Good Friday

Good Friday.

What is it that makes this Friday so good?

We're talking about a story of a man betrayed, spat on, mocked, flogged, whipped, and ultimately crucified by a cruel and oppressive foreign regime.

Crucifixion was so painful, they invented a word to describe the pain, excruciating.

The first century philosopher Cicero said of crucifixion, it was a most cruel and horrifying punishment.

Quintilian noted the social shame of the act, saying, whenever we crucify the guilty, the most crowded roads are chosen, where the most people can see and be moved by this fear.

The story of Good Friday that we remember today is a horrifying, bloody, and cruel story, and yet we do remember it every year.

So again, what is it that makes this Good Friday good?

In other words, what kind of day is this Good Friday?

I think it is firstly a day of derision.

Derision means contemptuous ridicule or mockery, insult.

The story of Good Friday that we read certainly is full of insult and derision.

Chris read out for us the passage that we will be working through today in the message.

And the first few verses set the scene of the story.

We learn a few things that Jesus was probably too weak from the whipping that they gave him to carry his own cross, so they enlisted Simon to carry it for him.

The second thing we learn is Jesus was taken outside of the walls of Jerusalem to a place called Golgotha where they crucified him.

And then I want to pick up from verse 25 of Mark 15.

It was nine in the morning when they crucified him.

The written notice of the charge against him read, The King of the Jews.

In the first century, it was commonplace to put what was called a titulus above the cross that was positioned right here that said the crime that the criminal was being crucified for.

And we read that the crime Jesus was crucified for was being the King of the Jews.

There's a kind of a visual irony, isn't there?

That here's a sign that says this man is the King of the Jews, and yet Jesus beaten half naked on the cross looks anything like a king.

Certainly not the King of the Jews.

There's a visual irony in verse 27 as we read down.

It says they crucified two rebels with him, one on his right hand and one on his left.

Earlier in this Gospel that we're reading, the Gospel of Mark, two of Jesus' followers, his disciples, came to him and asked him a question, and this is what they said.

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to Jesus.

Teacher, they said, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.

That's a bold question to ask Jesus.

What do you want me to do for you, Jesus asked.

They replied, let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.

What they're asking is, when you come into your most glorious moment, Jesus, when it all happens, when you are at your highest point of glory, let us stand at your right and left.

Jesus says, you don't know what you're asking.

There is a narrative irony here that Mark is inviting us to see that the moment of Jesus' greatest glory is right now on the cross.

And it's not James and John on his right and left, but two criminals crucified next to him.

Verse 29.

Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, so, you who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself.

In the same way, the chief priests and the teachers of the law mocked him among themselves.

He saved others, they said, but he can't save himself.

Let this Messiah, this King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe.

Those crucified with him also heaped insults on him.

I think to those who passed by Jesus on the cross, they were probably familiar with who this man was, with the things that he said, the things that he did.

And to see Jesus on the cross, knowing everything that he did and said, would have seemed like the most terrible waste of potential.

And so they mock him.

Even today, people might say, Oh, Jesus said lovely things.

Love your neighbor, bless those who persecute you.

He said lovely things, but what a shame that they crucified him.

Even today, when we hold together the life of Jesus and the death of Jesus, on the surface, it seems like a waste, a waste of potential.

And so Good Friday is a day of derision.

What kind of day is Good Friday?

Secondly, it is a day of darkness.

Verse 33.

At noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon.

And at three in the afternoon, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, Iloi, Iloi, lema sabachthani, which means, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

When some of those standing near him heard this, they said, listen, he's calling Elijah.

A day of darkness.

Often we use the word darkness in a sort of metaphorical way, and there's a lot of overtones that the word darkness can refer to.

And I think a lot of those overtones are found in the darkness in the passage.

Firstly, there is a literal darkness.

Today we might say, it's dark in here, turn on the lights.

Literally darkness.

And that darkness is found in the story.

It's unlikely that it was a solar eclipse or a lunar eclipse because we know that this happened at noon, so the sun is straight above, and Passover happened at the full moon, which means the moon is at the other side.

So it's probably not an eclipse, but some kind of crazy, miraculous, literal darkness comes over the land.

Secondly, there is a moral darkness.

We would say when some terrible crime is committed, it was so dark, it is a dark act.

