Saddam Hussein was the President of Iraq for many years. He was a brutal man, known for suppressing rebellion ruthlessly- tens of thousands of Iraqis suffered and died under his rule. In the end he was defeated by the Americans and British and ended up a prisoner of the Americans.
In 2006, Hussein was facing his execution, knowing he was soon to die by hanging- a penalty that he surely deserved. And he asks to watch a film- ‘The Passion of the Christ’ by Mel Gibson. A film which describes the suffering and death of Christ. Why did he ask to watch that film? After watching it, he said the Passion of the Christ was the best movie he’d ever seen but he was angry at the way the Jesus had been treated- he said Iraqis would have treated him better.
Even as brutal a man as Saddam Hussain was angry at the way Christ was treated. Jesus suffering started with the betrayal of one of his own team, a man whom he had poured his life into- Judas.
Judas has been following Jesus, hearing his teaching, seeing his miracles and even performing miracles himself as Jesus sent him and the others out to preach the Gospel. Judas lived close to Jesus, but Judas was a greedy man, he loved money. Jesus and the disciples are in the house of a man called Simon the leper and a woman there does a lovely thing, she pours a very expensive oil on Jesus’ feet. It was worth a year’s salary, thousands of pounds. And Jesus commends her and says, she has anointed him for his burial.
And it seems that when Judas hears Jesus saying this, he realises that Jesus will soon go to his death. And so he thinks to himself, what can I get out of my relationship with Jesus before it’s too late?
And so Judas goes to the Jewish leaders and offers to betray Jesus to them. They are delighted because they know they can’t arrest Jesus openly during the day, he is too popular, it will cause a riot. They need help to arrest him quietly, secretly. And so they offer Judas 30 silver coins to betray Jesus and he agrees. 30 silver coins was the price of a slave. A slave was a status symbol. You were moving up in the world when you had a slave- like buying a smart new car today. Judas betrayed Jesus for that.
He had been with Jesus for three years and all the wonderful things he had said and done, how could he betray Jesus? Well how can we? For covetousness, greed is something that can lead any of us to turn our back on Jesus.
As we read the account of Jesus’ final days and hours, it’s clear that Jesus is in full control of what happens in these final days of his life. He decides when and how and where everything happens. He knows Judas is going to betray him, but he doesn’t let it happen before the right time. And so He makes arrangements for the use of an upper room in a house in Jerusalem to have the Last Supper. He tells two of his disciples to go ahead and tells them to keep their eyes open for a man carrying a water jug, he tells them to follow that man and He will lead them to the house where they are to have Passover. Why the code, why the elaborate precautions? Why did he not just tell his disciples exactly where they were going? Because He wanted to keep it a secret from Judas. Judas could not know beforehand where the Upper Room was and where they would be having the Last Supper. If Judas had known, then he could have tipped off the Jewish leaders early and Jesus might have been arrested in the Upper Room, there would have been no Last Supper.
And so that evening the disciples gather round Jesus for one last meal. All 12 of the disciples are there, including Judas. It’s the Wednesday evening, Jesus knew he would be crucified on the following day- Thursday – which was the Jewish feast of Passover. Part of the feast of Passover involved the ceremonial killing of thousands of lambs in the Temple complex. Jesus died on the day all the lambs were being killed, right on time, for he was the true Lamb of God who died for the sins of the world.
And so Jesus and his disciples took the Passover meal a day early on the Wednesday. He died and was buried on the Thursday and his body was in the tomb Friday, Saturday and the third day was Sunday- he was resurrected after three days. So really we should talk about ‘Good Wednesday’ not ‘Good Friday’, because Jesus died on the Wednesday.
Jesus at the meal says to his disciples that one of them will betray him. He knows. He knows that all his disciples will run away- he tells them they are about to do it. And yet knowing He is going to be betrayed and abandoned, he washes their feet and then takes this meal with them, offering them the wine and bread. Jesus told us to love and he gave us an example of it. John’s gospel says ‘Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.’
Jesus is facing the most painful experience possible, and yet as he leaves the upper room, his concern is for his disciples, not for himself. He is aware that the coming ordeal will be too much for them and so he warns and prepares them. In this way though they will still fail him at first, they will be able to come to terms with the experience afterwards. How kind. Jesus works with us in that way still.
He tells them that He will be struck, they will scatter, but after he has risen He will meet them in Galilee. When they leave Jerusalem, they won’t be leaving behind his corpse in the city but they will meet him, alive in Galilee. He gives them hope- the hope that they would need to get through the coming trial.
‘After I have been raised, I will go before you to Galilee’ he says. Galilee is so lovely compared to the hot noisy smelly streets of Jerusalem- how their hearts would have leapt! To get back to the good old days in Galilee, back to the sunshine, the lake and the open air, without these scheming enemies in back streets and in shadows.
God knows how to give us hope, he knows what will lift our spirits and he makes promises to us that help us to keep going in the dark times. And He always keeps his promises- even if it requires a resurrection for him to do it.
