John 19:17-24

Hey welcome back everybody.

Thanks for joining us on this Wednesday.

As we continue through the gospel here according to John.

We are in the 19 ninth chapter.

We move today to the crucifixion of Jesus.

It will will be here for a few days.

But this,

high point of the story to which John

has been taking us for a while, and today we begin to get into it.

And a few interesting things.

There are a few details that only John gives us among the Gospels.

So, let me jump in here,

read a few verses, and we'll come back and talk them through.

So they took Jesus, and carrying the cross by himself,

he went out to what is called the place of the skull in Hebrew is called Golgotha.

There they crucified him,

and with him two others, one on either side with Jesus.

Between them Pilate had an inscription written and put on the cross.

It read, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

Many of the Jews read this inscription because the place where Jesus was

crucified was near the city, and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek.

Then the chief priest of the Jews

said to Pilate, do not write King of the Jews.

But the man said, I am the king of the Jews.

Pilate answered, what I have written, I have written.

When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his clothes

and divided them in four parts, one for each soldier.

They also took his tunic.

Now the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from the top.

So they said to one another, let us not tear it,

but cast it for lots to see who will get it.

This was to fulfill the scripture.

They divided my clothes among themselves and my clothing.

They cast lots and that is what the soldiers did.

So, if one compares

the gospel accounts

of the crucifixion, you find some interesting nuances.

I suppose we could call them differences.

In general, the church has been comfortable

with the kind of overall story, but there are

there are some moments of departure, and we see one here

right away as Jesus carries his own cross.

Now, whether John thinks he is correcting of another story,

whether John's not aware of the story, or if you want to try and hold on to

both of them, whether John thinks he's talking about only the part of the journey

which Jesus did in fact carry his own cross.

I'll leave that to you.

But this is, it's interesting, Michael, that John gives us that detail, that he's

carrying the cross by himself, and they go out to this place called the skull.

I don't know

what we make of that, and I don't know that it matters.

But again, I do think it fits the kind of overall

tenor of John that Jesus is strong,

that he does things for himself, that he's in control in Jesus.

At no point in this gospel has needed help.

And it's not surprising, I think, that

it extends even to this final, these final acts.

That, in fact, I think maybe the interesting part of this

telling of the crucifixion of Jesus

is how little John goes into the details of this story.

And I do think that this pushes against some of the details that we had earlier.

Certainly we had Jesus being punched.

We had Jesus being physically abused.

That doesn't continue in this portrayal of the crucifixion story here.

We simply have these words there.

They crucified him and you know,

I actually this pushes back against some of the sensationalist,

emotive pictures of the cross that we have.

You know, John isn't giving the physical,

harrowing ness of this experience more credit than it deserves.

I think from John's perspective, what is in

focus in this story is the man, not the thing, happening to the man,

because ultimately, Jesus is the center of revelation.

And so, yes, we're going to see some pictures of how those ripples move out.

You know, this conversation with Pilate and the high priests, chief priests,

and you're going to have some of those details add in.

But note that this isn't about the physicality of crucifixion

as much as it is a moment for us to really zoom back out

and to see in totality that this is what Jesus Christ has chosen,

that this is the path that Jesus has set himself to be on.

And yes, the idea that he carries his own cross.

I think that's just simply another aspect of that reality

that at the end of the day, Jesus is carrying out his mission,

and these people who think that they're in control

are actually part of this divine economy.

They're part of this divine mission that God has set out to accomplish.

And whether they know it or not,

they are contributing to that mission.

They think they're in charge, but it's the one carrying

the cross who ultimately is the one who is in charge.

Yeah.

And John gives us an interesting snapshot of that again.

Something that is unique.

It at least in its, in its full story, unique.

Here we have a sign that Pilate puts an inscription, and John

has been giving us this theme all the way along, as Pilate said, are you a king?

And and here is your king, and this is a is he your king?

We have no king but the emperor.

