Life Project Blog

Luke 23:50-24:12

It is interesting that we now discover that not all of the Jewish leaders were involved in the plot to kill Jesus; at least one Pharisee dissented, although his opposition isn’t mentioned in the accounts of the trials of Jesus. Joseph from a town called Arimathea was the man. He was wealthy as one might expect of such a person, and had a tomb that had never been used. Having influence, he approached Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus, and Pilate agreed. In haste, he took the body down from the cross and quickly laid it to rest in his tomb, and had the heavy stone rolled into place before the sun set. The women from Galilee took note that they would need to prepare spices to complete the process as soon as the Sabbath was over.

Just after sunup they approached the tomb with their preparations no doubt wondering how they would move the great stone blocking their way into the tomb, but when they arrived on the scene, the stone had already been removed. Quickly they discovered that the body was missing, and as they wondered what could have happened, they found themselves in the presence of two “men” dressed in robes that shown like lightning. The “men” asked why they were seeking the living among the dead and reminded the women of Jesus’ predictions concerning His death and resurrection…

The women hurried back to the disciples and told their story with great excitement, but the disciples thought it was nonsense. Yet Peter and John did run off to the tomb to see for themselves that it was empty.

Sadly however, they couldn’t comprehend what had happened there, for even after Jesus had told them three times that He would be handed over to evil men and killed, and then would rise from the grave on the third day, and even after the women had told them what the angels of the Lord had said, they simply couldn’t believe it.

Hadn’t Jesus warned them about this sort of thing just a few nights before?

Luke 23:26-49

Any time you read a transcript something is lost, for a transcript reads without emotion or emphasis and a great deal of the communication that took place is lost. Most human communication is nonverbal whereas a transcript is only verbal, thus voice inflection, tonal quality facial expressions and body language are all gone. As we read Luke’s words, our perception of what is going on tends to be rather stale; we have a conversation recorded between the three who are being crucified and it reads as though they are sitting by a warm fire with nice cups of coffee on the table in front of them, along with fine pastries… and nothing could be further from the truth for they were in the process of being tortured to death slowly, agonizingly…

Luke mentions that the Romans grabbed a guy named Simon on the street and forced him to carry Jesus’ cross through the streets, but he neglects to mention that Jesus was physically unable to carry it because of the beating He had receive by their hands. His back would have been torn open, He would have been a bloody mess; probably His body would be in shock. When He spoke to the “daughters of Jerusalem” (23:28-31) He would have had difficulty speaking and have been in unbelievable pain. Even to have seen this scene would probably cause most of us to lose our breakfast in the street.

Yet Jesus is quoting Scripture…

The three condemned men are stripped naked and nailed to their crosses. When they are lifted up, no doubt they were immediately in a state of panic even through their unimaginable pain, for as soon as these crosses were upright, they would be unable to breathe, for they could only take a breath by pushing up on their feet which had a nail driven through them rubbing their bare backs against the rough wood of the cross; try to imagine what that would feel like for Jesus who had His back ripped open.

That is where Luke inserts his conversation.

With all of this in mind, take another look at what is said.

One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”

But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don’t you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence?  We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.”

Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

Luke 23:39-43

Can you hear them struggling for breath, their crying out in pain, their emotion and sheer terror?

Sadly, many commentators like to get into the gruesome details of this scene to impart guilt on their readers, for after all, Jesus was bearing my sins and yours too on that cross. As for me, I don’t think that imparting guilt is a very useful strategy for teaching about this scene for guilt is a negative emotion that impairs our relationship with our Lord, for it tends to defeat the very purpose for which He went willingly to the cross His purpose was to take our guilt away. What we really have is quite different, for we have a picture of our human condition:

The first criminal is angry. Bystanders are hurling insults at Jesus, and he joins in and uses the occasion to demand that Jesus save him from the situation as though it was Jesus’ fault that he had committed a capital crime. How many people have you known who seek to blame God for their circumstances and turn away from Him?

The second criminal, realizing that he is responsible for his own situation rebukes the first man, instead asking Jesus to “remember” him in the Kingdom. Which of these two men, in spite of the horrific circumstances in which they met Jesus, was justified before God on that day?

Round about noon, the landscape became dark, perhaps a storm was moving in. The curtain in the temple is torn in two around three in the afternoon, and Jesus commends His spirit to His Father and breathes His last… The curtain that was now broken in two was what symbolically had been the separation between humanity and the presence of God. The commander of the Roman troops on the scene was moved by what he witnessed, the onlookers went on their way… and the Messianic mission of Jesus Messiah was now completed; darkness was upon the land.

