Matthew 27:1–54
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You know, the term Good Friday often strikes people as a strange kind of phrase. I mean, if this right here is the day we come together and remember when Jesus Christ was betrayed and unjustly tried and then cruelly and painfully crucified, then if all of that happened, why do we call it then good? And when we come to this day, every day, three days before Easter, every year, what's the right frame of mind that you're supposed to have on a day that's called Good Friday, and yet it's a day about the crucifixion of our Lord. I mean, is this a time to mourn for our sin, to mourn for our Savior's death, to remember in some great detail our guilt and contemplate how our guilt is what caused the innocent Jesus to be nailed to the cross? Or is it a time, on the other hand, to celebrate, to remember and exult in what Jesus's death on the cross accomplished for us, the Forgiveness of sins, salvation, eternal life.
And I guess that's the question, isn't it? Did you weep today or did you rejoice? Did you laugh or did you cry? Well, I think the answer is that both weeping and rejoicing are appropriate. On Good Friday, we mourn and we celebrate all at the same time. I want to take a few minutes with you this evening to just meditate on that. the reasons for both our sadness on this day and our joy. Just a few minutes ago, we read from Matthew chapter 27.
And I hope you were able to kind of enter into that story and take in some of its details, some of its atmosphere. It's hard to even imagine the scene that unfolded on that day, that Friday, so many years ago. The whole land covered in a thick supernatural darkness. And when it did, the silence of fear and dread following, except for maybe one or two voices off in the distance cackling around the cross and then when everything was silent and everything was dark and the blackness rose in one instance the cracked voice of Jesus crying out in that foreign tongue Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani and there has not been a day in all of history that was deeper or darker than that and there have never been any words in history that have been spoken that were deeper and darker than that Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani than he, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
There's an eternity of mystery in those words. You could spend a lifetime staring into those words, studying them, understanding their depths, and you're going to come no closer to understanding the full depth of it than the day in which you started. There's an eternity of suffering in those words, but also an eternity of love. There's love for his Father, whose presence Jesus now feels cut off from. There's love for us, his people. Who were the reason the whole thing had to happen in the first place? And then there's that question in it.
It's not just, my God, my God, you have forsaken me. There's a question in it. It's, why have you forsaken me? Why have I been cut off from life while your face is turned away? Why? Friends, that is the most important question that has ever been asked in the history of the world. And it is the most important question that you yourself will ever grapple with. Why was Jesus forsaken by the Father?
Why was he abandoned and rejected by God? Why did the Father, the creator of the universe, turn his back on his son in wrath and disgust? The answer is because of me. And if you're a Christian, it's because of you, so that you might live. That's why. I want us to spend just a few more moments thinking tonight about who Jesus is and what he did, who it was exactly that hung on the cross and why he did it and what he was accomplishing when he did. And I want to do it by considering three different things that he said while he hung there and what those words show Jesus to be and to be doing.
Here's the first one. He said, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. And it shows Jesus in that moment to be a man of just unfathomable love for people around him. A kind of love that you and I don't experience for other people. A kind of love that can't exist in us and yet did exist in the Son of God. So when Jesus arrived at Golgotha carrying his own cross, the soldiers nailed him to the cross and lifted it up into place. He had a condemned thief on either side of him, dying right along with him. And then according to Luke in his gospel, those soldiers who had just nailed him to the cross knelt down at the foot of the cross and started to cast lots.
In other words, they were throwing dice in order to divide up his belongings. Apparently this was a common practice in crucifixion. I mean, the crucified man wasn't going to need those belongings anymore. And so the Roman government said, all right, you soldiers can take as your pay for standing here and watching these men die all the belongings that he has. You can throw dice for them or you can divide them up, whatever you want to do, but they're yours. Do with them what you want. So Jesus, hanging on the cross, in full humiliation, taking the wrath of God, had to look down from the cross and see his belongings being used as the reward in a game of dice.
