Luke 23.44-49

Humiliation & Exaltation

(Luke 23.44-49)

Jason Procopio

Last week we were in Luke 23.39-43, in which Jesus has an encounter with one of the two criminals who have been crucified next to him. Something happens to this criminal as he is hanging on the cross next to Jesus. He admits his own guilt, then turns to Jesus and says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

And Jesus responds, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” 

We spent an entire week on that single passage in order to highlight how incredibly easy our salvation is. This man didn’t reform; he didn’t go to seminary; he didn’t become one of Jesus’s disciples (he didn’t have time to). All he did was ask that Christ remember him. 

And Jesus’s response shows us that this man was saved—even if he didn’t say what we usually think of when we think of as a profession of faith, Christ knows the faith that the Holy Spirit had given to this man, and he saves him. 

Every time anyone is saved from their sin, it is every bit as easy. God does not make his children jump through hoops; he doesn’t ask us to reform before saving us; he doesn’t give us a reading list or ask us to write a paper on major works of theology.

He puts faith into us; he draws us to Christ; and he saves us.

Now, have you ever asked yourself why salvation is so easy? It shouldn’t be. What did every parent who ever lived tell their children? Nothing worth having is easy. 

That’s one of the reasons a lot of people dismiss Christianity out of hand. It just seems too easy to be true.

And of course that’s the right impulse (if factually incorrect). Our salvation shouldn’t be this easy.

The only reason it is this easy is because Jesus did the hard work for us. 

It’s the hard work that we need to see today.

Now before we get into it, there are a couple of things we need to remember. I don’t want to presume that everyone here knows why all of this is happening.

The Bible tells us that God is perfectly holy, perfectly just, and that we—human beings—have all rebelled against him. And that rebellion has made us “sinners”—it has given us instincts which go against God, desires and actions and thoughts he would never have. 

Because God is perfectly holy and perfectly just, he is angry at our sin, and must punish that sin. 

But instead of simply eradicating humanity—as he could have done and would have been just in doing—God had another plan.

He became one of us.

Jesus Christ—the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity—took on a human nature, and lived a perfect life for sinful human beings. 

And Christ took on the all the sins of his people and suffered and was crucified for those sins as a perfect, once-for-all substitute and sacrifice for them. Jesus took on our sins, and on the cross God poured out all of his wrath on him.

To show the intensity of what he suffered when this happened, Luke gives us a variety of images of what happened at this time. And he’s going to show us a concentrated picture of what we see all throughout the New Testament: that in the ministry of Jesus Christ, there is humiliation and there is exaltation. 

Humiliation: Darkness (v. 44-45)

We begin with humiliation. Humiliation, in a general way and for our purposes this morning, means doing something which is and which feels below you. 

When we talk specifically about “the humiliation of Christ” in theology, we talk about the fact that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, did things which were “below” him. 

He took on a human nature; he got tired; he got hungry. He was tempted. He was rejected and questioned and tortured and crucified by those who should have received him. These kinds of things are what we mean when we speak of Christ’s humiliation.

And the first picture of humiliation we see in this passage is the picture of darkness.

44 It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, 45 while the sun’s light failed.

“The sixth hour” was noon, and Luke says there was darkness over the land until “the ninth hour”—so, three o’clock. For three hours, everything went dark.

Now I know I’ve already lost the most skeptical among you. These are the kinds of details that cause a lot of people to reject the inerrancy of the Bible, because of course these kinds of things don’t happen.

Can we speak frankly? A lot of crazy stuff happens in the Bible. But if anything should make you reject the Bible, it should be the existence of God, not things like this. If God exists, and if he is all-powerful and sovereign over his creation like the Bible says he is, then of course he could make something like this happen. Whether he caused dark clouds to fill the sky, or fog to roll in, or an eclipse to happen at this exact moment in time,  it doesn’t matter. He’s God, he can do what he wants.

What’s important here isn’t what happens, but what it means: what God was trying to show by causing darkness to come over the land while Jesus was on the cross.

In a general way, darkness in the Old Testament was a cosmic sign of mourning. We read, for example, in Amos 8.9, 10:  

9  “And on that day,” declares the Lord God, “I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. 10  I will turn your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation...”

But even more specifically, darkness in this context is a sign of the reign of evil that Jesus predicted just a chapter ago, in Luke 22.53. He said to those who arrested him,  

“But this is your hour, and the power of darkness.”

This moment makes a sort of call-back to the moment of Christ’s birth in Luke 2, when the angels appeared in the sky, filling the sky with he glory of God, to proclaim his birth to the shepherds. 

At his birth, the light of the glory of the Lord shines; now, at his death, darkness covers the land.

So if we’ve been reading the gospel of Luke up to this point (and aren’t just popping in to read about his death), we can see what Luke is getting at. 

As the darkness takes over the land, Christ takes the darkness on himself—the darkness of our rebellion against God, or as the Bible calls it, our sin.