It means evil, and this story is morally dark, that an innocent man would be tortured and brutally executed.

It is morally dark.

Thirdly, there is, I think, an emotional darkness.

When a great person dies, we often say it's a dark day.

What we mean is it's a day of mourning, of sorrow, because we've lost someone.

And there is an emotional darkness in the story of Good Friday.

Jesus is separated by death from those he has spent three years with, full time.

There is an emotional darkness in Good Friday.

I'm sure you've heard the quote before, darkness is nothing but the absence of light.

I'm not a scientist, but I'm pretty sure what that means is darkness is not a thing.

Light is a thing.

It's a wave and a particle that comes to us.

But darkness is not a thing, but it is the absence of light.

Well, Jesus called himself the light of the world in John 9 verse 5.

He said, while I'm in the world, I'm the light of the world.

And I think that's just it, that the light of the world was leaving the world.

So what is left but darkness.

And in the same way, the good of the world was leaving the world, so what is left is evil.

The love and the joy of the world was leaving the world.

And so all that is left is mourning and loss and sorrow.

There is a fourth kind of darkness, which I think is probably the most central aspect of the metaphor that Mark is trying to convey to us.

It is a theological darkness.

Theological is a word that means to do with God or the study of God.

It is the darkness of God that comes over the cross in Good Friday.

Hundreds of years before the story that we're reading today, God spoke into the Bible through a man called Amos.

He said this in Amos 8 and 9.

In that day, declares the Sovereign Lord, I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight.

When you read the whole passage, it's talking about this coming day.

And on that day, the prophets foretold that God would take all of the wickedness and sin and evil in the world.

He would take it all, and it would be a day of darkness.

That the wrath of God, the judgment of God would come on evil.

And so when Jesus hung on the cross and there was darkness, it was the darkness of the wrath of God, a theological darkness.

Jesus felt it.

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

He felt this separation from God.

So Good Friday is a day of darkness.

What kind of day is Good Friday?

Thirdly, it is a day of death.

In verse 36, Someone ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put it on a staff and offered it to Jesus to drink.

Now leave him alone.

Let's see if Elijah comes to take him down, he said.

With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.

The Roman cross, which is symbolized next to me, was an instrument of execution.

It's how they would kill a lot of people.

In fact, we know from some of the early historians that the Roman soldiers crucified so many people they got bored of doing it the same old way.

So they would crucify in all different patterns and orientations.

Crucifixion typically killed its victims by asphyxiation because the crucified person could not lift themselves up to get breath into their lungs.

And so they would die by asphyxiation.

And if it wasn't that, it was the exhaustion or the thirst.

We know that it would often take two or three days for people to die by crucifixion.

And yet, Jesus dies after six hours.

We also know that often soldiers would, in order to speed up what was a very long and slow death, would break the legs of those who were crucified so they couldn't hold themselves up.

We read that Jesus was crucified at nine in the morning, and in the story, it's now three in the afternoon.

So six hours have passed, and after six hours, someone offers him wine vinegar, maybe to refresh him, maybe to numb some of the pain that he was feeling, maybe to give him the strength to continue to fight, to fight death and hold on.

But even still, Jesus was dead after six hours.

It is a very unusual death by crucifixion, to die after six hours.

What that tells us is Jesus was not resisting death.

He wasn't fighting.

He wasn't holding on as long as he could.

Instead, the exact opposite is true, that Jesus, with a loud cry, gave himself up to death.

He released himself into death freely.

He did not fight it.

And he did it because that was always the plan.

The plan was that Jesus would die, and so he did not resist death when he was on the cross.

You might have been with us about three months ago.

We met in this room to celebrate Christmas, the birth of Jesus.

And Christmas is funny because it's a joyful time, family and friends and celebrating Jesus came, and yet the shadow of the cross looms even over Christmas, because this baby who came to us was born to die.

And Easter has some of the joy of Christmas that he came to us in the first place, and there's no Christmas without Easter and no Easter without Christmas.

Jesus knew he was going to die, so he released himself into death.

Karen read for us earlier part of Isaiah 53, and I'd like to read some more of that now.

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering and familiar with pain, like one from whom people hide their faces.

He was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities.

The punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray.

