Luke 23.26-38
The Kingdom of Life Through the Death of the King
Luke 23.26-38
Jason Procopio
Today we arrive at what is probably the central story of the Christian faith. This is the moment you see depicted in every Catholic church, in thousands of works of art, in pop culture, and in jewelry.
We’ve been in the gospel of Luke for twenty-three chapters and two and half years now, making our way to the death of Christ. But for all we know and have seen about the crucifixion, the one thing many people still don’t understand is why. Why did he do it? Why did this happen? And maybe even more urgently, what difference does it make for us?
So that’s where we’re going today.
We’ve got a lot to see, and it’s going to be heavy lifting, so I’ll ask you to stay awake, to keep moving—if you start to drift off, give your head a shake, or ask your neighbor to give you a poke in the ribs, because there are few things we could see together which are more important.
In the texts we’ve seen over the last few weeks, Christ has been arrested, he has been tried by his own people, and he has been convicted by the Roman government—condemned to die by crucifixion. Pilate has handed Christ over to the crowds.
The Crucifixion
And that’s where we find him in today’s text: handed over to the crowds, on his way to be killed.
So Jesus has to carry his own cross—a very heavy crossbeam of sturdy wood—all the way through the city streets, out of the city, and up the hill to where he will be crucified.
But few people have ever been less physically equipped to carry a huge cross anywhere. Jesus is exhausted—he has been up all night being interrogated by the religious leaders, and beaten by their guards. He has been flogged by Pilate’s guards, whipped with leather cords embedded with bits of bone and metal—which meant that he likely had little to no skin left on his back, shoulders and sides. (The flogging alone was known to kill prisoners.) Jesus is close to death already.
So, as Luke tells us, the soldiers leading the way find someone in the crowd, a man named Simon (who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time), and make him carry the cross for Jesus, so that he can actually make it up the hill.
Luke tells us that a crowd of people are following after him, and he points out the women following behind, weeping as he goes.
Now it’s good that he notes this, because otherwise we might be tempted to think that all the Jews hated Jesus. This simply wasn’t true—plenty of Jews, even if they weren’t convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, at least admired him, and didn’t want to see him killed.
So Jesus notices these women, and he turns to them and says (v. 28):
28 “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. 29 For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ 30 Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ 31 For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”
This is a perplexing thing to say in such a context, and it would have been perplexing to the people listening as well. But remember, we’ve already heard Jesus say something like this before, in Luke 21.23, when he foretold the fall of Jerusalem.
In the year 70 A.D., the Romans will come in and basically burn Jerusalem to the ground. They’ll destroy the temple; they’ll kill almost everyone still inside the city walls. So he’s telling the crowd, “You’re weeping for me; but in a short time it’s going to get bad for you too. If God didn’t spare his own innocent Son (the ‘green wood’ of v. 31), what kind of judgment will he give to his sinful people who rejected his Messiah (the ‘dry wood’)?”
So finally they arrive at the place of crucifixion, and there (v. 32):
32 Two others, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. 33 And when they came to the place that is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on his right and one on his left.
That’s all Luke says about the crucifixion itself. He doesn’t go into detail describing it, because he doesn’t need to—anyone living in his time would have been acutely familiar with crucifixion, because it was the Romans’ favorite method of execution.
The condemned was nailed to the cross, with thick nails driven through their hands (or wrists) and feet. The cross was hoisted up and dropped into a hole in the ground so the condemned was upright. And there, he stayed. Hanging from his hands would have put incredible pressure on the lungs, so the only way to breathe was to stand up on the pierced feet to take a gasp of air. But of course, that was even more painful, so after a moment or two they would drop back down.
The condemned could live a surprising amount of time in such a state—sometimes as long as an entire day—so often the soldiers would break the legs of the condemned so they couldn’t lift themselves up. Eventually they would die of exhaustion and asphyxiation.
The physical pain of such a death is obvious: it’s difficult to imagine a worse way to die. But equal to the physical pain was the shame of it. Jesus was stripped naked, exposing his wounded body to the crowd—Luke tells us (v. 34) that they cast lots to divide his garments, fulfilling the prophecy in Psalm 22.18 that they would do this to the Messiah.
There is nothing that compares to crucifixion as a way of wounding and shaming a human being to death. The apostle Paul goes so far as to equate crucifixion with the curse of God (in Galatians 3.13). And it is this horrible image, alongside one other, to which Luke wants to draw our attention.
