Died

Reading from the book of Mark.

And 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, Eloh, Eloh, Lama Shabakhtany, which means, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And some of the bystanders hearing it said, Behold, he is calling Elijah.

And someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a reed, and gave it to him to drink, saying, Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.

And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last.

And then the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.

And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, Truly this man was the son of God.

There were also women looking on from a distance, among whom were Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James the younger, and of Joseph St.

Solomon.

When he was in Galilee, they followed him and ministered to him, and there were also many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem.

This is the word of God.

Please be seated.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver, which uh is also, as you can see, repopulating the earth.

So uh there's uh this is how you this is how you grow a church.

You just grow a church from the inside out.

From the bottom up.

That is pretty cool.

Uh this is Palm Sunday, uh, but we are not covering a Palm Sunday text.

We are continuing through Mark and moving into uh uh as we move closer to next week, uh, where we will finish our what's been over the course of five years, our time in Mark, on Easter Sunday, and we look at the resurrection.

But today we look at the uh second half of the story of the crucifixion in Mark, and we see when Jesus dies on the cross.

So it is a special Sunday and a special time of year to remember this central event in human history and the central event for each of our hearts, uh the wonder of the Son of God dying on a cross and then rising again for three days, and what that means for our station before the Lord.

It is wonderfully good news that we look at today.

So before we move into our text, let's pray together.

Father in heaven, we praise you for your loving kindness towards us.

Lord, as we see it demonstrated on the cross, we are swallowed up in your grace.

It is a wonder beyond imagination, a sacrifice greater than any sin committed.

Lord, it is a grace that reaches out and swallows up the hardness of our hearts and transforms us, pays the penalty for our sin, ransoms us to God.

Lord, I pray that you would give us hearts to see the wonder of what was accomplished.

You would transform us to be able to receive it.

We might see in savor the wonder of your grace shown to us.

And the Son of God died on a cross.

Lord, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Also, I should note today, right after the service, we have a celebration.

So plan on sticking around.

There'll be food and snacks and drinks and all those sorts of things because this is Krista's retirement party.

Yeah.

So that'll be a joyful uh thing to get to celebrate as she's meant um an unspeakable amount to our church and our very existence here.

So that'll be a fun thing to celebrate.

Look forward to celebrating you, Krista.

So all right.

We're just a week away from our last Sunday in Mark.

And our first Sunday in Mark as a church was September 20th, 2020, which was, I think, 5,000 years ago.

September 20th, 2020.

Uh, my four-year-old then was 11 days old.

And I probably should have been at home, but I was preaching through Mark 1.1, just that first verse.

This is the first verse of Mark that we that we looked at.

Mark 1.1.

It says, the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

And what I taught on then was that this is the thesis statement of Mark.

That his whole book, the project of his of this whole gospel is to prove to us that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and to show us the good news that that is.

And so the case that he's making is that this man, Jesus Christ, was the son of God.

And so the question that I posed then was: what would it take?

What story would you need to hear, or what evidence would you need demonstrated to you to prove that this particular man was the son of God?

What would be enough to show you that this man, this one man in human history was the son of God?

What how big of a magic trick would you need to see?

How wondrous of a particular miracle, how authoritative would his teaching need to be, where you would walk away and you would say, Surely this man is the son of God.

And it's it's more than that because when we're saying son of God, this isn't just like he's a close relation, or perhaps the closest possible relation.

That's not what this phrase means.

He's the son of God, and that means that he has all of the authority.

He is the heir of the Most High God, the one who has all of the authority that God himself has.

And so when Mark is using this phrase, son of God, what he's saying is this man is God.

What would you need to hear?

If you were in conversation with someone, what would they need to say to you?

Perhaps they could read your thoughts and speak directly back to you, but what you but you would leave and you would think, that person can read my thoughts.

You wouldn't think this person is the son of God.

And so when you consider this, like what possible evidence would we need to see?

It's almost like an impossible story to tell.

It's in order to allow you to arrive at this conclusion, and yet Mark arrives at this conclusion.

All of the gospels arrive at this conclusion.

The Christian church arrives at this conclusion.

Jesus is God.

He dwelt among us.

Now, as difficult as it is to imagine a piece of evidence or a story that would that would cause you to finally conclude that this particular man is the son of God, it's not so difficult to imagine a piece of evidence which would make you conclude that he isn't.

