This sermon is part of Easter 2024. You can watch more here.
Sermon manuscript:
Hello, let’s get started! My name is Michael, and I am not one of the pastors here at North Village Church! Michael asked me to speak at this Good Friday service this evening and when I agreed, honestly, I was quite intimidated by the idea of being here in front of you all on what is the most important weekend of the church calendar, remembering the most important event in history, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Why celebrate Good Friday?
If you’re familiar with the stages of grief before I reached “acceptance” about speaking here, I spent some time with “bargaining” and couldn’t help but think to myself, “why do we even celebrate Good Friday”? Wouldn’t it be better to celebrate it all together on Easter Sunday? I mean, there are many parts to the Christmas story – traveling to Bethlehem, the birth, the gifts, the flight to Egypt – but we still only have one Christmas day!
Now don’t get me wrong, as we’ll see in our passage, Jesus’ death on the cross is the sacrifice that paid our debt and won us eternal life, I know that without it we have no salvation, and that’s worthy of our celebrations.
But on Sunday we’ll be back here again to celebrate the resurrection which shows us God’s victory over death, and it puts to rest any idea that this was anything but God’s perfect plan.
We rejoice at the details, we rejoice in the stone rolled away, the angels, and in Jesus’ life! But if you look too closely at details of Good Friday you’ll see injustice, mocking, violence, and death. It doesn’t make for pretty reading, so maybe it would be better to combine the two so we can offset all of that negativity with the good on Sunday.
Similar to Childbirth?
As I thought about it a bit more and tried to reconcile this tension, I tried to think of other scenarios where we celebrate an event, despite the pain and violence and injustice of what’s going on. And as I thought back, I was able to remember a time in my life where I have witnessed first-hand great turmoil and physical pain, where I saw incredible suffering, but when I look back on this event now, it’s one I remember with happiness of the outcome allowed me to have joy even despite of what went before.
Now, I don’t want to alarm you, but I have a picture from that event in my life where I witness great physical pain. I’ve tried to pick some that are safe for a family audience, but you’ve been warned. Here it is…
This is my lovely wife Jennifer, with our equally lovely newborn children. These are the happiest days of my life, but the hours that lead up to these pictures were ones of pain and suffering. Just to be clear, I do mean for Jennifer!
I did ask Jennifer what she thought of me using these pictures and her suffering as an example and she kindly agreed, but she also showed why she’s the brains in the Bird family because she reminded me that Jesus uses this analogy too in John 16:21
When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world. So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.
“We” – what other responses do we have?
This gives us a framework for how to think about and approach Good Friday and the crucifixion. I know that it’s the case that, just like in childbirth, the suffering and pain was for good. I know that Jesus’ death was what washed my sin away, and for that I rejoice. But it doesn’t help me when I encounter different views on the crucifixion from wider society.
Now I think it’s largely accepted that a man called Jesus lived and was then crucified in the first century so you might just think that the views out there are either “that man was God” or “he was just a con man”.
Now those views do exist, they’ll say Jesus and his followers created an elaborate hoax, but there are a bunch of other viewpoints out there some egregious in how wrong they are but some very subtle.
Some of the subtle lies will tell you that Jesus was just a good man, showing an extreme example of forgiveness.
These people will try to make it seem that they believe the same as we do, that Jesus did a “good work” on the cross by dying for his beliefs. I think that is pretty patronizing to believers, but doesn’t account for the fact that, as we’ll see, Jesus predicted his own death.
But did you know that some there are much bolder lies, where some people frame the crucifixion as what has been called “divine child abuse”, portraying a Father God who demands punishment and would enact it on his Son as barbaric. They reject Jesus’ willing part of any of these events, and instead paint him as an unwilling victim.
So even if you have no doubts yourself, it’s important that we know how to address these lies if we encounter them. And this isn’t just something that Christians in our modern society have been wrestling with and trying to convey to unbelievers in our cynical times.
Even in the very early church this was a problem. We know this because Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:23, “we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles”. This is not an easy topic. It’s not one that we only struggle with because of our modern cynical times. Christians have been fighting to convey the tremendous importance of the crucifixion since the first century!
