The Road to the Cross 2: The King Who Gives His Life

This podcast is brought to you by Walnut Grove Lutheran Church in Langley, D.C., in the hope that it will draw you closer to the one who loves you most.

Brent Chapman was blind for more than two decades until last year.

And then Dr.

Greg Maloney and a medical team from the University of British Columbia performed for the first time in Canada a surgery that's called tooth-in-eye surgery.

And what surgeons do in this particular surgery is they take a tooth out of the patient's eye and they drill a hole in the tooth and they place a lens in that tooth and then reinsert it, stitch it in to their damaged eye.

And they use the tooth because that's the heart, one of the hardest substances that the human body produces, and so it can hold that lens securely.

And now Brent has 230 vision in his one eye.

And he's able to see and do things that he has been able to do for many, many years.

And when Brent and Dr.

Maloney first made eye contact, they both burst into tears at the sight of each other.

In an interview with CNN, Dr.

Maloney said, it's like watching people come out of a time capsule and reintroduce themselves to the world.

It's highly emotional for us.

To have physical sight restored like this is amazing.

One could even say it's almost miraculous, but it's very rare.

However, there is a way that human sight can be restored, and it can be almost as amazing, and yet it's possible for anyone.

And what I'm talking about is those times, maybe you've had this happen, where you thought that things were one particular way and you lived your life according to how you understood things, and then you get a flash of insight, and you realize that things are actually very, very different from the way that you thought that they were.

You begin to see things in a new way.

And that causes you to live and function in a totally new way as well.

Now, as life-changing as these flashes of insight are, we cannot make them happen.

They seem to somehow come from outside of us.

And yet they don't seem to be random at all.

They tend to come to us in moments of crisis when we need them the most.

And some people are more likely to receive these flashes of insight than others.

Two people can go through exactly the same situation at the same time, and one sees through that experience, sees things in a new way, and the other one doesn't.

So the question I'm asking you to think about today is how can we be people who are more likely to see things as they really are and live accordingly?

And to help us answer this question, we're going to look at a passage from the Bible, Mark 15, verses 21 to 39.

Mark 15:21–39

And if so, if you have a Bible or a Bible app, I invite you to turn there now, if you would like.

And as we open this passage, what we see is Jesus is carrying the beam of his own cross to the place of his execution.

And weakened by the trauma and loss of blood from being flogged, Jesus collapses, too weak to carry on.

And so the soldiers that are escorting him force someone from the crowd, Simon of Cyrene, who is likely a pilgrim in Jerusalem for the Passover, and they force Simon to carry that bean for Jesus.

And when they got to the execution site, known as Golgotha, the place of the skull, they offered Jesus wine mixed with myrrh to deaden the pain that would soon be coming.

But Jesus refused.

He wanted to have all of his faculties for the experience that lay ahead.

Mark leaves out the gory details and only tells us this: it was nine in the morning when they crucified him.

But people in his own time would have clearly understood what he meant with these words.

Jesus was stripped of his clothing.

Wrought iron nails were hammered through his arms above his wrists.

Jesus hung then suspended from the crossbeam as it was hoisted up and fastened to the vertical pole that was waiting in the ground.

Jesus' legs were then turned sideways, and a single large spike was driven through his ankles.

When he hung by his arms, the pain was excruciating and he couldn't breathe.

When he tried to push himself up to catch a breath, he experienced more incredible pain from his feet.

Crucifixion is perhaps the most horrible way for a human being to die.

Jesus' crime was posted on a sign and hung over his head.

King of the Jews, it said.

The Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, was trolling the Jewish leaders who brought Jesus to him for capital punishment.

And yet the words on the sign were true.

Jesus was the King of the Jews.

He's the King of the world.

Many of the people present that day mocked Jesus, including the chief priests and the teachers of the law.

He saved others, they said, but he can't save himself.

Let this Messiah, this king of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe.

These words were spoken in derision, but there was truth in what they said, even though the speakers were blind to it.

Jesus really was the Messiah, the King of Israel.