Well they go to Gethsemane- which is described as a garden. It was on the slopes of the Mount of Olives and so appears to have been a grove of olive trees. He leaves eight of his disciples a distance away and takes with him Peter, James and John and goes a bit further on into the grove, The full weight of what He is about to endure is starting to settle one him. He says to them ‘My soul is so very sorrowful that I could die.’ Or to put it another way- ‘I am so very sorrowful that it is killing me.’ The word ‘sorrowful’ is ‘perilipsos’ which means ‘deeply distressed’. The distress is enough to kill him. And He needs all the help he can get, which is why He wants his closest disciples to keep watch with him, which means keep awake nearby. It would be encouraging for him for his disciples to do that.
Jesus needed encouragement, like any of us, he needed the moral support of his friends. He would feel he wasn’t going through it on his own.
Peter, James and John are about a stone’s throw away from Jesus according to Luke’s version. And thus could hear him pray. The book of Hebrews says during the days of Jesus life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death. That seems to be a how Jesus prayed in the garden of Gethsamene- he prayed with loud cries and tears there and the text says he was lying on his face before his Father.
He has this conflict going on within him between his natural revulsion at the sheer pain and suffering He is about to endure and on the other hand, his desire to obey His Father’s will.
It’s the greatest battle of his life.
He is asking if his Father has a plan B. He is willing to do plan A, but he is asking if there is an alternative plan that his Father might accept, a plan that is less painful.
We get a real insight here into Jesus’ relationship with his Father. Jesus was human- yes the Son of God, but fully human also. That meant that his knowledge was limited. He didn’t know everything. He didn’t know if his Father had a possible alternative plan. And so He is asking about it in the hope there is. But he is willing to accept a no.
And we can investigate God’s will in our prayers also. We can ask.
He returns after a while to his disciples and he finds them sleeping. And he rebukes them- ‘could you not keep awake with me for one hour?’ Then he gives Peter some advice, basically he says ‘if you don’t stay awake and pray, you will fall into temptation. The spirit is willing but the body is weak.’
They are about to be tested and if they had been praying – the line in the Lord’s prayer ‘Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil,’ they might have not run away. But because they fell asleep and didn’t pray, when the soldiers came along, they all ran away.
There are moments when praying will make the difference for you between a test passed and a tested failed. There are windows of time in our lives, when we must pray and if we pray and I mean really pray, we will succeed and if we don’t pray we will fail. Prayer has a big impact on how things go for us. Prayer has a big impact on whether we can overcome sins or give in, whether we can cope with pressure or fold under it. Victory comes from praying in time.
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak is a saying that Matthew uses and it means that despite our good intentions our enthusiasm, we are weak and we let ourselves down. Our human laziness, fear or tendency to get distracted means that although we set out wanting to do the right thing, we end up falling short. It’s easy to start a marathon race strong, but can we keep it up for 26 miles?
Moral stamina, the ability to keep going and complete what the Lord has asked of us is important.
We are getting an insight into Jesus’ prayer life. He is modelling to us how to pray. And what He is modelling is familiar. He calls God ‘Father’, just like he taught his disciples to say ‘Our Father’. He prays ‘your will be done’. And he taught us to pray ‘May your kingdom come, May your will be done.’ And he tells the disciples to pray that they might not ‘fall into temptation’. And off course he taught us to pray ‘Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil’. As time goes on, I am coming to appreciate the value of the Lord’s Prayer more. It’s a powerful weapon and Jesus is using that weapon here.
What is Jesus scared of? It’s the cup. He says ‘take this cup from me’, take this cup from me. He doesn’t want to have to drink the cup. What is the cup? It’s the cup Jeremiah proclaimed when God says to him ‘take from my hand the cup filled with the wine of my anger and make all the nations drink it.’ It’s the cup Isaiah saw when he said ‘rise up o Jerusalem you have drunk from the hand of the lord the cup of his anger.’ And Ezekiel prophesied of this cup when he says– ‘a cup of ruin and desolation a cup of scorn and derision.’
The cup is a metaphor for suffering. Suffering caused by God’s anger at human wrong doing. And Jesus was going to drink it. Drink the cup that we deserved, in our place, for we have all done wrong and deserve punishment, but he drank the cup we should be drink, the cup of God’s wrath, the cup of God’s punishment.
When we take communion and drink the wine in the Lord’s Supper, we are drinking a cup of forgiveness, but it’s a cup we can drink only because Jesus drank from the cup of suffering. He suffered in our place that we might not need to. So great was his love for us and his desire to do his Father’s will.
Well a large crowd of people armed with weapons come, led there by Judas, who shows which one is Jesus by going up to him and kissing him. Peter grabs his sword and starts to respond with violence, but Jesus stops him.
Jesus is in command, he has prayed it through and in private with his Father he was emotional, but now he is calm and in control. Do you not think I cannot call on my Father and he would put 12 legions of angels at my disposal? That is 72,000 angels. But Jesus is not going to resist- it must happen this way, for Biblical prophecy to be fulfilled. And so he begins to drink the cup of suffering.