And maybe you’re here and you’re in the “Jesus was a good man” camp and you’re happy with that position. To you I’d say, “keep listening”, because this is not just an historical account of some judicial proceedings in 1st Century Israel. It’s not just another miscarriage of justice like the ones we read about on our phones and feel sad about for a few seconds before scrolling on to the next thing.
This isn’t the same. Jesus’ death is different because it requires a response on our part. As we’ll see, there are only two possible options here: we can either choose Jesus, or reject him. There isn’t a middle ground, there isn’t the option to just spectate.
What’s the plan?
So how do we unpack this? Well, I think the best way is to do what we always do in NVC and turn to God’s word, the Bible, and investigate how the people who were there react to the death of Jesus. In our passage in Luke we find different groups of people who:
• loved Jesus and mourned his death,
• people who hated Jesus, abused him, and gloated over what they saw as his helplessness, and there is
• Jesus himself who as we’ll see went to the cross willingly, knowing exactly what he was doing.
Let’s take a look at these groups in turn and see what we can learn.
Those Who Hate Jesus
What can we see? People with different backgrounds
Let’s first looks at verse 35-37:
35 “… even the rulers were sneering at Him, saying, “He saved others; let Him save Himself if this is the Christ of God, His Chosen One.” 36 The soldiers also ridiculed Him, coming up to Him, offering Him sour wine, 37 and saying, “If You are the King of the Jews, save Yourself!”
The first group are the most prevalent in the crucifixion story, and that is those that hate Jesus. We find the rulers sneering at him, the soldiers ridiculing him, dividing up his clothes among themselves. And then almost comically, one of the criminals on the cross, hurling abuse at him. Imagine being hours or minutes from your own death, and you use your last energy, your last breaths to hurl abuse at an innocent man next to you!
Many of you might struggle to relate to what we’re reading here. I know that we’re a church of people who love God, and that we have never in our lives said things like this about God and we wouldn’t dream of doing it now. But I think there are still some important lessons we can learn from these people showing hate towards Jesus.
What can we learn? Upbringing doesn’t matter
It could be tempting to dismiss these accounts as down to the background of the people involved and say, “well of course the rulers hated him, he challenged their power” or “it was the Roman soldiers job to oppress Jews and execute people” or “that criminal on the cross is probably just a bad person”
And perhaps for some people in the room you say similar things about yourself, “I’m from a Jewish family, a Muslim family, an atheist family, I can’t become a Christian”, or “I’ve done some bad things in my past, God couldn’t accept me, I don’t belong in God’s family”.
But maybe you are a believer but you find yourself thinking thoughts like, “Worship here isn’t what we did in the church I grew up in. It was wasn’t so loud, or it was louder, or we sang different songs”. Maybe you say something like, “My church organized Bible studies in this particular way, couples groups, men and women’s groups” and for that reason you don’t dive in and get involved with a group, you hold something back.
Or maybe we make those decisions for other people. You have a coworker who belongs to a different religion, and you don’t speak to them about your faith, partly because you want to be “respectful” of their heritage, background, their beliefs, but in part because you don’t think God could do that much!
All of these things are real struggles, but God is greater than all of them. We read in the New Testament of many Jews coming to faith in Jesus despite the struggles with their heritage and tradition which we see play out in the New Testament. We also this chapter in verse 47, the verse that comes immediately after our passage, “Now when the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God, saying, “Certainly this man was innocent!”
There is hope for everybody, regardless of background! We read in 2 Corinthians 5:17 “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”.
In the modern day, we can read of people like Mosab Hassan Yousef in his autobiography “Son of Hamas”, a militant member of Hamas, who gave his life to Jesus at great risk to the safety of himself and his family. I’ve been in the room to hear the testimony of former gang member who killed a man and was convicted of murder, he gave his life to Jesus while imprisoned.
Any world view, any religion, any criminal background, in Christ they become a new person, a member of his holy church. There is no background that is off limits to God, no one that he does not welcome into his love and grace.
