roman crime, a Roman sentence, and so insurrection would have been punishable by death. Pilate tries to sort all of this out. He’s doubtful, but he kills Jesus anyway.

We’ll get to that when we get to those passages. The key to mentioning the Gentiles or the non-Jews here in the passage is that it’s their methods that will be used to kill Jesus. Jesus is not going to be stoned in the street, for instance. That’d be a way that the Jewish community might do it, but they’re not the ones carrying it out. He’s going to be subjected to Roman crucifixion, which means he will be publicly humiliated. The Romans use crucifixion to dehumanize criminals. It was way more than just physical brutality. It was emotional brutality. It was a punishment so demeaning that you were exempt from it if you were a Roman citizen or if you were rich and they liked you. You were exempt from it then. It was reserved for the lower-class people, slaves, foreigners, people who committed treason. In Jesus case, it was so shameful to be crucified that the very mention of it was considered humiliating. Not even having it done, just mentioning it to somebody as a possibility would be humiliating. There was a Roman senator named Rabirius who was threatened with crucifixion, and his defender Cicero said this quote, the very word cross should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen, but his thoughts, his eyes and his ears. Shouldn’t even be talked about with a Roman citizen. Why was this so dishonoring? Why was it so shameful? Well, they would parade the criminals through the streets, making them carry their cross on their back, and the people of the city would come out and jeer him and taunt the person that was convicted.

The soldiers would write the name of the criminal and his crime on the sign, and they would nail it above his head. For Jesus they wrote King of the Jews. In Jesus case they then put a crown of thorns on his head and a robe on him to make fun of his false reign. Nearly everyone who was crucified was stripped naked. Now we don’t depict Jesus this way because of modesty, which is fine, but we should know that there was nothing modest about what they did to Jesus. Remember church? They cast lots to see who would get to keep his clothing. And when the Romans put criminals on display, they did it in such a way as to maximize the the mental and emotional toil. Now, this didn’t happen to Jesus, but in some cases they would line the roads, when they would conquer a city, they would take all the inhabitants out of the city and they would line the roads leading to that city with the crucified inhabitants of that city. One Roman official explained, he said, quote, the most crowded roads are chosen where the most people can see and be moved by this fear. It was like a billboard of fear for the entire community.

They would sometimes kill the crucified man’s family in front of him while he hung on the cross. And I tell you this because the mocking and shaming of Jesus wasn’t just out of cruelty. It had a purpose. The Romans intended to destroy Jesus credibility as king. They demanded absolute loyalty. There were to be no other kings, no other gods above Caesar. And to make that case, they didn’t want to just kill Jesus, they wanted to debase him. So that any person that might even be tempted to follow him as a king would be to their shame. They wanted to say, if you follow Jesus, you’re following a shameful king. Isaiah said, Kings shall shut their mouths because of him. They will, but not yet. This was their attempt to shut Jesus mouth, to erase any inclination someone might have to follow him. That’s the humiliation. And then there’s the pain. And after flogging him, Roman flogging, or scourging was sometimes used as a punishment on its own. When it was used in conjunction with crucifixion, it had two functions. Its main role was to maximise the pain of the entire process. So everything that happens within crucifixion was magnified in pain was far worse, with your whole body covered in wounds. But the other thing that it did was that it made death on the cross happen more quickly. As I’ll explain here in just a moment, crucifixion by itself is a lengthy process, and flogging sped the process along by inducing a shock blood loss.

