Ironies of the Cross

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the death of Christ from Matthew 27:27-51.

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“Then the governor’s soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him. They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand and knelt in front of him and mocked him. ‘Hail, king of the Jews!’ they said.

They spit on him, and took the staff and struck him on the head again and again. After they had mocked him, they took off the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him. As they were going out, they met a man from Cyrene, named Simon, and they forced him to carry the cross.

They came to a place called Golgotha (which means The Place of the Skull). There they offered Jesus wine to drink, mixed with gall; but after tasting it, he refused to drink it. When they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots. And sitting down, they kept watch over him there.

Above his head they placed the written charge against him: THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF THE JEWS. Two robbers were crucified with him, one on his right and one on his left. Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!’

In the same way the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders mocked him. ‘He saved others,’ they said, ‘but he can’t save himself! He’s the King of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, “I am the Son of God.” ’ In the same way the robbers who were crucified with him also heaped insults on him.

From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land. About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’—which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ When some of those standing there heard this, they said, ‘He’s calling Elijah.’

Immediately one of them ran and got a sponge. He filled it with wine vinegar, put it on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink. The rest said, ‘Now leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah comes to save him.’ And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.”

This is the Word of the Lord. Let us pray.

And now may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Through Jesus Christ the Lord, amen.

He was a good king, a competent administrator. He unified the tribes, brought relative peace to the land, a measure of order and prosperity, competent, and on the whole, committed to justice. Unfortunately, however, toward middle age he erred in a pretty grotesque way. While his troops were on the frontiers keeping back some of the enemies who were prone to attack and while he was establishing his borders, he seduced a young woman next door.

The troops were away for months during the dry season, the war months, and it wasn’t too long before she sent him word to the effect that she was pregnant. To make matters worse, her husband was, in fact, one of the foot soldiers on the frontier. Knowing he could be found out, the king arranged for the officers in charge on the frontier to send the young man home, ostensibly with a message for the king.

The king thought, “It’s inevitable. He’ll come home. He’s been on the frontier for a couple of months. He’ll undoubtedly sleep with his wife and the miscounting, if it’s off by a few weeks, is no great loss.” It turned out, however, this young man was so much committed to the integrity of the war campaign and felt so much at one with his mates on the frontier that he felt somehow he was letting down the side if he went home and slept with his wife, so he just stayed in the king’s gatehouse.

King David knew he was snookered, so he sent a message back with that young man that was, in fact, that young man’s death warrant. It was a sealed message for the generals to arrange a skirmish on the frontier with everybody else in the platoon with a secret order to fall back at the right moment, leaving the young man himself at the sharp end. The inevitable happened. He was killed, and David thought he had gotten away with it.

The chapter where you read this account is 2 Samuel 11, and it ends with one simple sentence: “But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.” Chapter 12. You are now introduced to Nathan, a court prophet. That is, paid by the court, but he was in nobody’s pocket even though he was paid by the court. Still, he was approaching David, and David was, after all, not a constitutional monarch but an autocrat, so he thought he had better approach him with a kind of parable.

He said, “Your majesty, it has come to my attention that up-country there is a grievous case of injustice. There are two farmers. One is filthy rich with vast herds, innumerable sheep, and cattle beyond number. Next door is a poor dirt farmer. All he has is one poor little lamb. Well, he used to have him but now that’s gone, too. You see, the rich farmer was there one day and some people came for a visit and instead of doing the decent thing of slaughtering one of his own animals and providing a feast, he swiped the dirt farmer’s sole little lamb next door.”

All the righteous indignation of the king is aroused. “Who is this man? I’ll sort this one out in a big hurry. There’s no way he’s going to get away with this. Just tell me who he is. I’ll fix it!” David has no idea how ironic his words sound. God knows, the writer of 2 Samuel knows, the readers know, but David does not yet know.

That’s what makes the Word so ironic. We all know what irony is. Some of it is vicious, some of it is funny, but at its best in a narrative, the irony of a narrative unpacks what’s really going on. It shows you a deeper layer than the actual people in the narrative itself understand at the time. In the New Testament, the writers most given to irony are John and Matthew. What Matthew does in this passage is recount the crucifixion but showing you at every level how many ironies there are, and if you attend them, you find out a little more about what the cross was all about. What this passage gives us is the Ironies of the Cross. Here they are.

1. The man who was mocked as king was the King.

Chapter 27, verses 27 to 31. You need to understand what’s going on. In those days, when the ancient equivalent of police (they were soldiers really) took someone into custody, they beat them up thoroughly. They could pound them to within an inch of their life. This was considered part of good interrogation technique. It was a softening up process.