And yet what came out of his mouth was the most amazing thing. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. There's some debate, of course, about what Jesus meant when he said that, even who he was praying for there. Was he praying for the Roman soldiers? Was he praying for the Jews who condemned him? Was it all of them together? I think the best answer is probably all of them. I don't see any reason to limit the scope of the prayer. What does he mean by they don't know what they're doing? I think probably for the Roman soldiers who were casting lots for his clothing down at the foot of the cross, he's recognizing there that they have no real idea who it is that they're crucifying.
And by the end of the whole affair, they would have some idea. One of the centurions looked up at the cross after Jesus died and said, Surely this man was the Son of God. He had some category by the end. But right there at the beginning, they didn't know what they were doing. Maybe they had heard of Jesus' claims to be the King of the Jews, but they crucified a lot of false messiahs of the Jews. It happened all the time. So for them, maybe it was a prayer that they would come to know, as at least one of them did, what they did not know already. For the Jews, it was a bit different.
The Jews that were standing there watching this whole affair knew what they were seeing. They knew who they were crucifying. They'd seen the miracles. They'd heard the teaching. They knew exactly what they were doing. So for them, Father, forgive them, was a prayer, a plea for repentance. It was a plea that God would bring them to accept what they were at that moment rejecting and to embrace what they were at that moment hating. But whatever the details of all that are, here's what I want you to see. To pray a prayer like that, Father, forgive them, for people who have flogged you and pushed a crown of thorns into your head and driven nails through your wrists and your ankles to pray a prayer like that for those people is not an ordinary response.
It is not the normal thing that you or I would pray in that kind of situation. We would pray for vengeance like so many of the Jews did when they were being crucified by the Romans. God, let your fire fall on these people. Judge them for what they're doing. nobody prayed father forgive them and yet even here jesus his heart is fixed on those who are killing him and his desire for them is not that they would be wiped out but that they would be saved listen you ever have a moment where you're whether you're a christian or not where you have a sense of fear to come to jesus maybe there are times when he just seems too removed, too far away, too glorious, enthroned in heaven with the great crown of the universe on his head.
There's a sense of fear about going to him with your sin, with your plea for mercy, with your request for him to save you. You need to understand, and you can understand it from just these words right here. Jesus does not stand there with his arms crossed with a look of disappointment on his face when you come into his presence. Look, if his heart was for the good, if his heart was for the forgiveness of even the Romans and the Jews who nailed him to the cross, then I promise you, his heart is for your good also, your restoration and your forgiveness.
He's a man of unfathomable love. Second thing he said, we've already talked a tiny bit about it. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Shows Jesus to be, yes, a man of sorrows, but a man of sorrows with a purpose. See, Jesus' trial before the Jewish great council and then before Pilate the governor happened extremely early on Friday morning. So it happened in sort of the wee hours of the morning and carried on through the early morning hours. So by the time the Roman soldiers had scourged him and forced him to carry his cross through the city and out to the place of the skull called Golgotha, it was probably something like mid to late morning by the time they actually nailed him to the cross and lifted it up into place.
And usually, in a high-profile case like this, you would get around the crucifixion, around the headed, the procession out to Golgotha, you'd get this initial sort of explosion of euphoria and excitement. You'd have people all around ridiculing and insulting and laughing. Everybody in on the joke except the man being crucified. But crucifixions didn't typically end with a great climax. They just lingered. The crucified man just lingered, sometimes for days, draining of blood and life and energy until they were just kind of gone.
So what would happen long before the man died is that the euphoria of the crowd almost always eventually just kind of wore off. The people got tired or they got hungry, quiet, settled in around the place of crucifixion. But with Jesus, this was different because Matthew tells us that at the sixth hour, we're talking high noon here. Noon. And for three hours thereafter, from noon to 3 p.m., an unearthly darkness settled over the whole land. And try to imagine that. And it's spring in the Middle East, in Jerusalem. It's sunny and it's hot. And all of a sudden, an unearthly darkness closes in around you. Can you imagine that? The fear that would grip your heart, the cold that would seep into your chest. And why was that darkness there? There has been through the centuries so much ink spilled trying to figure out what this darkness was. Some have tried to tie it to a solar eclipse that is said to have happened sometime around that time. Other people have said that, well, it was just a
big severe dust storm that came through Jerusalem at that moment. But none of that works. None of that explains the darkness. That's not how Matthew describes it. It's not how other writers describe it. Those people knew eclipses. They knew what a dust storm was. They wouldn't have thought of that as being supernatural but what they say is that a darkness covered the land luke simply and kind of eerily just says the sun's light failed this was something supernatural but the important question the thing that really matters is not what happened exactly god can know that and take care of it what matters really is the reason for it and it has to do completely with the question And Jesus screamed out into the heavens once the darkness had been there for three hours.