What can we learn? Hating hearts can change
God is not bound by the past identity, by the background, or the upbringing of anybody. And it’s also important to see that he is not bound by what abuse or hate that has been turned his way in the past. He has the power to completely change a hating heart. Just as there is no one who is a lost cause because of their background, there is no one who is a lost cause because of their current attitude to God.
I think we see this in our passage when we look at what those Pharisees are doing. There’s not attempt to align their past beliefs with what Jesus is teaching, trying to make that step. It’s hate that we see in the lead up to the crucifixion and we hear of them “sneering” here. But God can change even hearts like these.
Here I think there is no better example in scripture than the apostle Paul. Now Paul was a Pharisee, one of the rulers who we see in the passage hating Jesus, and like them, I don’t think his background was his only problem. He wasn’t considering a move to Christianity but held back by what his family, or his community might say.
We don’t read about a man in turmoil about whether to accept Christ. We read about a man who seemed to genuinely hate Christians!
Acts 8:3 says, “But Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.”
That doesn’t sound like a man struggling to reconcile his background to his faith. That sounds like hate!
And we see that Jesus can change even his heart. Paul writes in 1 Timothy 1 13-14, “I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus”.
We know that God can work perform a miraculous work in the heart of even the most hateful people.
So if you have a family member, a friend, a coworker that is actively hostile to the gospel, then don’t give them up as lost. Pray that God will make a life transforming change in their heart. We know it’s possible!
“Neutrals in the stadium”
As I read this passage and imagine the scene, with crowds of people around Jesus, some who loved him, but many who were shouting abuse at him, my mind turn to soccer (some people I know might say that happens a bit too often). But I couldn’t help but picture this scene as similar to a soccer crowd.
Now I grow up in the UK and maybe you’ve heard some stories, but there can be some especially hostile crowds.
There are some huge rivalries, usually between teams in the same city or part of the country. There’s Arsenal-Tottenham in London, or Glasgow Rangers and Celtic, but I support a team called Leeds United, and the big rivalry for us is Manchester United.
Now, you might think the Cowboys Eagles rivalry goes a long way back, but let’s just say that the English counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire, where those cities belong, fought a war that started in 1455!
So am I going to make an analogy of good vs bad, maybe the team in white against the team that has a devil as its logo? No, that isn’t what I want to talk about, it’s another group that slips under the radar in the stadium. It’s the group that might be sprinkled amongst the diehard fans, but who don’t have a lot of skin in the game. It’s a group who I’m going to term, “the neutrals”.
These are the tourists who decided to catch a game while in town, the people in the corporate boxes there to close a deal. Based on my experience from the past few weeks, a good way to spot them is to go to an Austin FC game during SXSW!
The neutrals are the sort of people who this sort of thing is marketed to.
Now if soccer isn’t your thing and this doesn’t fill you with outrage, maybe try substituting your own favorite rivalry. Maybe “Cowboys – Eagles”, or “Biden – Trump”, or “Taylor – Kanye”.
As I read the passage I see a hint of these “neutrals” in verse 27, “Now following Him was a large crowd of the people” and also in verse 35, “And the people stood by, watching”.
As I read this I couldn’t help but think that this attitude is something that we see around us. People who say, “Jesus was a good man”, “a good teacher”, or “he had some wise sayings”.
People who are very respectful of your faith but keep any personal discussion of it at a distance, making it very hard to see what they actually believe. They’re members of a large crowd of people, watching on, but not rooting for either side.
When we looked at the people today who hate Jesus, it’s easy for us to see that they need the Holy Spirit to enact change in their hearts. It may be harder to see, but the neutrals also need to have their hearts changed in just the same way. In Matthew, Jesus says, “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters”.
It’s not enough to be respectful to your Christian friends. We cannot hold up a scarf that says Jesus on one side, and “sin” on the other.
We read in our passage of Jesus on the cross, with criminals on either side, both of them will die before the day is out. One of those criminals turns to him and recognizes Jesus as God, and one uses his dying breaths to hurl abuse at him. The choice is the same for us.
CS Lewis says in his book Mere Christianity,
“You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to”
We don’t get to stand on in the crowd. There are only two choices, to be on one side of Jesus or the other, and with only one of those choices does Jesus say, “you will be with Me in Paradise”.