After someone was actually sentenced to die by crucifixion, it was standard imperial policy then to whip them and beat them up again. Jesus has already undergone all of that. What takes place here is not that. This is not on the agenda. This is not standard. This is unique to Jesus. This is barracks room humor. They take him aside, and they think, “Another one of these guerrilla warriors. He’s going to take over the might of Rome. We’ll show him where he stands.”

They take off his clothes and put some sort of robe on him to make it look as if he’s a king. They put a stick in his hand of some sort to pretend it’s a scepter. Then they bash him on the head with it again and again and again and bow down and say, “Hail, your majesty!” They take these spiked thorns you find in the Middle East. The thorns are about that long, and they’re on a vine. They wrapped them up and scrunched it down on his head and slapped him back and forth. “Prophesy who hit you!” It’s barracks room humor.

But before you read chapter 27, you’re supposed to have read chapters 1 through 26. How does the book begin? Verse 1 of Matthew 1: “The origins of Jesus Christ, the son of Abraham, the son of David.” Then a genealogy, broken somewhat artificially into three 14s with the central 14 being the years of the Davidic dynasty’s reign on the throne of Israel.

Of course, that would call to mind for any first-century Jew the entire history. David came to power about 1010 BC. He had seven years in Hebron and then another 33 in Jerusalem, and he constituted the Davidic dynasty, but horribly the dynasty itself cycled down into more and more corruption until, finally, there was no Davidide on the throne from 587 or 586 BC.

When eventually the Jews were permitted to return to the land at the end of the exile, they couldn’t put a Davidide on the throne. It was just sort of a petty governor, and he was sometimes a Davidide, but the imperial powers of the day wouldn’t have allowed any competition. Eventually, there was rebellion in the second century, and at that point, there was the possibility for the first time in half a millennium to put a Davidide back on the throne. Do they do so? No.

The local guerrilla leaders took over (the Maccabees), but all along the Word of God had prophesied that a Davidide would come. In the eighth century BC, the prophet Isaiah saying, “Unto us a Son is given. Unto us a child is born. He shall rule on the throne of his father, David. Of the increase of his kingdom there will be no end.”

Oh, there was expectation of a king. You see, God knows, and Matthew knows, and Matthew’s readers know that Jesus is the King, and that has already been an issue at the trial. Do you recall earlier in the chapter (27, verse 11)? Pilate asks him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus replied, “Yes, it is as you say.”

But Pilate soon recognizes this is no ordinary king. He has no troops. He has no soldiers. He has no guerrilla warrior program. He’s not hiding out in the hills. He’s not robbing people in order to get some more arms. He’s not a king in any ordinary sense. Pilate is ready to let the man go. Now he’s mocked as king, and what the soldiers mean by their mockery is intended irony.

By saying, “Hail! King Jesus!” Slap! Slap! Slap! Bash! Bash! Bash! What they really mean is, “You’re no king. You’re just a piece of dirt.” But what they meant in irony had a deeper irony, for the man they were mocking as king was the King. In fact, if you start looking through the whole New Testament, he was not only the king of Israel, but he was the king par excellence. He was the King of Kings.

Colossians reminds us. Hebrews 1 reminds us. John 1 reminds us that all things were made by him. He was God’s own agent in creation. “Without him was not anything made that was made.” These very men who were mocking him are his creation, and we’re told every knee will bow before him, including these people who were laughing at him and you and me and everybody else, for Jesus is the King.

What sort of king is this? This is a strange king. Don’t forget in the first century they had no notion of constitutional monarchy. If you were the king, you ruled, and he seems to be ruling in some very strange ways. Once again, Matthew has already prepared the way for it. Do you recall what is said back in chapter 20? There are some ethical dimensions to his kingship. Do you recall?

Matthew 20, verse 20: “Then the mother of Zebedee’s sons …” James and John. “… came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him. ‘What is it you want?’ he asked. She said, ‘Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.’ ” In other words, they wanted to be secretary of state and perhaps minister of defense or something like that. They wanted to be the first princes of the land, the first people under the king.

“ ‘You don’t know what you are asking,’ Jesus said to them. ‘Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?’ ” That is, the cup of suffering he was going to drink. His own future involved a cup they knew very little of. “ ‘We can,’ they answered.” Not knowing he was talking about suffering. Jesus speaks with more irony.

“Jesus said to them, ‘You will indeed drink from my cup.’ ” After all, James would become the first apostolic martyr and John would die an old man exiled on an island out in the Aegean. “ ‘But to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.’ When the ten heard about this, they were indignant with the two brothers.” Understand they were indignant only because they hadn’t got their request in first.

“Jesus called them together and said, ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be your slave.” Now the reference to the cross. “Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

That’s why for three centuries in the early church Christians spoke of Jesus reigning from the cross. You see, they understood the irony. This, at a time when if a king reigned, he reigned with authority, where the cross was understood only to reflect shame and execution, destitution, despair, horrible suffering, and odium. Yet, Christians dared to speak of Jesus reigning from the cross. There’s the first irony.