This was what Isaiah said would happen. Isaiah 53.4-6:  

4  Surely he has borne our griefs 

and carried our sorrows; 

yet we esteemed him stricken, 

smitten by God, and afflicted. 

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. 

6  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. 

This was the time during which, as Paul put it in 2 Corinthians 5.21, Christ was made to be sin…so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

People talk all the time about the physical suffering of Christ. And that’s normal—it’s normal that Mel Gibson would make a movie about that—because physical suffering is something we can see. But speaking about Christ’s physical suffering so much can sometimes make us forget that his suffering was not merely physical. 

His physical suffering paled in comparison to the suffering he experienced as God poured out his wrath on our sin. Christ became our sin, and God poured every last drop of his wrath on him.

For hours Christ endured this pain, and for hours his pain intensified.

Think back to when you were kids playing with a magnifying glass. (Most of you are younger than me, but I doubt things changed that much in one generation.) You put the magnifying glass under the sun, and the closer you get it to the leaf (or to the bug, if you were particularly nasty as a child), the more the sun’s light would intensify around one spot until it caught fire.

This is the point in time when the sunbeam of God’s wrath against our sin causes Christ’s suffering to catch fire. 

And we need to be really specific here, and remember that Christ wasn’t punished for sin in general; he was punished for my sin. He was punished for your sin. 

R. Kent Hughes writes:

Our sins were focused on Christ on the cross, and he suffered the fiery wrath of God. On the cross Christ was robed in all that is heinous and hateful as the mass of our corruption poured over him. With horror Christ found his entire being to be sin in the Father’s sight.

Wave after wave of our sin was poured over Christ’s sinless soul. Again and again during those three hours his soul recoiled and convulsed as all our lies, infidelity, hatreds, jealousies, murders, and pride were poured upon his purity.

Darkness covered the land as God poured out his wrath on Jesus for our rebellion against him.

Exaltation: The Curtain (v. 45b)

The next image we see is one of exaltation. Exaltation, in a general way, is the opposite of humiliation—it means being elevated to an honored place.

When we speak specifically of the exaltation of Christ, we’re speaking of Christ taking up his throne as King. We’ve seen this over and over in the gospel of Luke as well. 

Christ’s birth was proclaimed by angels. Flocks of people follow him and worship him. He enters Jerusalem as a king and preaches in the temple with the authority of a priest. And although the cross seems to be his greatest moment of defeat, it is actually his enthronement: it is on the cross that Christ takes his throne as King of the universe.

The first picture of exaltation we see in this passage is brief, but it is hugely significant. In the second half of v. 45 we read:  

And the curtain of the temple was torn in two.

Now that sounds like a quick, throwaway line—a detail. But to everyone reading this at the time who was familiar with Judaism, this detail would have been astonishing.

There were thirteen curtains in the temple of Jerusalem, and THE curtain—the most important one—separated the temple itself from the Most Holy Place. The Most Holy Place was where the presence of God had dwelt among his people. This was the place no one was allowed to enter, except for the high priest, and then only once a year, when he offered a blood sacrifice for himself and for the sins of the people. 

This was the place where God’s people were made right before him, where they were purified from their sins and maintained in the covenant God had made with them, through the ritual acts of the high priest, who acted as mediator between God and the people.

And now—as Christ suffers on the cross—the curtain which blocked entrance to the Most Holy Place, this curtain as thick as a man’s hand, was torn in two.

Now we could speak in detail about what this means for hours—entire books have been written about this. But we don’t have a lot of time, so we’ll keep it simple.

The curtain which separates the people from the Most Holy Place is torn in two, which means that it’s open now—in Christ, we all have access to God.

Before, God’s people had to come into his presence through a mediator: the high priest, who would offer blood sacrifices to purify them.

But now, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has become our perfect High Priest, offering his own blood (instead of the blood of an animal) for his people. And when the Holy Spirit changes our hearts and gives us faith, we are united to Christ—we are in him. 

Which means that because Christ, our High Priest, has perfect access to God, we have perfect access to God in him.

This is why we don’t need priests anymore. This is why my being a pastor doesn’t make my prayers any more effective than yours. God has not given me any special access to him that he has withheld from the rest of you. We have one mediator to go to God, and it’s not me, or any other pastor.

Paul writes in 1 Timothy 2.5: 

For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.

He is our mediator, and we are in him.

Ephesians 2.18:  

For through [Christ] we [all] have access in one Spirit to the Father.

That’s what the tearing of the curtain means. There is no longer any separation between God and his people. We have been reconciled to God.

Exaltation: Victory Cry (v. 46)

The next image we see is another image of exaltation.

46 Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!”

I know it sounds strange to call this a victory cry. It sounds more like a statement of trust than a declaration of victory. And it’s true that at first glance, it may seem like a fairly innocuous statement.

But any Jew hearing Jesus’s words would have recognized those words. Jesus is quoting Psalm 31.5. And there is a reason why this psalm (and particularly this verse) would have been so well-known to them.