My God, why have you forsaken me? You come to a phrase like that in Scripture, there are a few of them that preachers kind of fear to tread. There are places in Scripture where you just really don't want to go there because no amount or beauty or eloquence of words could ever capture the depth of what's happening. The Garden of Gethsemane is one of those. How do you talk about what was going on between Jesus and his father when he says, my God, let this cup pass from me if it's possible, and heaven says no?
How do you deal with the Son of God crying out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? How do you deal with that? I mean, the depths of the meaning and mystery there just leave you kind of standing helpless, like looking off into an abyss that you're never, ever going to understand. I mean, think about it. God, the Son, abandoned by God, the Father. God, forsaking God. No wonder there was an earthquake. No wonder the world was shaken. It's a wonder the universe continued to exist when that happened. See, in that moment, Jesus became horribly conscious of a severing of his relationship with the Father.
And as his eyes looked up into the darkness of the heavens, he cried out, Why is this happening? Why have you forsaken me? Well, there are a few reasons, and one of those reasons is that he was holding in that moment on his own shoulders the horror of his people's sins. The New Testament writers knew that. Peter says it. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree. Paul says it. God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, which is incredible to think about.
And Jesus, for all of his life, for all of his 33 earthly years, never knew sin. not a bit, not in word, not in thought, not in action, not even in motivation. He was completely pure. His communion with the Father completely uninterrupted until that moment. But at that moment, as he hung on the cross, in that moment, all the sin and the rebellion and the filth and the hatred and the black iniquity of his people is placed on him as if all of it were his.
And try to fathom that you and I, you and I are often weighed down by the guilt of having to bear the sin of one person, ourselves. It crushes us sometimes. And yet Jesus bore the sin of millions. And friends, that sin wasn't just mistakes. That sin wasn't just little white lies. It wasn't just little ethical lapses or bad choices. It was rebellion against the Father that was placed on him. He was treated as a rebel against his own father. Paul says that we, as human beings, are filled with all manner of sin. But friends, in that moment, you know what Paul would say?
He would have said, Jesus was filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. He was treated as a gossip, a slanderer, a hater of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, an inventor of evil, disobedient, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. That's why Jesus' eyes went wide with horror and his soul was amazed. Because the horror of all your sin and all my sin and all the sin of millions of his people pressed like a hot iron into his pure soul he was at that moment the sin bearer and because of that he was abandoned by his father the prophet Habakkuk said that God's eyes are too pure even to look on evil and now with all the sins of his people lodged against him Jesus saw his father's face turn away in disgust he felt the perfect loving
communion that he'd had with his father for all eternity stretch and thin and break i wonder if you've ever watched a friendship just end right before your eyes somebody that you love somebody that you care for and you just you watch the whole thing just come to an end in a moment it's just like a knife hollowing out the soul but if you've experienced that friend that's not even a beginning of what Jesus endured here is his father's eyes hardened against him and turned away and as they did Jesus cried my God my God it's an interesting phrase isn't it what why does he say my God my God you notice there that it's not my father like a child crying out in the in the night as he watches his father walk away until now in the story of Jesus's life it always had been it had always been my father even in the garden of gethsemane it was my father if it is possible let this cup pass but not now now it's my god as if the consciousness of his relationship
with his father not not the reality of it but jesus's own sense of his sonship with the father has been obliterated and all he's conscious of on the cross is the reality of being the forsaken and rejected bearer of sin. And I want you to notice, too, when he cries out, my Father, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? No answer comes. The heavens are brass. In the past, an answer had always come. This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.