Luke 22:66-23:25

Luke’s account of the trial of Jesus, which was actually three “trials” in one, is not the easiest to follow. Sadly, he left out some details that would make the whole tale more sensible to read, details that Matthew and John recorded. Yet I think there is a certain wisdom in Luke’s approach, for if nothing else, it reveals to us that the big players in this drama were really little more than pawns on a great chessboard.

First there were the Jewish leaders, who on purely human terms were the instigators of the whole thing. Of course, we’ve already seen that they were really Satan’s pawns in an attempt to cut short the mission of Jesus, the Messiah of God. Their behavior through the whole story is nothing short of ridiculous as they went against everything they believed in to silence God’s voice in the midst of His people. It would be a fair question to ask how such a thing was possible, and yet Satan uses this same tactic even today.

Herod as we know was afraid of Jesus, thinking that He might have been John the Baptist come back to life. When Jesus was brought before Herod, He was asked many questions that He chose not to answer, and then He was ridiculed and insulted, but in the end, big bad Herod returned Him to Pilate, too fearful to render the judgment he would have loved to render.

If there was anyone in this story who might have changed the tide of history, it was Pilate, for Pilate wanted no part in any of this. He knew perfectly well that the whole Jesus matter was nonsense; that Jesus had not broken any Roman law… and he said so more than once. All of the false charges, all of the blatant lies coming from the Jewish authorities, the handiwork of Satan himself, were not motivating Pilate to act against Jesus. Even so, in the end, Pilate bowed to the political pressure that was brought to bear in the form of an implied threat of rebellion.

Jesus was led off to be crucified.

In the larger sense, there is an amazing paradox in play through this drama. Satan was trying to kill Jesus before He could realize the Kingdom of God that would be Satan’s undoing. Yet apparently unknown to Satan, he was playing right into God’s hands, for God’s purpose was not to rise Israel to her former glory, it was to build a Kingdom that included all of humanity, and so, Jesus must go to the cross. One can almost say that the entire situation was God’s trap that even Satan fell into.

So off Jesus went to His destiny, a destiny that not only is Satan’s ultimate destruction, but that is also our ultimate salvation.

Luke 22:54-65

Jesus is led from the Garden by the force sent to arrest Him; He is taken to the courtyard at the home of the High Priest and held there. Peter follows at a discreet distance and quietly joins a group of people gathered around a fire in the courtyard. It would be hard for anyone to say for certain why Peter was there, other than to see what would happen to Jesus, but in due course he was recognized, first by a servant girl and then two more times. Each time someone spoke up about his identity, Peter denied ever having known Jesus.

And then the rooster crowed.

According to Luke’s narrative, Peter found himself looking right into the eyes of the Lord at that moment: He had succumbed to the temptation Jesus had warned him about, and the prediction that he would deny Jesus three times before the rooster crowed had come true.

Peter was devastated and rushed out of the courtyard and wept “bitterly”.

This is the point where I am supposed to ask if we too would deny Jesus when the going gets tough, and where you say ‘no way’… but I won’t… because there is really no way to place ourselves in Peter’s circumstances honestly. It’s kind of a funny thing, we can look back at the story of the disciples from start to finish, and find all kinds of fault with them. We can comment, as all of us have, on how they didn’t always “get it” when Jesus taught them. We can ask how they could see so many miracles and then still have questions. We can be critical all day long about the things they might have done or said, but the reality of the situation is that they are us; we are every bit as clueless, stubborn and silly as they were.

Yes, it is true that they had the advantage of being in the physical presence of Jesus and actually bearing witness to His miracles. Yet in spite of that, they had no idea how the story was going to end, even though Jesus told them several times. We must recognize that the ending of the story ran completely counter to everything they had been taught and had known… and people rising from their graves are nothing if not foreign to all of us.

We who know how the story ended and all that happened after that are still bound by the things we have been taught, the things we have seen and the things we think we know. Very often, this makes us even more clueless that the disciples were. I think that if we are honest about it, had we been in the same position as Peter was, we would have done the same thing; or we wouldn’t have been in the courtyard at all.

During this time, the soldiers guarding Jesus had a bit of fun with Him before daybreak and the momentous events that would follow.