2. The man who is utterly powerless is powerful.

Verses 32 to 40. I don’t have time to unpack everything here, but let me draw your attention to at least a few of the points that are made. In those days, when a person was crucified, the place of execution was already set up from previous executions. It was always at a marketplace or at a corner of main thoroughfares or in a public place because it was meant to be a form of death that would scare off other people from similar crimes.

What the Romans did was leave the uprights of the crosses in place. They were there all the time. When a prisoner was condemned, the prisoner had to carry out the cross member on his shoulder. That’s what was meant by carrying out your cross. You carried it out to the place of crucifixion. You were stretched out on it and either nailed or tied to it, and the whole thing was hoisted up onto the upright member, and then you died.

There was no long system of appeals, so that once you were condemned, once sentence was passed, you were taken out and crucified, but Jesus now was so weak from his repeated batterings and loss of blood and all the rest that he couldn’t even carry the cross member out to the place of execution, so we’re told in verse 32 the soldiers, instead, conscripted a passerby. Simon of Cyrene is conscripted by the soldiers to carry the cross out to the place of execution. That’s how weak Jesus is.

Then, when he gets out to this place.… What they did was they stripped you naked. No convenient loincloths as on all the crucifixes. They stripped you naked, and when you died of crucifixion, you died an agonizing death of muscle spasm. You were hung up there, and you pulled with your arms and you pushed with your legs to open up your chest cavity so you could breathe. Then the muscle spasms would start, so you collapsed, and then you couldn’t breathe, so you’d pull with your arms and push with your legs again so you could breathe.

This could go on for hours and hours and the worst cases for days. The physical agony of crucifixion was muscle spasm. That’s why, if they wanted to get rid of you in a hurry for some reason, they’d come along and simply smash your shins. Then, of course, you couldn’t push with your legs anymore, and you’d suffocate in a few minutes.

But that’s not the worst of it. The Romans had three different methods for execution, and when you read the ancient sources, crucifixion was universally viewed as the worst of them. You couldn’t crucify a Roman citizen apart from explicit written sanction of the emperor. It was reserved for slaves, non-citizens, and riffraff.

Throughout the literature of the time, whenever there is mention of cross or crucifixion or that sort of thing, it’s always mentioned with enormous disgust or even fear, all kinds of little asides saying, “Don’t talk about crucifixion in front of your children. This is not the sort of thing that is ever to be mentioned in polite company.” Always there is a sense of shame and odium and ignominy and failure and defeat bound up with the cross.

There is Jesus stretched out and hoisted up naked, and he’s crucified. In former times, before the Roman government established the pattern of leaving soldiers there, occasionally the friends of the victim came along and took the person down, and he was known to survive, but at this point in the empire, there was imperial policy to leave a quaternion of soldiers there to watch over the person.

It not only showed the person was hopeless and helpless, but it kept off any friends who might want to take the body down. This is the most remarkable picture of utter and complete powerlessness. There is no strength, no future. Nothing but ignominy, shame, and suffering, and still the mockery. “THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF THE JEWS.”

Then, in case we haven’t gotten this picture of weakness, the text makes it explicit in verses 39 to 40. “Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!’ ” Once again, there has been reference to this earlier in the chapters that precede. In chapter 26, in the trial before Caiaphas, they were looking for some witnesses who would finally get rid of Jesus.

You must remember the Roman Empire was religiously extremely pluralistic, and as a result, the Roman Empire established the policy that desecration of a temple, any temple, was a capital offense. They didn’t want the different religious factions to be warring against each other, so they said desecration of a temple, any temple, is a capital offense.

Now they’re looking for voices against Jesus, and we’re told (chapter 26, verse 61b) two witnesses eventually came forward and declared, “This fellow said, ‘I am able to destroy the temple of God and rebuild it in three days.’ ” That sounds awfully close to desecrating a temple. “Destroying a temple? That’s great. We’ll get him on this charge, won’t we?”

We know, in fact, they didn’t get him on that. They couldn’t get the stories quite straight, and so forth. Besides, to destroy a temple and raise it in three days, what does that mean in any case? It seems a bit obscure. We need to remind ourselves just how remarkable this sounds. Today we have prefab buildings, don’t we?

I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with Habitat for Humanity. So long as somebody has gone in and put down a foundation first, so long as you have some of it prefab, you bring in a big crew and at least a few engineers who know what they are doing, and you can put up a house in a day. Even in my lifetime the technology has changed an awful lot.

When I was a young man, if I wanted to put up Gyprock, you’d put in a sheet of Gyprock and bang in the nails one by one, one by one. It’s not that way anymore. Now you have an electric screwdriver with a big battery pack and on the front end is a whole string of plastic enclosed screws that are just designed for Gyprock. I can Gyprock a small house in a day just by myself. It’s not hard!