And I think the one thing that you would need to see in order to conclusively say and finally say, oh, we were wrong.

This man isn't the son of God, is death.

I think a lot about my time at CU Boulder, because it's a magical place to get to live for four years, kind of a hack to live in Boulder for four years.

And you get to study with all these hippies and commies, and in uh I had one professor, you know how you kind of find a professor in school and you follow them around, you take all their classes because you like their classes.

I had one professor, her name was Kathy Comstock, and uh I loved her, I loved her classes.

Um one of them was called Cultural Deconstruction and Discourse Analysis, which was basically like, you know, all the incredible absurdity of our culture right now, where it's like, we don't even know what people are, or you can't tell, you know, the insanity of our culture right now.

Well, this was like 10 years ahead, and it all felt very avant-garde uh and interesting then.

Uh as it turns out, it's just like we were all just like, okay, we'll all just be insane together.

Just moments later.

But one of the projects of the class was to demonstrate that you can deconstruct anything.

You can deconstruct gender, you can deconstruct uh marriage, you can deconstruct uh any aspect of culture, and you can you can show that if you invert the hierarchies that are inlaid within that, that you can create a world of new things that you could look into and show that fundamentally, what was fundamentally operating in the hierarchies that you presupposed was something like oppression.

And then one student in the class said, but what about death?

Can you can you deconstruct death?

It doesn't seem like this is some cultural institution.

And what the uh professor said, and many of the other students agreed, was yes, but if you look across cultures through the world, cultures have many different perspectives on death.

And then the students said, Yes, those are varying perspectives on death, but everyone dies and they go away and they never come back.

And it seems like this is uh a final aspect of the world which is not dependent upon some cultural position on it, but it is just a fact of existence, or a fact that we all end in non-existence, that we die.

And there's nothing any of us can do about it.

Now, the student didn't go on like that, you know, it was more just like, but what about death?

And then the whole room was just like, well, I don't know, I don't know.

Well, I think the one piece of evidence that would convince us that this person wasn't the son of God, we would just have to see them die.

We would just have to see them die.

And if we saw them die, then we would be able, we would look and we would say, I guess we got it wrong.

Because to be God certainly means you can't die.

If death still has dominion, then it must mean this person who we might have thought was the son of God was not the son of God.

Well, you would think that if Mark's thesis was that this man is the son of God, then you would hear that phrase repeatedly, chapter after chapter, that they would all, every story that he tells, he would say, See, he calmed the storm, that because he's the son of God.

And then everybody would confess around him in the narrative, he's the son of God.

Or look, the demons listen to him, he's the son of God, is why they listen to him.

Or look at how he teaches with such authority, he's the son of God, that's why they listen to him, or look at how he multiplies the food.

He's always feeding everyone because he's the son of God.

But oddly, there is not a human that confesses that Jesus is the son of God throughout the whole narrative of Mark's gospel until what we see today.

And strangely, the man that can that finally confesses in Mark's gospel, surely this is the Son of God, what he looks up and sees is his death.

So we're going to look at that deep mystery.

Why it is that this one data point, which seems like it would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, this one thing which we can't confuse ourselves into being able to deconstruct away so that we can live in denials of plain reality.

Death.

That in witnessing it, the truest response was surely this man is the Son of God.

So let's look at Christ's death on the cross this morning.

Mark 15, 33.

And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.

So that's noon until three.

Darkness falls over the whole land from noon until three.

And that's strange because you guys know how days work.

And there's been lots of attempts to try and demonstrate some sort of uh mechanistic cause for this darkness, but they all come up fruitless.

We we aren't able to find like the the eclipse that maps on to this time.

In fact, it seems impossible because of when Passover would be, based on lunar cycle.

Or perhaps it was just a large thunderstorm.

But of course, we have words for large thunderstorms, and that's not what's said, or perhaps a dust storm or something like that, but this is not what's happening here.

The darkness is showing us that what's taking place on the cross is the wrath of God is being poured out.

And the scriptures have taught us to understand so that the people who were witnessing it could have known, had they have remembered their own scriptures, that what they were witnessing was the wrath of God being poured out from noon until three, impossible darkness.

They could have known this because they would have remembered the story which they cherished so deeply of their own deliverance from slavery to the Egyptians.

In Exodus 10 21, you'll remember that one of the final plagues against Egypt was darkness over the whole land.

In Exodus 10 21, then the Lord said to Moses, Stretch out your hand toward heaven that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness to be felt.