V. 35:
35 And the people stood by, watching, but the rulers scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen One!” 36 The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine 37 and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” 38 There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.”
Once again, the rulers of the Jews mock Christ’s kingship. Jesus is the Christ of God. He is the Chosen One. He is the King of the Jews. They should be worshiping him, pledging their allegiance to him, because he is their rightful King.
But instead they mock him.
They say, “He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God.” “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”
But he is the Christ; he is the King of the Jews, so he could have saved himself. Easily. The only thing keeping Jesus on that cross was his own will to stay there.
And that’s where we need to focus today.
Many of us have so often heard the story of the crucifixion that we’ve become numb to the details. People always speak of the horror of the crucifixion, the gore of it, without necessarily thinking much about the reason behind it.
Because if it’s true that Jesus could have come down from the cross at any time, why didn’t he? Why did he go through with this?
That is the question that Luke wants us to ask as we read this—and we know it because he’s spent such a long time establishing Christ’s power and authority as King, that he didn’t have to be up there. Luke wants us to consider that question: why is this happening? Why is Jesus on the cross?
There are many answers to that question, but this morning we’re going to boil it down to three reasons—three reasons why Jesus went to the cross to suffer and die.
On the cross, Christ bore the sin of his people.
The most profoundly offensive thing about the Christian faith is the truth that we proclaim loud and clear to all who will listen: You are a sinner.
Now when we say that, we need to explain what we mean. What is sin?
Before we say what it is, let’s talk about what it isn’t.
Sin is not simple “imperfection”—it’s not a “mistake.” Sometimes we use the word “imperfection” to talk about sin, and it’s sometimes useful to do that when you don’t have time to go into detail. But it’s not entirely right.
Sin isn’t merely bad things we do. Often we’ll talk about the sins we committed this week, or we’ll point to an action and say, “That is a sin.” And while that’s true—we do commit actions that are sinful—it goes much deeper than that.
Before we can talk about sin in action, we need to talk about sin in being. Or to put it another way, before we can understand why certain actions are sinful, we need to understand that our very nature is sinful.
J. I. Packer defined sin this way: “Sin is lawlessness in relation to God as Law-giver; rebellion in relation to God as rightful ruler; missing the mark in relation to God as our designer; guilt in relation to God as judge; and unclean in relation to God as the Holy One. Sin is perversity touching each one of us, everywhere, and at every point of our lives.”
In other words, the Bible tells us again and again that God's nature is holy, and our nature is sinful, so sin must always be defined in relation to God himself, not in relation to anyone or anything else.
God is holiness itself: he is everything that is good, pure and right. And every one of us, without exception, has rebelled against our holy God. So we are sinful, through and through, because we have separated ourselves from God, who is holiness itself.
And that separation, that sinful nature, finds its way into every corner of our being and produces sinful actions in and through us. It causes us to find things desirable which God finds offensive. It causes us to have inclinations that God would never have. It causes us to think in ways that God would never think. We are not all as bad as we possibly could be, but there is not a single corner of a single human being which is not touched by sin.
Now here’s why that’s problematic for us: because God is holy, he hates sin. He hates anything which is not totally pure, totally righteous, totally just, and he alone can say what is pure, righteous and just, because purity, righteousness and justice come from him.
So because he hates sin, he is angry at the sin in us. He must punish our sin, because he is just, and because sinful people deserve his anger.
And that is where the good news of the gospel shines.
God chose for himself a people whom he desires to redeem, to change. He chose for himself a people whose sin he would remove and replace with his own Spirit. But that sin still has to be taken care of; it can’t just be swept under the rug. It is an offense to God, and must be punished.
So what did he do? He sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to bear the sins of his people, in their place. Because Christ is fully man, he is a fit representative for his human people; he is an acceptable substitute. And because Christ is fully God, he is able to bear the weight of our sin.
And that is exactly what he did. If we ever have the tendency to downplay the seriousness of our sin, and think that it’s not really all that bad, the cross should disabuse us of that tendency in an instant. If we want to know how repulsive sin is to God, we look at what Christ suffered for it.
On the cross, he took our sins upon himself, and was punished in our place. Christ did not suffer mainly because the Romans killed him. He did not suffer mainly because the Jews accused and mocked him.
Christ suffered and died because God poured out his wrath on him at the cross—the wrath we deserved. He bore the punishment of our sins so that we wouldn’t have to.
On the cross, Christ took up his throne.