The feathering will take a little longer. You get a team of six guys coming behind, and the feathering will all be done in a day, too. It’s not all that difficult. It’s pretty easy in a prefab world, isn’t it? But this was a temple, a bit bigger, and made of stone, and it was policy, too, to not hear the hammer on stone anywhere in the precincts, so all the stone had to be cut and measured elsewhere and brought in without benefit of hydraulics.

It’s just like the big cathedrals of Europe. In no case did the architect of the big cathedrals of Europe ever see the finished product, because it took more than one lifetime to build them. Now along comes Jesus and looks at this temple and says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I’ll raise it again.” It sounded like such a powerful thing to say.

I mean, yes, he’s done some pretty remarkable miracles. I mean, he has walked on water, and he has healed the sick, and the odd dead person has come back, and an exorcism or two; nevertheless, taking down this temple and rebuilding it again in three days? That would be quite remarkable in those days, wouldn’t it?

Interestingly enough, Matthew does not actually record Jesus’ utterance along these lines. Matthew only records the reports of the witnesses at Jesus’ trial. It’s actually John’s gospel that records Jesus’ utterance, and it records his utterance in chapter 2, right at the beginning of his ministry.

In fact, one of the reasons why the witnesses probably didn’t get their stories very straight is because Jesus had uttered this thing at the beginning of his ministry, and two or three years had elapsed and time makes the memory a little bit screwy. As a result, they couldn’t get their stories straight.

When Jesus actually said these words, however, in chapter 2, John carefully records his opponents didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. The disciples didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. John comments, “After Jesus had risen from the dead, however, then the disciples remembered his words and understood the Scriptures.” They then saw he was not referring to this hunk of masonry; he was referring to himself.

The temple, after all, in Jewish history was the great meeting place between God and human beings. It’s where the blood of bullock and goat was offered once a year by the great high priest in the Most Holy Place, the little room at the back end of the temple, to pay for his own sins and the sins of the people. God met the high priest there in shekinah glory. It was the great meeting place between God and his people.

Now Jesus is saying, in effect, “No more. The great meeting place is not a temple. I’m the meeting place. This is where God meets with his people. This is where the sacrifice for sin is offered. This is where the priest does his work. I’m the temple. I’m the sacrifice. I’m the lamb. I’m the priest.” When he said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again,” he was ultimately pointing forward to his own death and resurrection.

At that point, of course, the disciples didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Not a clue. When these folk laugh at Jesus, they think they’re speaking with great irony. “He’s so powerful. He claims he’s going to rebuild the temple in three days. If he’s so powerful.… He doesn’t look so powerful now, does he?”

But God knows, and Matthew knows, and the readers know that he is the temple and that he is powerful and that it’s precisely by remaining on the cross that he will then come through the three days and rise again as he said to build the temple of God, himself the great mediator between God and human beings, himself the great meeting place. The man who was utterly powerless is powerful.

Here, too, of course, there are some pastoral implications Matthew has already worked out. Do you remember the great scene in chapter 16 at Caesarea Philippi? This is the great scene where Jesus asks his own followers, “Who do men say that I am?” They say, “Well, some say this; some say that; some say something else.”

“Yes, but what do you say?” Peter eventually replies, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus says, “You are blessed, Simon son of John, for flesh and blood does not reveal this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” From that point on, we’re told Jesus explains to them how the Christ, how he, the promised Messiah, must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things and eventually be put to death and on the third day rise again.

Peter blows it because, you see, he has no category for a crucified Messiah. As far as he’s concerned, Messiahs win. The Messiah with all the powers that Jesus has.… Who’s going to keep him down? If he can raise the dead.… Even if you bump off some of his followers, Jesus will bring them back. How are you going to win against this Messiah?

A crucified Messiah? That’s an oxymoron. It’s a contradiction. It’s like boiling ice cream. You just can’t have it. A crucified Messiah doesn’t work, so he actually turns around and says, “Never, Lord.” More irony. How do you say, “Never, Lord”? You can say, “Never, you stupid twit,” or you can say, “Yes, sir, Lord,” but how do you say, “Never, Lord”? More irony.

Then Jesus wheels on him, and he says, “ ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.’ Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’ ” Again, ethical implications. As there were ethical implications in John 20 about leadership, so there are ethical implications here. If you’re going to follow Jesus, you have to take up your cross and follow him.

That might not be a transparent statement to us. You see, the cross was so odious in the ancient world that people didn’t put placards of it up anywhere. Supposing somebody came into this college or this university and had a little pin on his lapel showing the mass graves of Auschwitz. Wouldn’t you think that grotesque? Just horribly bad taste. Not funny at all.