This is what stretches over the cross during the crucifixion, leading up to the death of Christ.

A darkness to be felt.

As though God Himself has turned his back.

And so if they had eyes to see, they would have been able to understand what they were witnessing was the wrath of God being poured out.

That's what they're looking up at as they look up at the cross.

And so the darkness gives us the context by which we're able to understand the cry of Christ.

And Christ cries out amidst this darkness.

One more thing on the darkness.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

They also ought to have remembered the prophecy that they were given by Amos in Amos chapter 8, 9 through 10.

Amos 8 · chapter mention

And it says this, and on that day, declares the Lord God, I will make the sun go down at noon.

It's pretty particular.

And darken the earth in broad daylight.

I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation.

I will bring sackcloth on every waist and baldness on every head.

Listen to this.

I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day.

They ought to have known what they were looking at.

It's like the mourning for an only son.

This is the pain of the wrath of God poured out on the cross.

And so out of the midst of this darkness, we're able to understand what it is that the cry of Christ means.

In Mark 15, 34.

And at the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eloi Eloi, lema sabactani, which means, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

When Mark relays this cry, he gives it to us in Aramaic, the language of which it was spoken, because he wants us to remember the noise, the sound of Christ's cry.

This is how piercing it was for those who would have heard it.

And because the cry comes out of the darkness, we're able to understand that it is the cry of one who is receiving in himself the wrath of God.

That is what is taking place.

And that's why he cries out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Now, my favorite sermon, there was a sermon that really transformed my life.

I listened to on a podcast at lunch, alone in my dorm room, and it's a sermon by Tim Keller called The Crucifixion.

And it's just on this verse.

And I remember hearing this sermon and coming to understand this cry of Christ as truly a cry of forsakenness, as Christ himself bore the wrath of God on the tree.

Keller pointed out, and it made me cry into my turkey bacon sandwich from the fair and grab and go.

Keller says, Notice what he doesn't cry.

He doesn't cry, my hands, my hands.

He doesn't cry, my feet, my feet.

Those hands and his feet were pierced.

He doesn't cry, my head, my head.

Though his head was being crushed from a crown of thorns.

He doesn't cry, my breath, my breath, though the mechanism of death in crucifixion is asphyxiation.

He cries out, my God, my God.

Why have you forsaken me?

Because he shouts out from the place of his deepest pain.

And the place of his deepest pain was not his hands or his feet or his lack of breath.

The place of his deepest pain, the real suffering of the cross, is the experience of forsakenness, which is the wrath of God being poured out on him.

Now, how can we grasp such a forsakenness?

Keller says, Imagine the greatest love story that you've ever heard between two people.

Well, the love between the father and the son, that greatest love story you've ever heard is like a drop compared to the Atlantic Ocean.

He goes on, you know, if you imagine if you you um meet a stranger on the street and they say, I never want to see you again, it's like, oh, that was uncomfortable.

But if you have a close friend who says that they never want to see you again.

This is an incredible pain.

Maybe a spouse.

Or child or a father.

He cries out at the place of his deepest pain.

And he bears the wrath of God treated as a sinner who would be rejected by the Father.

In a sense, being told the words, Away from me, I never knew you.

And it just keeps falling.

The light of the world plunged into darkness.

When you see the depth of the suffering on the cross, when you realize the reality of the depth of the suffering on the cross, you have to realize that that depth where you're still listening for the stone to hit the bottom, and it never happens, it just keeps falling.

This is also the depth of the Father's love towards you.

It's that same depth.

How can the second person of the Trinity be forsaken?

Well, certainly we're not saying that there's a brokenness in the unity of God.

Hero Israel, the Lord our God is except for that one time.

No, that's not that's not what we're that's not what we're saying.

There's something more mysterious and for us more wonderful taking place.

Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man.

This is the argument of Mark's gospel.

The man is God.

Fully God and fully man in two distinct natures, yet in one person forever.

Now, if you have trouble grasping that, I can't relate to you, so the fullness of the humanity of Jesus allows him to be treated as sin while absolutely being fully God.

And it had to be the case that the one who could intercede for us and bear the wrath of God on our behalf was fully God and fully man.

There is no alternative because if he is not fully man, he would be unable to bear the wrath that is due to men.

He would not be able to, in truth, be treated as the sin that is committed by humankind.

He couldn't atone for the sin of Adam.