King Jesus took up his throne, not through an obvious manifestation of his power, but through what seemed like the worst defeat imaginable. As we said a couple of weeks ago, the cross was not a defeat; it was an enthronement ceremony.
Christ could have died in any way God chose; he could have suffered the wrath of God on our behalf in any number of ways. Why choose crucifixion?
Because there is nothing which would have been further removed from victory in the minds of Jesus’s contemporaries.
The point of the cross in particular was that there be an impossible-to-miss demarcation between the Messiah and all the other false gods human beings could have dreamed up. In other words, in taking on a human nature and going to the cross, Christ was showing the world what kind of God he is: not a God who lords his power over his subjects, not a God who cruelly wields his authority over the weak, but a God who serves the weak, who identifies with the needy, who loves the unlovable.
This is the motivation behind every royal image we see in the gospels, which all seem just a little off to us—Christ shows himself to be King, but not the kind of King anyone would have expected. And the cross is the ultimate picture of that reality.
The fact of the cross was the most offensive notion to the first hearers of the gospel, because most of them could not imagine how a cross could be anything but a curse. They were right to think that. And yet, through the cross, God showed his infinite power and wisdom, by using it to do something unimaginable.
John Calvin said: “For although in the cross there is nothing but curse, it was, nevertheless, swallowed up by the power of God in such a way, that it has put on, as it were, a new nature. For there is no tribunal so magnificent, no throne so stately, no show of triumph so distinguished, no chariot so elevated, as is the [post], on which Christ has subdued death and the devil, the prince of death; nay, more, has utterly trodden them under his feet.”
(If that doesn’t make you stand up and cheer, I don’t know what will.)
On the cross, Christ suffered seeming defeat from those who considered him an enemy; but in so doing, he defeated the real enemy: Satan, sin and death. And his victory was so complete and absolute that it transformed the cross, this instrument of torture and death and curse, into a royal throne.
The cross was not a defeat, but an enthronement; and our King, who reigns today over his world, is a crucified King.
Now the question we need to ask ourselves is, Why does it matter that Christ reigns today as a crucified King? Why does it matter that he still bears the marks of the nails on his hands and feet?
There are many reasons—we could hardly exhaust them if we tried. We saw one reason a couple weeks ago: because Christ is a crucified King, he can identify with the suffering of his people, and so knows how to defend us and pray for us and welcome us.
But there’s still one thing we haven’t yet seen, and it is hugely important.
On the cross, Christ showed us what kind of people we are.
Christ is our King; we are his people. And because Christ is a crucified King, we are called to be a crucified people.
Now when I say that, I don’t mean that we should be going around looking for martyrdom. There are Christians who suffer martyrdom still today; all of the apostles but one suffered martyrdom. But nowhere in the Bible do we see any indication that it’s something we should hope for.
When I say we are called to be a crucified people, what I mean is that because we follow in the steps of our Savior and King, we must be prepared for the reality that the Christian life is always self-denial before blessing. The cross comes before the crown.
Spiritually, this has already happened. Paul said in Galatians 2.20 that we have been crucified with Christ. When he died on the cross two thousand years ago, we died with him. The people we used to be, slaves to our sinful nature, were put to death there and then. And now, through the faith that the Holy Spirit has given us, we are new creations (2 Corinthians 5.17). We are not what we used to be—we died with him, and we were raised with him, and we live with him and in him.
We don’t need to go looking to make some kind of penance for sins Christ has already paid for. We don’t need to keep on punishing ourselves for our sins—Christ was already punished enough for those sins.
We cannot do anything to add to the work Christ accomplished on the cross—our salvation is gloriously done. Spiritually speaking, we have been crucified with Christ (past tense).
But practically, in our day-to-day lives, the cross comes before the crown.
Christ took up his throne on the cross to show us just how backwards the lives of his people should be.
Think of what are often called the Beatitudes—we find them at the beginning of Matthew 5.
4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
5 “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth…
11 “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
This is not what any of us would naturally say, is it? We’d say, “Blessed are those who make three times their rent.” “Blessed are those who have a gorgeous wife and well-behaved kids.” “Blessed are those who spend eight weeks of every year hiking and skiing in the Alps.”
Again, none of those things are bad in themselves, but naturally we focus all our attention and effort to getting those things we think will give us LIFE, when life has been staring us in the face this whole time, in the pages of the Bible, and we can’t even take five minutes a day to read it!