And if Jesus was truly going to save others, then he couldn't save himself.

He had to remain on that cross and suffer for the sins of the whole world.

Asking Jesus to come down from the cross was impossible if he was going to save the world.

Around noon, darkness came over the whole land for three hours, and the mocking appears to cease.

Now this could not be a solar eclipse because Jesus' crucifixion happened at Passover.

And a full moon marks the beginning of Passover.

And a solar eclipse cannot happen during a full moon, for at such times the moon is on the opposite side of the earth from the sun.

So though it may have been a sandstorm or some other kind of meteorological event that caused the darkness, the timing suggests that the darkness indicates that God the Father was pouring out his judgment for all sin on Jesus as he hung on the cross.

Jesus continued to suffer.

And then suddenly things changed.

At about three in the afternoon, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, lemas sabakani, which means, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

After drinking some sour wine from a sponge to quench his terrible thirst, Jesus uttered a loud cry, then gave up his life.

And John tells us the words that Jesus cried, it is finished.

And in that moment, the thick curtain that separated God's people from the holy of holies in the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.

With the death of Jesus, the barrier between God and humanity was gone.

And the only one, the only one to recognize what God was doing was the Gentile Roman soldier in charge of executing Jesus.

He saw what the religious leaders and people did not.

Mark tells us, and when the centurion who stood there in front of Jesus saw how he died, he said, Surely this man was a son of God.

Now, why couldn't people see things as they really were?

Especially the people who had all of the history with God that the Jewish people did.

Well, psychologists tell us that one thing that can prevent people from seeing things as they really are is something called a cognitive bias.

And a cognitive bias means we interpret information through the lens of our own experiences and beliefs.

And these mental shortcuts help us to make decisions quickly, which is good.

But it can also lead to misinterpretations, which cause us to take actions which are contrary to what is good, right, and true.

Now, in this passage in Mark's gospel, most of the people around the cross are blinded by a particular cognitive bias called confirmation bias.

And confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret events in a way that confirms what we already believe while ignoring evidence that would support a contradictory view.

Now, the dominant worldview of that time was that comfort and prosperity indicated God's favor and blessing, while suffering and failure were signs of God's disapproval and rejection.

Now, based on that worldview, as Jesus hung on the cross, the interpretation on people's minds was this if he were truly God's Son, he would not be suffering like this.

And their interpretation was reflected in their actions.

The chief priests mocked him.

He saved others, they said, but he can't save himself.

The crowd demanded a miracle as proof.

So, you who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself.

The soldiers treated him as a failed king.

Even the criminals crucified with Jesus joined in the derision.

And because the people there that day already believed that Jesus was a fraud, then his suffering became proof of his phoniness in their eyes.

And Jesus crying, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

exposes their blindness.

They think he's calling for Elijah.

But this is not a misunderstanding of language.

This is a theological misunderstanding.

They cannot imagine that God could be present in suffering, so they cannot see that Jesus is praying Psalm 22, the prayer of the righteous sufferer.

The tearing of the temple curtain is further proof that nearly all of the people around Jesus' cross that day misinterpreted what was happening.

You see, the tearing of the curtain is God's commentary on the events of Golgotha.

For the torn curtain means that God is present in Jesus' suffering.

God is opening access to him, not withdrawing it.

And God is at work in a powerful way, precisely at the center of where human beings see only failure.

Only one person saw things as they really were.

The centurion.

He had likely seen hundreds of crucifixions, but he had never seen anything like the crucifixion of Jesus.

Jesus didn't curse his executioners, he forgave them.

Jesus didn't rage as he suffered, he prayed.

Where the crowd viewed Jesus as a failure, this Roman soldier saw incredible faith, dignity, and self-giving love.

Where the chief priest saw a fraudster getting properly punished, the centurion saw an innocent man dying a death he did not deserve.

As a Gentile, the centurion was not invested in Jewish religious debates.

He had psychological distance, which enabled him to be more objective.