But if he was not fully God, he could not intercede for us.

He could not come before God and plead our innocence.

He could not, having experienced the wrath of God being fully poured out on him, receive it in an absoluteness of righteousness and then take up his life again in victory over death.

And so if he is not fully God or fully man, if he is not both fully God and fully man, then we are still in our sins and trespasses.

We cannot be saved.

Job cries out, one of the earliest texts of Scripture, Job in chapter 9, verse 32 and 33, he's complaining about his inability to advocate for himself before God.

And he says this, for he is not a man as I am, that I might answer him, that we should come to trial together.

There is no arbiter between us who might lay his hand on us both.

Who is there that can come and be the arbiter between God and man?

And if our greatest problem, and this is our greatest problem, is that we have sinned against God and He has a just case against us?

Well, who can come to our defense?

Who can lay his hand on me and lay his hand on God and bring peace?

Who can bridge that chasm?

Who could be fully God and fully man?

Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

And here on the cross, he cries out in forsakenness, like a man would cry out in forsakenness before God.

Because he places his hand upon us that he might be treated as we deserve to be treated.

So that soon he would take up his life again and ascend to the right hand of the Father, where he lives to intercede for us, pleading his own sacrifice on our behalf.

So that's what we see in the cry from the cross.

But the ones who were standing around looking at the crucifixion, surrounded by this darkness that could be felt, when they look up and they hear the cry, they're deaf to it.

In verses 35 and 36 it says, And some of the bystanders hearing it said, Behold, he is calling Elijah.

And someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a reed, and gave it to him to drink, saying, Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come down, will come to take him down.

Christ cries out, Eloy, Eloe.

In Matthews it's recorded as Eli, Eli.

They mishear.

They miss hear.

That's the that's what's happening here.

And they think that he's just crying out to Elijah.

In if I can get this.

They are witnessing fulfillment.

They're surrounded by it.

And what Jesus has just cried out, Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabactani, is the first verse of Psalm 22.

And if there had been one person in the group that would have said, hey, this guy, I think this is Psalm 22.

That's the verse that he's crying out.

What other types of things does that Psalm talk about?

Well, it talks about him being surrounded by people who are cursing him.

What have we been doing?

They might have thought.

Well, if you keep reading here, it also says that his hands and feet are pierced.

So, oh.

His hands and feet are pierced.

Where's his clothes?

They're being gambled over over there.

It seems to say that here.

And they might have been able to look and see we were we are surrounded by fulfillment of the scriptures.

Everything that we have seen, in fact, is being come come to this head on the cross.

And the people of God who this promise is given to, they're deaf to it, even when it's cried out.

Well, why do they think it's Elijah?

Well, Elijah hadn't, Elijah didn't die.

He was just taken up into heaven, chariots of fire.

But they had this final prophecy, the last prophetic words that had been uttered until they were fulfilled for 400 years, at the very last verses of the Old Testament, in Malachi four, five through six, the Lord says, Behold, I will send you Elijah, the prophet, before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes.

And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children, and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.

The hearts of fathers will be turned towards their children, hearts of children will be turned towards their fathers, and this will prevent utter destruction.

But Christ has shown us, as he taught his disciples, Elijah has already come.

And Jesus describes that this Elijah who has come that fulfilled this prophecy is John the Baptist.

John the Baptist has come and he called the people to repentance before this great and awesome day of the Lord.

But what they were witnessing was the great and awesome day.

Elijah had already come, and they did to him as they saw fit, and they did what they already, what they are doing to Jesus now.

Elijah was beheaded.

He was killed.

But they didn't recognize his voice as it was crying out either.

And so they mishear.

And therefore they misunderstand even the shape of what's taking place.

Elijah is a prophet of judgment.

You know, he has a clear enemy, Elijah does.

His name's literally Ahab.

You know, that's an enemy name.

Elijah's enemy.

And he's the one who kills all the prophets of Baal.

He has this ministry of judgment.

And that's what John the Baptist's ministry is like.

It's a ministry saying, judgment is coming, come to repentance.

Repent now, quick.

It's a warning ministry.

Elisha.

Elisha's this ministry of mercy.

What they were looking up at on the cross in this great and awesome day of the Lord, they didn't have eyes to see it.

But it's mercy.

An unthinkable, incalculable mercy.

Jesus is given wine to drink.

And he said he would not drink from the fruit of the vine again until the day when he drank it in his kingdom.