Jesus calls us to look at his life, and look at his death, and to understand that if we’re going to follow him, we’ll need to undergo a radical overhaul of the way we see every single area of our lives. We’ll need to realize that the things we’ve been taught to pursue as ultimate—the things without which we can’t imagine living—are empty, and that life is found in what the world calls weakness and folly.
Because we died with Christ two thousand years ago, we are called to put our old selves, our old desires, our old priorities, to death—every single day, and to live in the new life he’s given us, every single day.
That’s what Jesus said early in our gospel, in Luke 9.23-24:
“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. 24 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”
Jesus is saying that if we want to be with him, we have to put our own desires and our own dreams and our own preferences on the backburner, and live life as he lived it—for the glory of God and for other people. He’s saying that if we want to be with him, we have to be ready to give up our dreams—the things we think we want from our lives—and our own sinful desires. Every single day we will want things that will kill us if we give ourselves over to them.
This is hard for us to accept, so let me just push on our resistance a little bit.
When Christ calls you to deny yourself as he did, take up your cross as he did, and follow him wherever he leads you, he doesn’t give you the leeway to partition out areas of your life in which you’ll deny yourselves, and others in which you’ll indulge yourselves. It didn’t work that way for him—there was no part of his life that wasn’t put up there on the cross—and it doesn’t work that way for us.
“But it’s my wedding, Lord.”
“But it’s my career.”
“But it’s my family.”
“But they’re my friends.”
“But they’re my hobbies.”
“But it’s my free time.”-
NO—when he calls us to lose our life, he means all of it. You can’t drive a car with half an engine. You can sit in that car, and make childish sounds with your mouth—vvvvvvrrrrrrrooooooom!—and pretend to drive, but if the whole engine isn’t in that car, it’s not going anywhere.
When Christ demands that we take up our cross, to deny ourselves, he’s telling us to give him everything. Our King dies, and calls us to die, and find our life. Not when we feel like it. Not when we don’t have anything better to do on the weekend. Every minute of every day.
Now can we just be honest for a minute? This never sounds like good news. None of us ever wake up in the morning thinking, You know what I’d love to do today? I’d love to NOT do what I want.
We struggle with this, because we just can’t wrap our brains around why resisting our own desires, not doing the things we naturally want to do, and doing things we’d never feel drawn to on our own, could be a good thing.
But in reality, Jesus’s call to self-denial is the best news ever, and here’s why: if you love your life, you’ll lose it. Now that’s not a punishment from God, that’s just a fact. If you love your life, you’ll lose it, because you make a terrible god.
You cannot possibly bear the weight of your own unhealthy desires. Your sin is too strong for you. Those of you who play with sin for a little while, thinking, It’s okay, I can stop whenever I want, are fooling yourselves. You’re not strong enough to resist sin on your own—you can’t do it.
And you cannot possibly bear the weight of your own ridiculous dreams. Even your simplest dreams are completely unrealistic: nothing will ever go exactly the way we want it to, because we live in a broken world. And to make matters worse…even if we did happen to get everything we wanted, it wouldn’t be enough. Even if we got exactly what we wanted, it wouldn’t fulfill us.
Jesus’s commandment to self-denial is the best news ever, because he’s calling us to leave behind things that will never satisfy us, that—if we make them ultimate—will kill us, and to run to the only source of true and eternal life that exists: himself.
This should make us, collectively, kind of odd. People should be able to see that there’s something different about us. If our King is strange, we should be a strange people.
Now of course that doesn’t mean we should be off-putting or condemning. But we should be strange—different.
Jesus modeled this beautifully in his ministry. He is both strange and relatable. He is a strange King, but during his ministry no one was afraid to approach him. As a King, as a teacher, he said things that were profoundly offensive to many; but as a person, he was so relatable that children would flock to him. He met people where they were, and people were drawn to him, because he was simply different, and the difference in him was appealing.
So we remain true to what keeps us in the faith; we don’t sugar-coat or water down the truth of the gospel—it is what makes us distinctive, because it is what makes us whole. It is through the gospel that we learn what it means to be truly human, as God created us.
And human beings are always drawn to other human beings whose humanity shines to the fullest.
I talked about this a few weeks ago with a young woman in this church. She was bothered by the fact that her colleagues thought she was weird, because she wouldn’t go clubbing with them after hours, wouldn’t talk about sex with them, wouldn’t talk about drugs with them. There are some things we will say no to, and those things will mark us.
But we’re also marked by what we say yes to—what we celebrate. We’re marked by the fact that we actually find more joy in not investing our lives where everyone else does, but in simply loving Jesus.