See, the guards had to stay with the crucified criminals until they died, and so they were incentivized to move things along so it would take hours instead of days. Flogging is done by taking a leather whip. It’s got many, many strands of leather on this whip. And what they’d do is they would tie iron balls or bits of bone or other hard materials into the strands. Then the prisoner would be tied to a post, his bare back would be exposed and the whip would be slashed against the skin, lacerating the flesh just turning it into ribbons. One article I read that was written by Mayo doctors back in the 80s said that this whipping wouldn’t just tear the flesh, but it would rip down to the muscles. It would actually rip muscles off the bone. Jewish law limited the lashes to 39. They called it the 40 minus one. But the Romans didn’t have those rules. They could go on as long as they liked. And given the description of the Messiah from Isaiah as being brutalized to the point of no longer appearing human, Jesus flogging must have been especially terrible. Thorns were then forced onto his head, and a robe, as I mentioned before, was placed over his open wounds. Now putting this material on him and then tearing it off of him would have been excruciating. Think of pulling a Band-Aid off of yourself before your wound is completely healed.

And now imagine that your whole body is covered in wounds, and the wounds go all the way to your bones. Then they made him carry his cross. Probably just the horizontal crossbeam. The vertical crossbeam usually would be out where the execution was taking place. To carry that beam after being beaten nearly to death would have been almost impossible. And it proved to be because another guy eventually had to take over. Simon of Cyrene was forced to pick up Jesus cross for him. This was not the soldiers doing Jesus any favors. The soldiers didn’t do favors. Clearly, it was impossible for Jesus to carry it anymore. He had reached complete physical failure. And when they finally got to the site, they nailed him to the wood beams. They didn’t have to. They didn’t have to nail him. Criminals could just as easily be tied to the cross. The method of death would be exactly the same if you were tied to the cross. And so often they did it that way. But by using the nails, fiery pain would shoot through the victim’s arms and legs as they writhed on the cross for however many hours or days it took to die. And of course, the time on the cross itself. Approaching death was the worst part of this. They will kill him. The Jewish historian Josephus, who had watched countless crucifixions, called it, quote, the most wretched of deaths. There was no fixed pattern to crucifixion.

You could be tied to a stake with your arms at your side. You could be turned upside down. Josephus was describing what the Romans did to a certain city when they were crucifying the people out on the street, and he said he just he says this, quote, the soldiers themselves, through rage and bitterness, nailed up their victims in different postures as a grim joke. The stoic philosopher Seneca made the case for why any death would be better than crucifixion. Listen to this description. Can any man be found willing to be fastened to the accursed tree. Long, sickly, already deformed, swelling with ugly wheels on shoulders and chest. And drawing the breath of life amid long, drawn out agony. He would have many excuses for dying even before mounting the cross. I find it ironic that Seneca asks the rhetorical question can any man be found willing to go to the cross? Expecting a no answer to that. Of course there was one man. There are basically two ways you can die on a cross: blood loss or asphyxiation. You either die of your wounds or you die because you can’t breathe anymore. And crucifixion is designed for the latter. It’s designed to choke you to death. By hanging there, it becomes more difficult to breathe. And so to get air in and out of your lungs, you have to push up your body, push up your body to open up the airways to so that the air can come in.

And so really, how you die, what you’re fighting is gravity. Crucifixion kills you by gravity. To extend the cruelty, the Romans would put a small wooden peg on the vertical beam as a seat. And you think, well, that seems nice. Except no, it’s designed to prolong. It’s designed to make it a little bit easier to push up so that the death will last longer. The victim would then push up on the seat to get enough clearance to breathe, but eventually he would run out of strength to do that. He’d no longer be able to endure the pain of pushing up on nailed hands and feet, and the posture of his body would cause him to suffocate. And if that process took too long, the soldiers would eventually come along and break the legs of the victim so that he couldn’t push up anymore. That’s the death that’s waiting for Jesus in Jerusalem. That’s what he’s willingly walking to. Church I know it is hard to hear these things, but we need to remember what it really meant for our Savior to go to the cross. Now, there is no problem with wearing a cross on your neck as a necklace, or printing it on a t shirt, or imprinting it on your Bible, or putting it on your wall. Directly behind me is the largest cross in this building. The cross was chosen by the early church as a symbol of our faith in Jesus, not because of what it is, but because of what Jesus accomplished on it.