His kingdom's breaking in.

In this final move in Mark 15, 37, and Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last.

The Son of God, under the wrath of God, gives up his spirit.

You can see that in the way he dies, it is not as though his life is taken from him.

But he utters a loud cry and then he gives up his life.

In the Gospel of John, we're told that the loud cry that he utters just before he gives up his spirit, what he says is, it is finished.

Now, what he's given us then on the cross are these bookends of Psalm 22, where he cries out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

The first verse.

And then just before he gives up his spirit, he cries out, It is finished.

Here's the last verse of Psalm 22.

It says, They shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn, that he has done it.

Now if you look on at somebody doing something, you'd say, He has done it.

Jesus is the one who accomplishes it.

He says, It is finished.

What is the it?

What is finished?

What's done?

What has he done?

Well, we can see in the events that take place right afterwards.

In Mark 15, 38, it says, and the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.

You see, within the temple, before you enter the Holy of Holies, it was separated by this thick curtain.

And within there was the very dwelling place of God.

And the curtain served as the separation between man and God to preserve the holiness of God.

But now the Spirit breaks out of the temple and comes and dwells within the hearts of Christ's people, so that we are now the temple.

There is no more separation between man and God, because the curtain, which is Jesus' flesh, has been torn.

The wrath of God has been satisfied on our behalf.

And because of that, the countenance of the Lord looks towards us and he makes his face to shine upon us.

Because the darkness was poured out on Jesus, we receive the light of the world.

It is finished.

The wrath of God has been satisfied.

Justice has been paid.

It is finished.

And you think, well, it's not done for me yet.

My life is still going on.

I still encounter difficulties with sin.

I'm still waging this war.

Christian, look at the cross.

Know this for sure.

It is finished.

When the Father looks to you in Christ, he sees it is done.

Come into my rest.

Well done, good and faithful servant.

Yeah, he turns the hearts of the fathers towards their children, how, and the children towards their fathers.

But this is this is, you know, just showing how at the restoration, there's this, there's this more maximal restoration even that takes place because he reconciles us to the true Father as his true children.

Because Christ, who is fully God and fully man, bore the penalty of sin on the cross.

So now Jesus has finally died.

The curtain has been torn, man is reconciled to God.

Christ says it is finished.

The Psalm says he has done it.

And in Mark 15, 39 it says, and when the centurion, that's one of the Roman soldiers who was there to crucify Jesus, someone who we would not think has any reason to be, he's he's not thinking through Psalm 22, when he looks up at this.

He's surrounded by darkness, doesn't know what he's looking at.

And he looks up and it says, and when the centurion who stood facing him saw that in this way he breathed his last, that perfect piece of evidence, which might make you conclude he couldn't be the son of God, he just breathed his last.

When the centurion looked and saw that, he said, and Mark brings out this phrase for the first time in the mouth of a human, truly this man was the son of God.

What did he see?

How could he know?

The curtain was torn.

The dividing wall between God and man, the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile, Christ's church.

At his death, it's starting to, these seeds of his church, this are starting to pour out into the world as the Gentile looks up and makes this first confession, this first true confession, Jesus, that man, surely he was the Son of God.

Now it's not complete yet, because you can hear it in the tense.

Was.

He's got a surprise coming.

And I think we have good reason to believe, just from this confession alone, that that centurion will likely go on to say, is.

This man is the Son of God.

What is it that you're seeing when you see Christ's death on the cross?

How is it that it convinces us that this man is the Son of God?

Because only from the Father can we see such grace.

Only on the cross do we see the wonder of the depth of this type of love poured out.

Nothing comes close.

Look at all that we don't deserve from him, that we receive freely.

But consider your own sin that separates you from him, the justice that you know you deserve.

Well, look at his death on the cross.

It is finished.

It is finished.

Lastly, in Mark 15, 40 through 41, Mark wants us to look at it, and so he shows us people looking at the cross.

But not just generically people, it's women.

Mark 15, 40 through 41, there were also women looking on from a distance, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary, the mother of James the younger, and of Joseph, and Salo.

When he was in Galilee, they followed him and ministered to him.

And there were also many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem.

So is the what I think for a verse like this, is that one of those like, huh?

Thanks, Mark.

Now we know there were women looking at this take place.

Why does he draw our attention there?

What is he showing us that he wants us to see the women seeing the sun crucified?

He wants us to notice, like this is the image that he gives us.