By the way, this is how we avoid slipping into moralism. One of the biggest mistakes many Christians make is that they define themselves, not by what they love, but by what they reject. They’ll talk night and day about sin, and about what they don’t approve of, but they’ll have a hard time coming up with an answer when someone asks them what they live for.
We have to remember that God is the happiest being in the universe, that Christ suffered on the cross for the joy that was set before him (Hebrews 12.2). We resist sin, and we pursue obedience to God’s commands, not just because God commanded it, because sin is a happiness vacuum, and we want to be happy.
Brothers and sisters, this is our witness. When those who know us look at us and say, “This person suffers; I’ve seen it. And yes, he’s a little strange. But he is deliriously happy, and he says it’s because of Christ.”
On the cross, Jesus Christ bore our sin—he took our place, he took our punishment, and he set us free from the wrath of God.
On the cross, Jesus Christ took up his throne—he defeated the enemy, he defeated sin, he defeated death. Every obstacle set up against his reign proved to be no obstacle at all. He was crowned as King, and took his place on the throne, through his suffering for his people.
And on the cross, Jesus Christ showed us what kind of people he expects us to be if we belong to him. Because he is our King, we follow in his footsteps. Because he is a strange King, we are a strange people. Because he suffered for the joy that was set before him, we do the same. Self-denial comes before blessing. The cross comes before the crown.So through this text which showed us what Christ suffered, God calls us to be a peculiar people, marked by the self-denial our Savior showed when he saved us. To live our lives in such a way that it is clear we are no longer the center of our own worlds.
Before making significant decisions about how we spend our time, our money, our vacation, our resources, we will take time to seriously ask ourselves how we can use these things to glorify God. It doesn’t mean we won’t do it, it means we’ll bring God unto that discussion. And if in the end we do feel that he would be better glorified by our using our money or our time or our vacation in a way that we never intended, well then we do that. Why? Because Jesus did not consider the incarnation, his earthly ministry, and his death too costly to lay them down for us.
We will seek to pursue, not what makes us look strong, but what strengthens others. We will recognize and joyfully admit that we are weak, and need a strong Savior; and that our Savior preceded us in weakness, so we don’t have to be strong.
We will refuse to bear grudges against our brothers and sisters, but rather will seek reconciliation and extend forgiveness, even if it hurts. Because you know what? It did more than hurt Jesus to forgive you, and he died to bring you into a family.
We will not try to beat our sin on our own, but will pray for help from the Holy Spirit, and bring those sins out into the light by confessing them to our brothers and sisters, and asking for their help too. Because our sin was serious enough to warrant the life, torture and death of God’s only Son, so it should be in our minds like touching a live wire: we should naturally want to get as far away as possible.
We will seek to tell others about the good news of Jesus Christ, regardless of whether we feel like we have the “gift of evangelism” or not, because Christ was not selfish with his honor and reputation, so fear of man must not keep us from proclaiming the gospel to all who will listen.
We will live in such a way that it will be evident to everyone watching us—through the way we talk, the way we react to criticism, the way we deal with our anger, the things we celebrate—that we have already received everything we need to be eternally and blissfully happy.
I could go on.
We won’t do this perfectly, but because of the cross, this is now the trajectory of our lives, and there is none better.
Now it’s quite possible this morning that you are very far from everything I’ve just said. It’s not that you’re struggling to stay on the path; it’s that you’re not even on the path. But it could be that you’re starting to realize why the cross makes sense; why it makes sense for God to send his Son to pass through weakness in order to save us. Because we’re all weak. None of us have our lives figured out. All of us need help.
And the good news of the gospel is that we have a Savior who understands weakness, and who is now on the other side of that weakness, reigning and interceding for weak people.
So if that’s you this morning, please know that the cross is not only Christ’s way of taking his throne; it’s not only a picture of what the Christian life should look like. It’s an invitation—an invitation to stop trying to save yourself, stop trying to be strong, stop trying to clean yourself up, when you know deep down you’re unable to do it. It’s an invitation to come to our crucified King and let him be strong for you, to rest in his grace and to let him do the work of changing you.
We’re going to take a moment of silence and prayer, to consider the death of Jesus Christ for us. If you follow him this morning, take this time to place yourself before his death, to thank him for his death, to worship him as the crucified King he is, and to ask him to convict you by his Holy Spirit. To show you what areas of your life you’re still refusing to give to him.
Let’s sit in his presence together, and ask him to make us a people who are conformed to the image of the crucified Son of God.