Each of us has turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth.

He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.

By oppression and judgment, he was taken away.

Yet who of his generation protested?

For he was cut off from the land of the living.

For the transgression of my people he was punished.

He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.

Jesus knew he was gonna die.

I imagine him reading this passage and thinking of the coming day when that would be him on the cross, when he would take those nails and be pierced for our transgressions.

Jesus knew he was gonna die, and so he freely gave himself up to die.

And the reason he died is that you and I should have been on that cross.

You and I have been broken by our own sin and by the sin of others, and it brings death into this world.

But Jesus took that death for us.

So Good Friday is a day of death.

What kind of day is Good Friday?

Ultimately, it is the day of decision.

We read in verse 37, With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.

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

And when the centurion who stood there in front of Jesus saw how he died, he said, Surely this man was the Son of God.

When Jesus died, two significant things happened.

Firstly, the curtain in the temple, which was the barrier between the presence of God and the rest of humanity, was torn in two.

What that symbolized was the presence of God is now everywhere.

It is available to all people, not just in the temple.

The second thing that happened was a centurion, a gentile, not a Jew, the most unlikely person, becomes the first in all of the Gospel of Mark to make the declaration that Jesus is the Son of God.

Seeing how Jesus died, he said, There's something different about this man.

He must be the Son of God.

The centurion was the first person to say that.

So Good Friday is a day of derision, of darkness, and of death, but ultimately for you and I, it is the day of decision.

On the cross above Jesus, it said, King of the Jews.

That's why they crucified him, because he was the King of the Jews.

And so the decision that you and I have to make today is, was he the King of the Jews or not?

Was Jesus King?

Was he Son of God, Messiah or not?

And obviously, there's only two options.

Either Jesus was not the King of the Jews, and in that case, his death is the death of a liar and a lunatic, maybe someone who said nice things, but he deserved what he got, because he was not what he claimed to be.

That's one option.

The other option is Jesus actually was the King of the Jews.

He is the Son of God and the Messiah.

There's only two options.

And when you look at Jesus on the cross, as we do this Good Friday, it is the day of decision.

Do you believe he is King or not?

Is he the Son of God or is he not?

There's only two options.

Like the Centurion, you and I stand or most of us sit.

I'm the only one standing.

We sit and we look at the cross, and we're forced to make that decision.

Do we think this man was the Son of God or not?

You know which side I fall on.

I think most of us in this room, we believe he is the Son of God.

He is God himself who took our death on him.

In fact, he took our derision, our darkness, and our death on himself so that what makes Good Friday good for us is because it was bad for him.

Jesus took our derision, darkness and death on himself in order that we might have not those things, but to be loved, forgiven and freed, to know God, which is eternal life.

Jesus took the bad for us in order that Good Friday might be good for us.

And so I implore you to make a decision this Easter.

Is Jesus the son of God or is he not?

You must choose one of those two options.

And I hope you'll come back on Easter Sunday to see how the story pans out, because there's a good finish.

So I'm going to pray now, and as I pray, if you would like to declare maybe for the first time or in a sense of coming back to it, you would like to say, I do believe Jesus is the son of God.

This Easter, I want to recommit, re-believe or believe for the first time.

I'm going to pray for you, and you can repeat these words in your heart as I pray.

And please tell someone, we'd love to know that you've made this decision.

We'd love to help you out in the journey of seeing what it means to declare Jesus is King.

Would you like to stand as I pray?

Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, we stand now before your cross, and we behold how you died.

We see that you took our derision, our darkness, and our death, and we thank you for that.

You're the only one who could save us, and you did save us.

So we receive that with gratitude, and I'm praying for those hearing my voice now in the room and online.

For those who haven't yet decided that you are the Son of God, I pray you would speak to them now.

And if they want to make that declaration for the first time, that you would fill them with your Holy Spirit even now, that they would know the forgiveness and the love and the freedom that they have in you, that you would make them born again.

And I pray that for all of us this Easter.

Make us new again, God, in the midst of a world that is broken and full of evil and wickedness.

Transform us with your love.

We thank you that Good Friday can be good for us because it was bad for you, Jesus.

So it's our honor to come before you now, to come to the table and to glorify you and to say thank you.

And we say this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

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