Not unique to John, but this part where he puts the sign,

and in Hebrew, Latin

and Greek, in other words, in the of the known languages of the time,

or at least the major languages of trade

and commerce, and

education

and economics.

We have here written

Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,

and this offends the Jewish leaders and they tell him,

hey, you write that he said he was

it looks like he you agree with him.

And Pilate just says, I have written what I've written.

In other words, I'm not going to change it.

Now again, I don't I don't think John here is trying

to frame this as a some act of faith by Pilate.

I just don't see that in the text.

But I do think what John is trying to say us, tell us,

is that on unwittingly

or maybe without intending to,

Pilate has gotten it right

that hanging over Jesus is the exact description

of who he is, and it is written in the language of

all of the modern world of their time,

that the religious people of the Jews,

the Romans, the Greeks, they could all look upon this man

and see hanging over his head the sign Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

And again, John loves irony.

And the beautiful irony is this is accurate,

that this is exactly the right description of this man.

They don't know it.

They're offended by it.

But it's, it's a really interesting way

that John paints a picture here again, as he loves to do, of a truth

that is obvious to some and completely missed by most.

You know, I think what is striking about John's

telling of this story is that at the end of the day,

Jesus has been talking about being lifted up throughout his entire earthly life.

There are explicit sections of the teaching that we've been through

already, where Jesus has been talking about how he would be revealed

when he was raised up, and the cross he represents,

not just the action of God giving himself for us.

It's not just the action of the death and dying,

which, if you're a Christian, that that language is comfortable to you.

It's also the proclamation of who this man is.

And that's a fascinating, powerful

theological lesson being communicated to us from this story.

The text itself, Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews

in those modern languages, is a powerful faith statement.

That is the very thing that the early church was proclaiming

in their own martyrdom, when they lost their own lives

for the sake of what they believed it was that

that it boils down to that, that he's the king.

And now there's also the multiple layers that go beyond that.

Right?

The idea of the Jews, of the very people who who have betrayed Jesus, the very ones

who have turned them over to the turning over of that religious order,

and the God who the Jews worshiped is now being crucified.

And you know this this book is so multilayered that so complex.

But I think at its center that Pilate here represents

a Gentile who is in the wrong, as we've already said in our previous studies.

And yet in his wrongness,

he ends up closer than the people who hand Jesus over to him.

And I think that there's a kind of faith revelatory moment in this text

that Jesus, at the same moment he's doing the saving work.

He's also correctly identified as the king,

but not the king that the people wanted, but rather the king that God had sent.

And that's the gospel message in a nutshell.

And it's the it's the very sort of pinnacle moment

where it's represented in its fullest form.

I think John would love

the idea that while

no one knew it or understood it,

there is a sign above Jesus

that proclaims the truth in a similar way.

Michael in the Palm Sunday text in Luke where Jesus says,

they tell Jesus to tell people to quit singing the Messiah song

and it says if they're silent, the rock would cry out.

I think it's it.

Again, we've said it, John is as much preaching as he is storytelling.

And here the idea of this sign over a dying man

and the the irony and maybe even the absurdity of that.

And yet the reader knows,

in whatever language they read that this is the truth.

And I just think it's a powerful storytelling technique.

It's a powerful scene that John paints.

It's really good.

And then we end here with the thing that John doesn't always do.

There is far less fulfillment language in John

than there than there are in the other gospels.

Certainly Matthew, which is just full of it, but others as well.

And yet here John takes a moment to to paint a picture.

Tell us what happens as the soldiers divide Jesus's clothes,

and then as they find one piece nice enough that they don't want to tear.

So they cast lots for it.

And he reaches back into what we call the Old Testament.

And he and he pulls forward this verse.

They divided my clothes among themselves.

And for my clothing they cast lots.

And this is what the soldiers did.

Unawareness of prophecy

for John, a an awareness of fulfillment.

It's not that John doesn't find these things important, it's

just that he emphasizes them far less than the other writers.

And yet, for whatever reason, this is one, Michael, that he makes sure to point out

has indeed happened and been fulfilled in the scene playing out before us.