Startled by the darkness in Jesus' final cry, the centurion's eyes were opened to see what was before him, and he declared, surely this man was the Son of God.

Now Mark is showing us that the difference between blindness and sight is not intelligence, education, or religious background.

It is the lens through which we interpret suffering.

If we assume that suffering means God is absent, then we will miss him and what he is doing.

But if our assumptions are broken open, if we are willing to believe that God is present in the very places we least expect him to be, then the cross becomes not a scandal, but a revelation.

The centurion becomes the first human being in Mark's gospel to confess Jesus as the Son of God at the moment of his death.

The place of greatest suffering became the place of greatest clarity.

This is where the story meets our lives.

Many of us carry a quiet, hidden narrative that shapes how we interpret our own suffering.

And it often sounds like this.

If I were doing better spiritually, this wouldn't be happening to me.

If I were stronger and more faithful, more disciplined, God would bless me.

If life is painful, then God must be disappointed in me.

We rarely say these things out loud, but they live inside of us.

And when suffering comes, illness, grief, conflict, depression, financial strain, as it inevitably does, this quiet narrative becomes the lens through which we see everything.

But the cross tells us that this narrative is false.

Jesus suffers not because God is displeased with him, but because God is accomplishing his greatest work through him.

Ultimately, the cross is not a sign of divine rejection.

It is the place where God's love is revealed most clearly.

And if that is true for Jesus, then it is also true for those who belong to him.

And that includes all of you.

Your suffering is not a sign that God has abandoned you.

Your pain is not a verdict.

Your weakness is not a failure.

The cross tells you that God is present with you in the very places where you assume He is absent.

The centurion saw God in a place of suffering.

And the invitation is for us to let the cross of Jesus Christ reshape the way we see our own lives.

Instead of interpreting suffering as a sign of God's displeasure, we can, with Jesus, begin to see it as a place where God meets us, holds us, and works in ways we cannot yet understand.

The cross gives us a new lens, a lens of grace, not of shame.

A lens of God's presence, not abandonment, a lens of hope, not despair.

And when we stand before the cross of Jesus, we are not looking at a tragic ending.

We are looking at the moment when God's love shines at the brightest.

The ultimate proof of that is Jesus' resurrection on the third day after his death.

Jesus chose not to save himself so that he can save us.

He entered humanity's deepest darkness so that no darkness in our lives will ever be able to separate us from God.

He experienced utter forsakenness so that we will never be forsaken.

And when we see the cross of Jesus in this way, something begins to change in us.

We find courage to trust God in our own suffering.

We find hope where we once felt only fear.

We find compassion for others because we have been met with compassion ourselves.

The cross not only becomes the place where Jesus died, it becomes the place where our vision is healed.

The cross of Jesus is where God heals our eyes so that we can see things how they really are.

And then we can finally see God as He truly is, present, faithful, self-giving, and at work in the very places where we assume He's absent.

And with our new perspective, things begin to change within us.

Our old narratives begin to crack.

Our assumptions about God, about ourselves, about suffering begin to loosen.

And a new way of seeing begins to take shape, a way shaped not by fear or shame, but by the self-giving love of Jesus Christ.

And so I hope and pray that you will consider accepting this challenge for the coming week.

Take one moment of your life, one place of pain, confusion, or weakness, and bring it to the foot of the cross.

And ask Jesus to not only meet you there, but to change how you see.

Ask him to give you the eyes of the centurion.

And trust that the same Jesus who gave his life for you will heal your vision with his love, grace, and compassion.

Amen.

Let's pray.

Dear Jesus, we thank you for going to the cross, suffering there, and dying for us.

To give us the gift of new life with you.

We pray, Lord, that you would continue to keep opening our eyes more and more so that we can see you and your love and the love of the Father and the love of the Holy Spirit for us most clearly.

And then we pray, dear Lord, that you would help us to live in your love more fully.

We pray these things in your precious name.

And all God's people said.

Amen.

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Any gift that you would like to give will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you and God's blessings.