That’s the way the cross was viewed in the first century, with such odium and shame and scorn. Today we have crosses dangling from our ears and bishops wear them around their necks. They’re on our buildings and on our lapels. Nowadays, they’re even in our bellybuttons, and nobody is shocked. We have a domesticated cross. Then we speak of, “We all have our cross to bear.”

Someone says, “I have a terrible toothache. It has just been going on and on. I can’t get an appointment.” “Cheer up, sister. We all have our cross to bear.” Or maybe you have really difficult in-laws. “Well, we all have our cross to bear.” Eventually, someone in your family comes down with cancer, a little more serious this time. “Well, you know, we’re mortal. We live in a fallen world. We all have our cross to bear.”

Nobody could have talked like that in the first century. The cross wasn’t something you joked about any more than you’d joke about Auschwitz. If you bore your cross in the first century, you were going out to die. No rites, no pleasures. Just suffering and then death. And Jesus has the cheek to look his disciples in the face and say, “Unless you take up your cross, you cannot be my disciple.”

In fact, in one place he says, “Unless you take up your cross daily you cannot be my disciple.” How would you like to be crucified every day? You get up tomorrow morning and say, “Here we go again.” I have to say, this is not very seeker sensitive. What kind of repulsion is this? Yet, it’s what Jesus says.

Then he unpacks it, at least a little bit. “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?” In other words, part of following Jesus is bound up with a kind of decision that means, in principle, we lose our lives. We deny ourselves, and thus, find ourselves. We die, and thus, live. You give everything away and gain everything. That’s the way it is.

After all, that doesn’t seem too unreasonable considering we follow a Master who did it literally. For most of us we won’t have to do this literally. There may be some of us who will become missionaries somewhere and we will give our lives. After all, there have been more Christian martyrs in the last 150 years than in the previous 1,800 years before that.

About 2 million of them in the southern Sudan in the last 10 years. About 8,500 in the islands of Indonesia in the last three years. Nobody quite knows how many pastors have lost their lives in Iran in the last 10 years. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. They say there are about 3,000 pastors who are still in detention in China today. Martyrs.

Some will give their lives very physically, but most of us won’t. Yet, we are all to give our lives so that, as we take up our cross, we are saying, in effect, “I follow Jesus. I’m not going my own way. I renounce everything. I follow Jesus. He’s my Master.” You cannot follow him unless you renounce everything and die to yourself and follow him. That’s what the text says, and we follow a Master, in fact, who has done it literally.

The truth is in Scripture those who suffer with him will reign with him. Just as he died and was vindicated.… That’s part of the great Christ hymn in Philippians 2. He emptied himself and made himself a nobody and died in ignominy and shame. Wherefore, God has highly exalted him and given him the name that is above every name, so also we will be vindicated on the last day precisely because we have followed his pattern. That’s what Scriptures teach us. If we suffer with him we shall also reign with him.

Here it is, then, the second irony, and it’s tied to huge biblical themes. The man who was utterly powerless is powerful, and his power is displayed precisely in going through the ignominy and death and shame of the cross to come out the other side in triumph.

3. The man who can’t save himself saves others.

Verses 41 and 42. The mockery continues. “In the same way the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders mocked him. ‘He saved others,’ they said, ‘but he can’t save himself! He’s the King of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him.’ ”

What does the verb to save mean on the streets of New York or the streets of Chicago? In the streets of Cedarville, there are so many people, you see, who are Christians that, at the end of the day, you’ll come up with right answers, but I had one of my students not many months back who was in downtown Chicago with his fiancÈe.

Around her neck she was wearing a little gold chain and dangling from the gold chain was a wooden cross. A teenager stopped her on the street and said, “What are you wearing a plus sign around your neck for?” In that kind of environment, you use a verb like to save and what do they think of?

To save in secular America is what you do at a bank. You save money for your retirement. If you’re a sports fanatic, to save is what a decent goalie does in a net at a hockey game or what somebody does at a soccer game. You make a great save. If you’re a computer nerd, to save is that which, if you don’t do it, you lose a lot of data. If you don’t do any backups, you know what happens. It just happened to some of you. You’ve learned to save.

What did it mean in the first century? What does it mean to Matthew? Once again, you see, he has already told us. How does Matthew begin? In the very first chapter … chapter 1, verse 21 … we are told, “You will give him the name Jesus,” which means Yahweh saves. It’s the equivalent of Joshua. Yahweh saves. “You will give him the name Jesus for he will save his people from their sins.”

That’s already in chapter 1. That’s a flag. It’s a literary flag in the book that is saying, “You have to understand the whole book under this flag.” What is Matthew about? It’s about Jesus who comes to save his people from their sins. Thus, you find him in Matthew 5 through 7 in the great Sermon on the Mount, and all that teaching is part and parcel of what it means to live and to serve under the kingdom, turning away from your sins, because he came to save his people from their sins.