You know, the idea of tearing actually does appear in other gospel accounts,

when at Jesus's death, the temple curtain is torn.

You know, there there's a rich amount of material

in the Old Testament that New Testament writers, they look back on.

And I think this is a good example of,

of when people who have been steeped in the scriptures,

they would have known them as their scriptures.

We might call the Old Testament.

But the early church is encountering those words,

and they're seeing how many of them are applicable within the life of Jesus.

And they literally did use the language.

It's revelatory.

It opened their eyes to see, whoa, this has all been here the whole time.

It took someone being raised up on the cross.

It took the clothes being taken by the soldiers for us to understand it.

But but that detail, I just want to point out

the other tellings of Jesus's death often

give us some detail of what's happening on the cross.

Words of Jesus.

Even in one case, the conversation that Jesus is having

with these other criminals.

And here what we have is that Jesus is crucified.

What matters is the sign and what it means.

And then we immediately turn to this

story of the soldiers, of the idea that they find this thing,

that is valuable, a thing that they're not going to destroy.

And this fulfills this thing in the old times.

I think that there is a immediate meaning connection

here, that this, that not only is Jesus revealing something by his life,

by what he does, but but this is connected to what came before

that we're not making this up, that this is there.

If you have eyes to see.

Even the soldiers themselves and their actions is a testimony

to the truth of who Jesus is, that the story has embedded

these markers, and John wants to make sure that we don't miss them.

Right? Nor do.

Nor does John want us to imagine that this is some new approach.

This was always the plan.

This was always where this path was headed.

We've seen that in Jesus.

But now John expands that context to even say in our own scriptures,

it told us we were going to get here, and and here we are.

So, not not not surprising.

Every gospel does that.

John just tends to do it less.

And so when he does it, it's going to come up again in another day or so.

But when John does it, we, we just it stands out as particularly

important to him because it's not his general way of writing.

You know, I think I should step back here.

I think I spoke too soon.

I mean, there is words of Jesus to come from the cross here.

So just up to this point in the story, I think it's worth saying that

what we have here is a deep amount

of setting up of the revelation of what Jesus is doing.

And and I do think that that John is unique in the way that

he does that, so that there's some relational language to come here,

which is both connected to the gospel writer himself

and also to some of the relationships that Jesus has.

I just think we should be mindful of the fact that for John, crucifixion,

which is an embarrassing reality in the Roman world, is in this case

the chief testament to who Jesus is being, who he said he was the whole time.

It's a statement of faith happening

from the start of the story that this entire experience has been that.

And for John, it is as obvious as a sign proclaiming it above his head.

Right?

I mean, it really, it really is.

Michael, just one one quick thing here.

And in some sense this leaves the text.

But when we get to the passion

stories and the crucifixion stories again,

and this isn't only true in these moments, but each gospel writer

does provide some

different nuances, some different elements of the story.

And that can be problematic for some people that that bothers people.

But I think one thing that is important, and I think you alluded to it

in your comments there about John's understanding

that this event on the cross is so monumental,

so profound and powerful

and far reaching that I think each gospel writer

sees some different aspect of that importance and emphasizes it.

And so I hope it's not a troubling reality

that we get different details in different books.

It is more the reality of trying

to describe something

so unimaginably important

and so big that one perspective simply can't do it justice.

Now, that doesn't answer all the questions.

I understand that, but I think it at least is helpful to say,

of course, they don't all line up.

They each take some other thing from it, and that thing matters to them

in a way that some other thing matters to another writer.

So, stick with us.

We'll have some more opportunities to talk through things like that, but

I don't think that should dissuade anybody from entering each gospel individually.

And saying, what did this author want us to know about this thing that happened?

And in a way, though they don't all agree, I do think they're cohesive,

or at least I think they work together in trying to paint the biggest picture.

Yeah, that's a great set up.

I certainly hope that you will join us for those future conversations and that,

even in this one, you found something that's been encouraging to you.

Like, subscribe. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks, everybody.