I mean, think about if that had happened right here on the cross. Everything would have been different. But there was nothing. Even in the wilderness, when he was tempted by Satan, an angel came to minister to him. In Gethsemane, when that trial was over, an angel came to minister to him. That was the last one, you realize. The angel in Gethsemane was the last that came to minister to Jesus. After that, the soldiers were going to spit in his face, and no angel was going to be there to avenge him. The whip was going to cut into his flesh, and no angel was going to stretch out his arms over the back of the king to bear that lash for him.
He would be exposed and humiliated on the cross and no battalion of angels was going to come shield him from those mocking eyes all around him. Why? Why didn't they come? It's not that they wouldn't have. It's not that they didn't want to. I imagine the armies of heaven were lined up on the edge of heaven to come save the king and all their eyes turned to the throne of God, but the command never came because the Father had his purposes. As much as Jesus would cry out, my God, why have you forsaken me?
There would be no answer from heaven. Another reason he cried out that very phrase is that in that moment, because he was the sin bearer, he was engulfed by the righteous wrath of God. See, what Jesus suffered on the cross was not just passive abandonment. And that would be bad enough. It would be horrible enough to endure his father's abandonment. But that wasn't it. he endured the fire of God's wrath against sin. And that's the point of the darkness.
It's the darkness of judgment. It's not a darkness of preserving Jesus' dignity, of hiding him from the eyes of the crowd. It's a darkness of judgment. That's what it always is in the Bible. Back in Eden, God pronounced a sentence of death, and that sentence of death had been hanging like a sword over humanity for all eternity, for all of the story of history. And now it falls on the cross in all its fury. And like the song we sang a few minutes ago said, it pierced Jesus' heart. That's what the darkness was about.
On that day, declares Yahweh Almighty, I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasting into weeping and all your songs into lamentation. I will make it like weeping for an only sun. And the end of it shall be a bitter day. You see the point of that? That's what Jesus suffered. Far worse than the nails, far worse than the thorns or the spear or the mockery or the rough wood on his back, far worse than all of that was enduring the wrath of Almighty God for sin.
And why did he do it? For us. For you and for me. That's why he did it. He didn't need to die. He could have stayed in heaven. He could have lived a perfect life here on earth and set an example for us and then ascended into glory with the angels. He could have done it. but if he was going to save you and me if he was going to save his people from the wrath of god there was no other way for it to happen than for him to die friends that's the gospel the good news of christianity is that no matter how rebellious you are against god no matter how apathetic you are or have been to god jesus stands ready to save you if you will come to him in faith you know faith is it's just trust faith is trust it's nothing more complex than that it's to look at Jesus and say Jesus I believe that you are in fact the sin bearer and I believe you can save me so bear my sin so that I don't have to it's
to trust him to do just that you know there was one more thing that Jesus cried out on the cross it is finished comes in John chapter 19 you know it's not a cry of despair some people have read it that way my life is finished my purpose is finished I'm beaten and broken by the Romans but it wasn't a cry of despair how do we know that how do we know that it didn't just sort of slip off his lips as the last cry of a dying man how do we know that well because he asks for a drink right before he says it he wants his throat wet and so that the voice can cry out to the heavens and everyone can hear it it's not a whisper it's a cry of triumph it is finished in other words everything necessary for your salvation and my salvation and all his people's salvation was done to telestai he would have said in greek he's won a couple of details in that story of jesus's death i think that help
us see what he won. First, Matthew tells us that the curtain of the temple was torn from top to bottom. It's an extraordinary thing because this was the huge, towering, thick curtain that separated the Holy of Holies in the middle of the temple from the rest of the building. In other words, it separated the people from God. They could not come into his presence because that curtain in the temple veiled and shut off the place of the presence of God. But now, Matthew says, it's ripped. and Matthew says it was ripped from top to bottom.