Reminder – Even if we love Jesus, we can be neutrals in some aspects
I don’t find it difficult to spot neutrals everywhere. For me it’s in the workplace where people are respectful of my faith, but never dig deeper. Maybe for you it’s at the family dinner table when you speak of your faith, or when you’re out with your friends.
But when I reflect on my own heart, I know that there can be aspects of my life where I want to be the neutral. When difficult conversations or topics come up in the workplace, it’s my natural inclination to stay quiet, and not speak what I truly believe. When it comes to being sacrificial with giving. Maybe you feel similarly about other parts of your Christian life.
For me I feel this especially with my time. I am hugely protective of my time, even when I have no particular reason to be. I remember a time in my life when I was a new graduate, living in a new city, and I had found a church that I like. The teaching was good, the people were welcoming. But did I dive in and get involved? No, I was the one who sat at the back. The one who left as soon as that last song ended. I never once went to a Bible study group. So what was I doing instead? Honestly, I have no idea – I knew probably 5 people in this city, I needed what the local church had to offer, but out of greed, out of fear that I’d be asked to attended more things, do more things, I held back.
This is an attitude that is rooted in sin. Jesus doesn’t make it any clearer than Matthew 22:37-38 when he says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment.” We are asked to give God our whole selves, all our hearts, all our souls, all our minds. So let us reflect on areas where we’re holding that half-and-half scarf, where we aren’t giving God what is rightfully his, and let’s do as Jesus commands in Matthew.
Those Who Love Jesus
Ok, we’ve looked at the people who hate Jesus, and we’ve also touched on the neutrals. Let’s turn now and look briefly at the people in the passage who love Jesus. We see right at the very start, the group of women who are mourning. Let’s read it again.
Now following Him was a large crowd of the people, and of women who were mourning and grieving for Him. But Jesus turned to them and said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, stop weeping for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are those who cannot bear, and the wombs that have not given birth, and the breasts that have not nursed.’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ For if they do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?”
Wow, this is pretty bleak! These women are mourning, and I’m not sure what you were expecting, but to me it feels like surely Jesus is going to try to comfort them? At this point Jesus has already foretold his resurrection multiple times. And he hasn’t been subtle about it – in Matthew 16:21 we read, “…Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” That makes this interaction interesting because he could very easily tried to comfort them, to tell them “it’s ok, I’m going to raised from the dead on the third day”, ask them not to cry but to rejoice for what he is going to achieve on the cross. But instead, he says, “you think this is bad?! It’s going to get worse!” For us, I see this as a stark reminder to us that we as believers are not promised an easy life, a reminder that we still live in a broken world where people will shun, or attack, or even persecute Christians.
Paradise is the destination
That might sound pretty discouraging. That you’ve lived a life of struggles and pain, that you’ve found comfort in Jesus, but things aren’t going to get any easier? But we have hope! We see that hope in the second example of loving Jesus in our passage. It’s the criminal on the cross who sees Jesus for who he really is. He says,
“Do you not even fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed are suffering justly, for we are receiving what we deserve for our crimes; but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he was saying, “Jesus, remember me when You come into Your kingdom!”
We see that this man recognizes Jesus as God, recognizes that he has done “nothing wrong”, that Jesus lived a perfect life. And he asks Jesus to remember him in his kingdom.
And what is the result? Jesus tells him, “today you will be with Me in Paradise”.
That is our hope also!
No matter how much suffering we experience in our life, we know that we have eternity with Jesus, in paradise awaiting us. We see that it doesn’t matter how late in life we give our lives to him, the result is the same – paradise with Jesus. When we die, we’ll be in paradise with Jesus, and with all of the other believers who have died, even this criminal! How amazing is that!
Jesus Himself
Went willingly to the cross
We’ve seen the haters, we’ve seen the neutrals, and we’ve seen those that loved Jesus. Let’s finish by looking at Jesus himself. What can we learn about him and how does he help us navigate those feelings about Good Friday that we talked about at the start?