Then you come to the great miracles of chapters 8 and 9. Again, what’s all of this about? For example, the man who is lowered down through the roof. He’s a paralytic and the people can’t get close to Jesus because the house is so full. His friends lower him down, and as the crowds step back and make way for this mat with this paralytic, then suddenly Jesus looks at him and says, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” Your sins are forgiven? Is that what they lowered him down for? People take immediate umbrage. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

They had a kind of point, didn’t they? I mean, supposing you were horribly beaten up and mugged on your next trip to Cedarville, or if you want to make it on your next trip to whatever the big city is near where you’re from, that’s fine, too. Maybe you’re gang raped and I find your attackers, and I go up to them and say, “I forgive you.” What would you tell me? You’d tell me, “You don’t have the right! You’re not the one who was attacked! The only person who can do the forgiving is the person who was offended against!” Isn’t that what you would tell me?

In one of the most moving documents to come out of the Holocaust, that’s what Wiesenthal says in a splendid essay called The Sunflower toward the end of the war. He survived it when none of his family did. He was taken by some German soldiers to the bedside of a young German soldier who was dying. He was horribly wounded, and he was going to die, and the German soldier begged Wiesenthal, a Jew, emaciated and right near death himself, for forgiveness.

Wiesenthal reasoned, in effect, and it’s Wiesenthal who tells us, “The only ones who can forgive are those who are offended against. The most offended Nazi victims are dead. They are not here to pronounce forgiveness. Therefore, no forgiveness can be pronounced.” He turned and walked out of the room and let the German soldier die.

That’s exactly right, except for one thing. Every time a sin is committed, the one who is most offended is God. David understood that. The horrible sin with Bathsheba and Uriah the Hittite. After it’s all over, he has the cheek to pen Psalm 51 and address God and say, “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.”

You want to say, “David, wait a minute. You sinned against Bathsheba. You sinned against Uriah. You sinned against the baby in Bathsheba’s womb. You sinned against the high command of the army. You sinned against the covenant. You sinned against the people on whom judgment will fall because you are their representative. There’s nobody you haven’t sinned against, and now you start saying, ‘Against you only have I sinned.’ ”

At the deepest level, David was right, because what is most odious, what is most venomous, what is most anarchic, what is most rebellious, what is most hateful is defiance of God, even in the gang rape. That’s why, at the end of the day, it must be God who forgives sin because he is the one most offended against.

Now you find Jesus in front of this paralytic saying, “My son, your sins are forgiven,” so the observers start watching and say, “What is Jesus saying? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Exactly. That is the point. After all, his name is Jesus, and he came to save his people from their sins.

Then you move on to Matthew, chapter 10, and there you have the trainee mission and people are going out. Why? Why does he train people as trainee missionaries? Because he came to save his people from their sins. Then eventually you come to chapter 13, with the parables, and the parables are showing the nature of the kingdom.

The kingdom does not come in with a bang in Jesus’ day against what most people thought. No. It’s going to be delayed. It’s going to come in slowly because God in his forbearance is giving time for the gospel message to go out to the ends of the earth because he came to save his people from their sins.

Now what is he doing? He’s dying on the cross to save his people from their sins. He rises from the grave to save his people from their sins. He sends us out under the terms of the Great Commission in the closing verses of the entire thing precisely because he came to save his people from their sins.

I have a son who has an independent streak in him about as wide as a barn door. He’s a lovely lad with a wonderful sense of humor. He will charm the socks off you. He has finished his first year of college and he’s heading into the military actually. He is so diverse in his gifts and graces, but all along he has liked to live on the edge of all kinds of things.

He went through a stage when he was 14 or 15 of wanting to buy fairly outrageous tee shirts. We’re pretty laid back. We can put up with a lot of stuff. I mean, he had one glorious tee shirt on his broad back. “Woke up late. Missed my math class. Flunked the exam. Girlfriend jilted me. Missed lunch. Played soccer. Not a bad day.”

There’s a kid with his priorities straight, I have to tell you, but there was one tee shirt where we decided, “Nicholas, we’re not going to let you have that one. That one’s just a bit over the top.” He was all right with it. It showed a picture of a soccer net and the ball with these streams following it so you could follow the ball’s path.

The ball had come in and the goalie had made a diving save, and the ball had just glanced off his fingertips and was clearly going to go over the net. It was a save, but the goalie was dressed up like someone from the first century in sort of kimono garb, and underneath were the words, “Jesus saves.” That one we didn’t want, because you see, Jesus came to save his people from their sins, and the cost was so high you never, ever want to make jokes about that.