Jesus on the cross, the the women who have ministered to him and stayed close to him, they stand and look and see the sun on the cross.

I think he's bringing He's showing us Christ making the church.

Because the church is, we are the bride of Christ.

And we are the ones who look up to.

We are the ones, what the church has always been, we are the ones who are looking for the promised son.

And that all of our hope is that the promised son will one day be sent.

This is what, you know, the first one to do this?

Is Eve.

Remember Eve?

It's the very beginning of the story.

And Eve, after her sin, she is given this, she hears this in the curse against Satan that there will be an adversary that will come and will crush the serpent.

And he himself will be bruised.

And the head of the serpent will be crushed.

And that one will be the offspring of the woman, of Eve.

And Eve is the first one who is looking for the Son.

She's the first church.

Who are the we are the ones who look for the Son as the hope of our salvation.

But Eve experiences that terror, the greatest terror that a mother could experience.

She receives a son.

She receives Abel.

And she says, From the hand of the Lord, I've surely from the Lord I've I've received a son.

But then in one stroke, she has another son, Cain, you know the story.

Cain kills Abel.

And then Cain is banished.

In one stroke, she goes from two sons who she's looking towards in this the fulfillment of the promise to none.

But then she's given Seth.

And she says, The Lord has given me another son to replace the one that I'd lost.

And she gives us this pattern: the ones that are looking towards the sun.

The people of God have always been like Eve.

We are the ones that have been looking towards the sun to finally crush Satan so that we might be freed, that it might, that this terrible war that's come from the sin might be finished.

And these women, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, the women who, one way to describe this is they were like mothers to Jesus as they ministered to him throughout his ministry.

They look up and they see the Son on the cross.

Finally, this is the true Son that we've all been looking for.

They are now the true church that bears witness to the one who crushed the serpent.

The church is formed at the cross in this sense.

And so we, like those women, we take them as models and guides, and we look and we behold the one upon the cross.

We see the depth of his suffering as he cries out.

And in the depth of his suffering, we see the depth of the love of the Father towards us, who did not spare his own son, but delivered him over for us all.

And we witness with these women the destruction of Satan, so that we are no longer under his dominion, but under the dominion of Christ.

We see the son that was promised that we've been waiting to that we've been waiting for.

We bear witness alongside these women.

He's here.

He came.

It is finished.

That's what we see on the cross.

Are there any questions today, Eric?

Okay, cool.

Have you guys been?

Could Mark also be drawing our attention to those particular women because they will be participants in Jesus' burial, and at least one of them will be the first witness to his resurrection?

Yes, certainly.

But we're not in chapter 16 yet.

Yeah, but great, wonderful observation.

That's certainly the case.

And it and even more oddly, even more so the case for Luke.

Luke spends tons of time with them.

And there's also there's also an element of their the way that they had uniquely there's another element too, which is um uh the disciples aren't there.

Uh and these women are.

There is a um humiliation of the of the disciples as well by the courage of these women.

Uh so there's there's a lot there's a lot to be said um about them.

They're also the ones uh who were the who chiefly supported Jesus financially, were these women.

And they're the ones who witness him on the cross and then witness him uh uh at the at the resurrection and then testify to it.

I think uh this is the pattern for the church, to follow them in their testimony.

So good question and observations.

All right, let's take communion together.

In 1 Corinthians 11.

Starting in verse 23, Paul says, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

That the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread.

And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

So on the night before he was betrayed, Christ took the bread and he broke it, and said, This is my body, which is broken for you.

And he took the cup, and he said, This is this cup is the new covenant of my blood, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

Consider what is poured out in the pouring out of his blood, what is poured out on him.

He drinks from the cup of God's wrath, so that he might invite us by the freedom of his grace, the free gift of Jesus.

This is such good news.

This is unthinkably good news.

He offers us to come drink in fellowship with him, fully restored to him.

He has done it, it is finished.

So for all of you who've been baptized and who trust and confess Christ Jesus as Lord, come and drink and eat with him together, made the church.

We are the ones who look to the Son.

He has come, the promised one has come, and it is finished.

Let's pray.

Father, we praise you for your loving kindness and we praise you for the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for his death, that in his death we are granted life that we need not fear death or punishment, that we have been justified.

Lord, that we will be sanctified, that we will be glorified all because of what Christ has accomplished on our behalf on the cross.

We praise you, Father.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.