His disciples desert him and run away. He drinks it on his own
He goes through trials in front of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council, and Pontius Pilate- if you watched the film the Passion of the Christ, you would see the mockery and the beating He took, the Roman flogging. He was sentenced to death and had to carry the wooden cross bar along the road out of Jerusalem up the hill to Golgotha, the Place of the Skull.
If you ever feel the burden you are carrying in life is heavy and you feel like giving up- remember Christ’s journey up the Via de la Rosa up that road to Golgotha. He pushed himself to get there- he dug deep, exerted all his will power and determination to get up there. He had a task to accomplish and he wasn’t going to fall short. Jesus willed himself up that hill for us, will we push ourselves for him? Sometimes we feel like giving up and walking away, Jesus must have felt like that and he could have- but He didn’t, He persevered.
What is Christian love like? Well Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 13, the famous love passage, that love always perseveres.
Hanging on the cross, the sun went dark for three hours, Matthew says darkness came over the land, Jesus was thirsty, they offered him a vinegar drink but he refused, and he felt abandoned by God- he cried out ‘My God, My God why have you abandoned me’. He was going through hell at that moment, darkness, pain, thirst, the absence of the presence of God. He was doing it out of love, so we might not need to go to hell. Taking on himself our sins, our evil deeds, drinking the cup that we deserve.
A saintly African Christian once told a congregation that as he was climbing the hill to the church he heard steps behind him. He turned and saw a man carrying a very heavy load up the hill on his back. He was full of sympathy for him and spoke to him. They he noticed his hands were scarred and he realised it was Jesus. He said to Him ‘Lord are you carrying the world’s sins up the hill?’ ‘No’ said the Lord Jesus, ‘not the world’s sin, just yours.’
We have each committed plenty of sins, it was our sins he died for.
The lyrics of the song have it right-
Behold the Man upon a cross,
My sin upon His shoulders
Ashamed I hear my mocking voice,
Call out among the scoffers
It was my sin that held Him there
Until it was accomplished
His dying breath has brought me life
I know that it is finished
He stayed on that cross for our sin. This was the Son of God, God incarnate suffering and dying. For our sin and the sin of the world.
He gave one last shout on the cross- with a loud voice. Jesus still had strength. But then He gave up his spirit, he died not because he had no more strength to keep going, but because he chose to die. A man usually took two to seven days to die on a cross, but Jesus died after only a few hours. He had completed his mission.
And when he die there was an earthquake.
The centurion and the other guards saw what was happening with the earthquake and the darkness, and they were terrified they exclaimed ‘surely he was the Son of God.’ Can you imagine how that centurion felt when he realised he had blood on his hands, they blood of the Son of God?
When Christ died, the curtain in the temple was ripped from the top to the bottom. God ripped it from the top down. The curtain was what divided the place where the glory of God was in the temple from the rest. The ripping of the curtain was symbolic of what Jesus’ death was achieving. Now because of his death, we have access to God. We have access to God’s presence.
As Hebrews 10 puts it – ‘we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body.’
Without Jesus’ death God would always be distant, now because of him, when we believe, we have access.
If we want to know how God feels about us, we need look no further than the cross. God demonstrates his own love for us in this- why we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
When Jesus was resurrected from the dead three days later, He revealed himself to many people. To the women at the tomb and then to others. His resurrection was a physical resurrection, he received a new physical body, it wasn’t his old body, He was a new creation. But his new resurrection body had the wounds from his crucifixion in it. The holes in his hands, in his feet, he could say to Thomas put your finger in my side and feel the wound from the Roman spear.
God never removed the wounds He transformed them. They are now medals of glory, badges of honour.
There is an old Japanese art of mending broken pottery called Kintsugi. The name means ‘golden joinery’ and the process involves using resin, mixed with gold to glue together the broken pieces.
Here is a photograph of piece of Kintsugi.
The result of Kintsugi is a dish, pot or vase that is more valuable than the original piece. Instead of hiding the repair, the brokenness becomes part of the aesthetic beauty. The golden scars tell the story.
Kintsugi tells us that brokenness is not the end. No matter how bad we are, not matter how much the image of God has been defaced in our lives- if we give our lives to Jesus, he can transform us in this life and even more in the next.
That’s what Jesus does with us through the power of his cross and resurrection. In this life He forgives us and heals us and uses our wounds for his glory. I know a man who was homeless and violent who came to Jesus and now he cares for the homeless and violent because he has been healed and he understands them. His weakness has become his glory.
And in the next life we shine with a new glory, remade totally by God. Kintsugi is an image of resurrection. Our humble lives are resurrected more glorious, just as Jesus’ broken body was raised in glory. As Jesus died and was resurrected with a new body into a new life, so will we be. We will be recognisably ourselves, but we will be transformed. We will follow where Jesus has led.