What’s going on here? Again, they think they’re speaking with such irony. “He saves others. Let him save himself. Did you get the irony in that one, Charles?” When I was a boy, I had an even more perverse imagination than I have now, so I liked to read stories and get to some crucial point in the story and imagine what would happen if you changed a few little pieces in the story. Where would the story go?

Did you ever do perverse things like that? Maybe I’m too perverse, but this was one of my favorite stories for doing it when I was a boy. I could picture Jesus there hanging on the cross, and they taunt him, and they say, “He saved others. Come down now. Save yourself and we’ll believe.” So he gets down off the cross and comes down. Now what happens in the story? Where does the story go now?

Do they believe? In a sense, it would be pretty impressive, wouldn’t it? In one sense, they sure would. They’d be backpedaling really fast and falling down before him and saying, “I’m sorry. I spoke too quickly. Please forgive me.” Wouldn’t they? But would they believe in any Christian sense? Of course not, because what he was doing up there was, in fact, bearing sins of sinners.

If he came down and did not bear their sin, how could they believe in any Christian sense? The people on the ground who were casting these mockeries and saying, “Let him save himself and we’ll believe,” what they meant by that was, “He can’t save himself physically. He is not able to do so.” But they were wrong. He could have done so. That’s why elsewhere he says, “Do you not know that even now I could call twelve legions of angels?”

The problem was not that he couldn’t because he was physically incapable of doing so or because such an eventuality is logically inconceivable. Yet, at another level, God knows, Matthew knows, and the readers know they were speaking the truth. They were speaking it better than they knew, because he could not come down off that cross and save others. If he had come down off that cross, he couldn’t have saved others. He would have saved himself but not others. They were speaking better than they knew.

What they did not understand was he was held up there not by the physical constraints of the nails but by the commitment to do his Father’s will. He was held up there by moral constraint, and we don’t know much about that in our culture anymore. Did you see the film Titanic when it came out?

In this version of Titanic, when the great ship is going down, some of the rich fat cats on board are scrambling for the inadequate number of lifeboats. Do you remember the scene? In fact, the British sailors have to move these fat cats back because in the order of the day women and children were first. They pulled out revolvers and fired them in the air to get these people to move back. Do you remember the scene?

British policemen don’t carry handguns. There’s no way that sailors do. I mean, that scene was made up. The universal testimony of the actual witnesses who survived tells us something very different. There were a lot of fat cats on that boat. It was sort of a Forbes 400 of the richest people who were alive in the day.

John Jacob Astor was there. He was the Bill Gates of 1912, the richest man on earth. He was there, and he did forge his way to a boat with his wife in tow, shoved her on board, and when some people said, “You should get on board, too, sir,” he said, “No. This is for women and children,” and he backed off and he drowned.

Ben Guggenheim was there. Yes, of the Guggenheims. As the women and children were getting on the boats, he yelled, “Tell my dearest wife that Ben Guggenheim knows his duty,” and he drowned. There was not a single fat cat who scrambled for the boats. Not one.

When the reviewer for the New York Times reviewed the film, the reviewer asked the question, “Why did the producer and the director change the truth of history on this point to bring out British sailors with handguns to drive the fat cats back?” The reviewer answered his own question. He said, “Because if they had told the truth today, nobody would have believed it.”

Now that’s a damning indictment of our culture. We live in such a me-first generation that we are no longer constrained by the internal moral compulsion that was provided for so many in Western culture by the Judeo-Christian heritage. That heritage is now so weak that you need a lot more guns to keep the peace because the philosophy becomes more and more, “Everyone for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost.”

Just as Jesus hung on the cross, when he comes to save his people from their sins he so transforms us internally that we begin to want to do what we did not want to do. That’s what new birth is all about. He does not just give us forgiveness. He changes us so that we begin to love holiness. We begin to love integrity. We begin to love self-denial. We begin to love service. We begin to love the glory of God, all of which things we once despised because of an internal moral compulsion.

In fact, we become like Jesus. Not yet perfected. We wait for the new heaven and the new earth for that, but that’s why the Bible does insist genuine followers of Jesus have turned around. They have changed. Something internal is gone. They are driven now, not simply by a bunch of rules. They are driven by transformed personalities who now love eternal, holy, Christ-honoring godly things. Lastly,

4. The man who cries out in despair trusts God.

Verses 43 to the end. We’re set up for this cry of despair by verse 43. The mockers are still at it. “He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, ‘I am the Son of God.” ’ Then we have Jesus crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Does Jesus trust God or does he not?

If you read most modern commentaries on this verse, what you are told is something like, “Even Jesus can really get discouraged. You batter somebody enough, even a Jesus, and you cry out in despair. If Jesus can get discouraged and cry out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ because he feels so abandoned, then it’s not too surprising if sometimes when we’re down in the dumps we should cry out in this way, too.”