With his wounds we are healed. With his wounds we are healed. Think of that imagery from Isaiah. Healing requires prior damage, doesn’t it? We are healed by what he did. That means we were damaged before. Prior to Christ. Our souls are shameful, brutalized, dead. Jesus took these wounds. He bore that shame. He died that death not because he deserved it, but because by doing so, we are restored. We are healed. When we sanitize the cross, when we forget its horrors, we lessen the horror we should have for our own sin, and we lose the awestruck joy and appreciation that we should have for our Savior. Jesus Christ willingly walked to Jerusalem knowing that the nightmare of crucifixion waited for him because he knew the nightmare that awaited us if he didn’t. And he knew that even though the shame and pain of the cross would kill him, that would not be his end. And on the third day, he will rise. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the reason that we celebrate any of the things about his death that I have described this morning. I mean, think about it, church. Think about this. If Jesus hadn’t risen from the dead, would we even know his name? He would just be one of the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who died nameless on a cross in the first century.

We just took a fairly detailed look at crucifixion. It’s the most shameful thing that could possibly have happened to him in the first century. These disciples, they’re all going to abandon him because they don’t want to be associated with him, because they’re aware of the implications of the crucifixion that we’ve been looking at. That’s why I was so detailed this morning. We need to see it through their eyes. We often get too far away from what it really was. We need to see it through their eyes. We need to hear it the way they would have heard it. A crucified king, a crucified king is an oxymoron in their culture. Doesn’t make sense. A crucified rabbi in Jewish law, to be hung on a tree is a sign that you have been cursed by God. You’re not going to follow a publicly shamed, dead, cursed rabbi. You’re not going to do that. But you would follow a king, Savior and Lord who rose from the dead. You would follow him. Jesus knew the plan. Death would hold us. It could not hold him. If we die in our sins, we simply go on to eternal punishment. But if God Himself, Jesus Christ, becomes a man and he takes the punishment for our sins into his own body, and he dies in our place, death is not his end. And when we trust in Christ, when our souls are restored to wholeness because Jesus took their brokenness, we know we will be raised to life someday, too.

And I bet you can guess. The disciples did not understand this, but they understood none of these things. The saying was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said. We shouldn’t be too hard on these guys, because this is the second time we’re told that it’s not possible yet for them to understand this. The timing is not right. God prevents the disciples at this point from being able to understand what is about to happen in Jerusalem. And so of course, we ask, well, then why tell them why? Why tell the disciples if God is preventing them from understanding it? Well, it’s because it’s for afterward. He’s telling them now so that when they see his resurrected body, they will remember that this was always God’s plan. This isn’t just something that’s going to happen to Jesus. This isn’t just a tragic accident. This isn’t just injustice. This was God’s plan all along. See, they’re all going to fail in the moment to stand with Jesus. But after the resurrection, the cross will become the cornerstone of their theology, and they’ll be emboldened to live lives shaped by the cross because they know that it’s God’s plan for them to live this way, just like it was for Jesus. I want you to listen. Listen to the apostle Peter. This is from his first letter. This is chapter two, verses 21 to 25. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example so that you might follow in his steps.

He committed no sin. Neither was deceit found in his mouth when he was reviled he did not revile in return. When he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep. But now have now returned to the shepherd and overseer of your souls. Do you see what he’s. Do you see what he’s saying here? Church? He’s saying that our lives should be cruciform, that they should look like the cross that Jesus bore for us. This is Peter writing this. This is a man who denied Jesus three times and ran away to safety. He is now telling us, Jesus did this for us. He did this for us. He bore our sins, and he set us free from the power of sin so that we can live in righteousness before our Savior. He’s bought us with what he did on that cross. Church, I’d like to invite you to stand as I close in prayer. Let’s all stand together in honor of what Jesus has done for us on the cross, for the brutal death that he was willing to die for us. Let us never take for granted what Jesus endured in his body to set us free. Let’s pray.

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