How would you know that? I mean, if you just walked into the Holy of Holies and you saw it ripped, you wouldn't know that it was ripped from top to bottom. How did they know that? Somebody had to be there. Somebody saw it. Somebody saw the finger of God tearing that curtain that had separated the people from him from top to bottom in half. And for the first time since Adam and Eve had been exiled from the Garden of Eden and kicked out of God's presence, People were welcomed by the Lord back into the most holy place where God dwelled. The last sacrifice has been made.
You know what that means if you're a Christian? What that means if you're a Christian is that your access to God, your access into the presence of God is not in any way dependent on you. It's not dependent on how holy your week has been. It's not dependent on how many quiet times you've had or how you've managed to avoid this or that sin or how you've parented your children. your right to come into the presence of God is now cemented open by the blood of Jesus. Never ever say, I can't face him.
Friends, the curtain has been torn in two and God says, come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Second detail I want you to see, we read about it in Matthew's account a few minutes ago. He says there was an earthquake and that tombs were opened and that certain people rose from the dead and went into the city. There are a lot of questions about what that means. One of which is, well, what did they do if the tombs cracked open on the day that Jesus rose and then they rose from the dead? Did they just kind of walk around in the graveyard for, you know, three days until Jesus rose and then they went into the city? But that's not what it says. It kind of sounds like it does, but what it actually says is the earth shook and the rocks were split and the tombs were opened. And then after the resurrection, the bodies were raised and they went into the city with Jesus. I think it's just a fascinating image. A fascinating image because as Jesus is dying on the cross, Satan and all of his cronies in hell are gloating and cackling and laughing. We've beat
him. The son of God is dead. And then they hear two things. The first one is the ripping of the curtain in the temple, and the second one is all the tombs cracking open like a locked and loaded gun aimed at his head. You got to wonder what Satan thought at that moment. My guess is that amidst all the cackling, all the laughing of the demons of hell, when Satan heard those two sounds, the big thing that came into his mind was, oh no, this is not going to end well for me.
Friends, all of that is what Jesus has won for you. Access to God, forgiveness of sins, the end of death and hell. There are some of you here who need to believe the good news of Christianity for the very first time. You need to come to Jesus and you need to put your faith in him and be saved from your sins. There are others of you here who have been Christians for a really long time. And what you need to do is believe again. You need to renew your trust in Jesus, your awe and amazement at what he won for you on Calvary.
You need to embrace him again as your king and as your savior and let the water of forgiveness and gratitude wash through your heart again. Even tonight, you need to honor your king. Most of you know that one of my favorite stories in all of history is the Lord of the Rings. At the end of that story, when everything is done, the climax of the story is done, everything is finished, one of the main characters wakes up after a long sleep. He's in his bed surrounded by his friends, and he asks, what day is it?
How long have I been asleep? And this is what one of the other characters says to him. He says, it's the 14th of the new year, or if you like, the 8th day of April in the Shire Reckoning. But in Gondor, that's the nation that's kind of been formed around this whole story. In Gondor, the new year will always now begin upon the 25th of March. Classically, Good Friday is what that is. It will now begin upon the 25th of March when the evil one fell.
And when you were brought out of the fire to the king. He has tended you, and now he awaits you. You shall eat and drink with him. When you are ready, I will lead you to him. Friends, you, if you are a Christian, were brought out of the fire to the king. That's a reason to celebrate. So let's do so as we celebrate the Lord's Supper together. Let me pray. Our Lord Jesus, we thank you that because of your life and death and resurrection for us, as our representative and substitute, as our great king.
Because of what you did for us, we have been brought out of the fire to you. You have tended us, and now you await us on your throne in heaven. And there will come a day when you will return, and we will eat and drink with you for all eternity. Our Lord Jesus, we thank you for these things, and we pray that even as we take this Lord's Supper tonight, as we symbolize that great feast on the last day. Lord, we pray that our hearts would be filled up with gratitude and joy because of what you have done for us on Calvary.
We pray all of these things in the name of Jesus and always to his honor and glory. Amen.