That’s the way this passage is understood, a sort of private, individualistic, psychological interpretation, but the whole stream of the passage is full of these ironies. You have to see another one here, too. “He trusts in God.” They mean it ironically. “He doesn’t really trust in God. He trusts in God, and look. Now he’s in the pit of despair.”

But God knows, and Matthew knows, and the readers know that it’s precisely because he trusts in God that he still hangs there. In fact, the biblically informed reader will remember he is actually quoting words here from Psalm 22. In Psalm 22, the psalmist cries out in despair because of all the betrayals he has faced, but at the end of the day and at the end of the Psalm, he articulates his ongoing trust in God. That’s the whole point.

It’s a quotation from a psalm, and you’re supposed to bring the psalm with it. So also here. He trust in God, and in the midst of this trust in God, he faces the most appalling suffering. I don’t want to minimize the suffering. He feels terribly abandoned, but the point is not psychological despair. He knows even as he trusts in God that the psychological despair is the Father’s will for him. It is precisely what has been ordained.

He has been predicting five times in Matthew’s gospel that he must go to the cross because this is God’s will for him. He is not now crying out in psychological doldrums. He’s crying out of the agony he faces as the Father turns away from him even while the Son knows and trusts his Father that this is the Father’s plan, ordained from before the foundation of the earth, that we might be forgiven.

One of the best commentaries on this passage that I know anywhere is from a nineteenth-century poem by Browning. The poem is called “Cowper’s Grave.” The reference is to William Cowper. We sang one of his hymns tonight.

Alas! and did my Savior bleed,

and did my Sovereign die!

Would he devote that sacred head

for such a worm as I?

Well might the sun in darkness hide,

and shut its glories in

That was William Cowper, but William Cowper was a great scholar. He wrote learned essays for students at Cambridge and Oxford. He was a great man who was a close friend of John Newton, who was a converted slave trader. Together, they produced a little hymn book called the Olney Hymns, and most of them were either John Newton’s or even more William Cowper’s.

What people don’t always remember is that William Cowper spent a large part of his life in an insane asylum. Four times he spent years and years at a time in an insane asylum at a time when insane asylums were not nearly the kosher places they can be today. He would get more and more discouraged and more and more despairing, suicidal, and they would have to eventually institutionalize him.

In this poem by Browning, “Cowper’s Grave,” Browning pictures herself looking at Cowper’s grave and for most of the poem (it’s only a three page poem) Browning goes through the great triumphs of Cowper: the brilliant scholarship, the brilliant essays he wrote, the influence he had on students, his perseverance even in suffering. Then Browning starts talking about the hymns that taught the church to sing. Right at the very end of the poem, Browning writes,

Yea, once, Immanuel’s orphaned cry His universe hath shaken—

It went up single, echoless, “My God, I am forsaken!”

It went up from the Holy’s lips amid His lost creation,

That, of the lost, no son should use those words of desolation!

Do you hear what Browning is saying? Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” so that for all eternity William Cowper wouldn’t have to. Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” so that for all eternity Don Carson wouldn’t have to. He trusted in God all right, so much so that he could endure the ignominy and the shame that took him through the torment of abandonment and judgment and hell itself so that Don Carson would never have to cry this cry before God. Here they are then, the ironies of the cross:

On that wretched day the soldiers mocked him,

Raucous laughter in a barracks room,

“Hail the king!” they sneered, while spitting on him,

Brutal beatings on this day of gloom.

Though his crown was thorn, he was born a king—

Holy brilliance bathed in bleeding loss—

All the soldiers blind to this stunning theme:

Jesus reigning from a bloody cross.

Awful weakness marks the battered God-man,

Far too broken now to hoist the beam.

Soldiers strip him bare and pound the nails in,

Watch him hanging on the cruel tree.

God’s own temple’s down! He has been destroyed!

Death’s remains are laid in rock and sod.

But the temple rises in God’s wise ploy:

Our great temple is the Son of God.

“Here’s the One who says he cares for others,

One who said he came to save the lost.

How can we believe that he saves others

When he can’t get off that cruel cross?

Let him save himself! Let him come down now!”—

Savage jeering at the King’s disgrace.

But by hanging there is precisely how

Christ saves others as the King of grace.

Draped in darkness, utterly rejected,

Crying, “Why have you forsaken me?”

Jesus bears God’s wrath alone, dejected—

Weeps the bitt’rest tears instead of me.

All the mockers cry, “He has lost his trust!

He’s defeated by hypocrisy!”

But with faith’s resolve, Jesus knows he must

Do God’s will and swallow death for me.

Let us pray.

Forbid, merciful God, that we should ever become cool or careless or thoughtless about such love as this. From the inmost recesses of our own hearts, we too cry like the publican in the temple, “Have mercy on me a sinner.” For Jesus’ sake, amen.