Fulfilled prophesy on the cross
The first thing we see is that Jesus fulfilled prophesy by dying on the cross God’s plan, which has been underway for thousands of years, is being enacted right now.
There are many, many, examples of Jesus fulfilling prophesy from the Old Testament. Biblical scholars put the number at around 300, some as high as 450. You can go and study these, but I want to pick out just one. It’s one of my favorite passages in all of scripture from Isaiah 53:5:
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all
I love this passage. I love what it says, what a clear picture it gives about the exact reasons that Jesus had to die. For our transgressions, for our iniquities. But one of the things that I love most about it is that it’s from Isaiah, from the Old Testament long before Jesus lived! A verse that predates Jesus’ life by hundreds of years, a verse that is part of the Jewish scriptures that so clearly speaks of what Jesus did on the cross.
The crucifixion wasn’t a failure of Jesus’ ministry; this wasn’t a story that was re-spun by his grieving disciples to allow their religion to continue. He was not just a “good man” who suffered an injustice, giving an example of how to bear pain with dignity. This was all part of God’s plan for saving humanity, the plan that he set in motion hundreds of years beforehand, a plan that he had in place in Isaiah.
Jesus is in control
In addition to the obvious fulfilment of prophesy, we can also see from Jesus’ actions that he is in control despite what’s happening to him. Jesus was innocent, we know that. And he was sentenced to death, so there is by very definition, an injustice happening here. But we also know that Jesus went willingly to the cross. We know from his prayers in Gethsemane that he knew what was coming. We read in John 10:17-18, “I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord”.
And we see that control in his dying words in our passage, “crying out with a loud voice, said, “Father, into Your hands I entrust My spirit.” And having said this, He died.” Jesus is in control here. He did not die with a whimper and a whisper. He cried out in a loud voice. He declares that he is entrusting his spirit to God, and then dies. He chose the moment.
So was this “divine child abuse”? Absolutely not – this is God in human form, willingly sacrificing himself for the good of all humanity, for our transgressions and iniquities.
Jesus is not a helpless passenger here, he’s in control, he knows the pain and suffering that will come, but he also knows what his death will achieve, and bears it willingly.
Conclusion
So why do we celebrate Good Friday? We’ve seen that while there is violence and injustice, it’s violence and injustice that God, in complete control and with complete knowledge, allowed to happen, and which Jesus willingly subjected himself for our salvation and peace. It was for us: “he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace”.
I think it’s OK to feel sorrow about the violence that was inflicted on Jesus, but we can remember what we read in John 16 right at the start, “So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.” We know that he rose again, and that he will come again, and we will rejoice, and no one can take our joy from us.
Which group are you in?
So which of those groups are you in? Because we must choose how we can react to that sacrifice. We can love him, we can reject him, but there’s no option to watch on impassive. We have to take action. There is no souvenir half-and-half scarf here, we don’t get to sit with the home fans.
There is a cross, and on one side of it there the path to paradise with Jesus, and on the other death.
The good news is you can make that choice today. All you need to do is pray to him, you can do it right now in your seat. You can say to him, “Jesus, I accept that your death on the cross was to pay for my transgressions, my iniquities, to bring me peace. I give my life to you, please remember me in your kingdom. I give my whole life to you, not just part”.
That might be hard, we might still feel like we’re in mourning as we face illness, death, an evil and fallen world, but if we do that we can be assured that we will be with him in paradise.
It doesn’t matter how late in our lives we leave it, it doesn’t matter what your background is whether it’s a different religion, no religion, there is no criminal background check here.
It’s available to you, all you need to do is ask – you can do it right now – and you can know for sure how Jesus will respond. He’ll say “you will be with Me in Paradise.”
North Village Church
This sermon is brought to you by North Village Church, a non-denominational church in Austin. established in 2009 and built around Jesus and Bible teaching.
Are you looking for a church in Austin? At North Village Church we put Jesus at the center of our church family. We worship together every Sunday at 10:30am, encourage Christ centered fellowship through groups, and host special events such as Bible studies and Theological Training, to ensure that we are rooted in in God’s Word. We also serve our local community in association with several Austin based organizations.
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