“Into your hands I commit my spirit” was the traditional evening prayer that a pious Jew would pray before going to bed. 

Jesus—and likely every Jew present—would have been taught by their parents to say this prayer at bedtime, and would have repeated these words to God every night, since their childhood. They’d all have memories of slowing down after a hard day’s work, and finally getting ready for that wonderful moment when you can lay your tired body to rest, and they’d pray, “Into your hands I commit my spirit.”

By these words, the Jews would place themselves once again into the hands of their God, asking for his protection and care while they slept. 

What a beautiful thing for Jesus to say at this particular moment. 

But two things set apart his statement from the simple beauty of the verse he quotes.

Firstly, he adds a word. He says, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” No other Jew had ever dared say such a thing. The God of Psalm 31 is the great Yahweh. David felt great intimacy with and love for God; he enjoyed a relationship with him which was almost completely unique. 

But never had he dared call God his “Father.” 

With this one word, Jesus shows that his relationship with God has not been broken by the sin he became. He was just as united to God after suffering his wrath against our sin as before.

Secondly, Luke tells us that Jesus didn’t just say this verse; he called it out with a loud voice.

Usually those who were crucified died from either blood loss or suffocation. If it was blood loss, their life slowly and progressively drained out of them. If it was suffocation, they couldn’t breathe (obviously). 

This is not what happened with Jesus. He doesn’t just manage to squeeze out one last sentence in his exhaustion; his lungs have not given out. He still has enough energy to cry out with a loud voice. 

In other words, he died because he chose to die. He died because his work was finished.

He has absorbed the wrath of God against our sin; his work is done; and now he places himself back into his Father’s care as he goes to rest.

Humiliation: Death (v. 46b)

And having said this he breathed his last.

This is the last image of Jesus that Luke gives us in this passage. 

Jesus Christ—the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, the Creator of all things, eternally existing and eternally God, who took on a human nature, and lived a human life—died a human death.

It’s very important that we insist on the fact that Christ’s death was a willful act of humiliation on his part. It wasn’t a defeat; his life wasn’t taken from him; he gave his life (John 10.18). It was a decisive act on the part of Christ, and it was an act of humiliation.

And it wasn’t the first.

When the Son took on a human nature, taking the form of an embryo in the womb of a human girl (what we call the incarnation), that was an act of humiliation. What could be further below the Creator than to take on the nature of a created thing? It’s a complete reversal of how these things should go—like Gepetto becoming a puppet instead of Pinnochio becoming a real boy. His incarnation was a humiliation.

The life he lived was an act of humiliation. Christ dressed himself in a fragile, limited, human body like ours. Christ, who was without sin, surrounded himself with sin and with sinners, every day of his earthly life. Every minute of Christ’s life was humiliation.

So his death was not the first humiliation; but it was the ultimate humiliation.

His heart stopped beating. His lungs stopped breathing. His synapses stopped firing, and his nerves stopped receiving impulses from his brain. This man Jesus, born of a virgin, who performed incredible miracles and taught with the very authority of God, was dead.

Now here’s why Christ’s humiliation, in his life and his death, is really good news for us. 

Christ’s humiliation means that everything he calls us to do, he did first. You hear it all the time in war movies: soldiers willingly follow a general who goes before them into battle. Everything that Christ calls us to do now that we are in him, he did first.

The Holy Spirit regenerates our hearts and gives us a new nature, makes us new creations (Ezekiel 36.26, 2 Corinthians 5.21). Because of the Holy Spirit’s work in our hearts, we can finally and truly say no to sin—we can turn away from our rebellion against God and pursue his righteousness. God calls us to do this.

And Jesus did it first.

He resisted every temptation until the end. He lived a perfect human life, without sin. He followed every one of God’s commandments, to the letter. And now he gives us his Spirit, he gives us his life, so that we can follow in his footsteps.

Christ’s humiliation means that because he lived this way, we can live this way too.

And not only did he pave the way for us in life; he also paved the way for us in death.

Few things frighten us more than death. At the end of everyone’s life, there is always a struggle to stay alive; there is always fear there, even for a believer. It is a fear of the unknown—no one has ever died and then been able to tell us what it’s like. 

Of course I’m not talking about just the physical aspects of it—some people have gone into cardiac arrest and then been ressuscitated. I’m talking about total, complete death, about what it’s like to have life completely disappear from your body, and to find your soul standing in the presence of God almighty to be judged. 

No one has ever given a testimony of what this is like—even when we see resurrections we see in the Bible, those kinds of testimonies are absent. 

This unknown quantity, this fear of the unknown, is just something we all have to deal with.

But we find rest in the knowledge that Christ died, because we know that he knows what it’s like. He died a real, human death; his soul went to the place of the dead, to be with God; and now he intercedes for us as our High Priest before God.

How good is it to know that our High Priest, who is constantly praying for us before the Father, knows how it feels to die a human death? 

How good is it to know that he went there before us, and that he is ready to welcome us when it comes to be our time? 

How good is it to know that when we die in him, we go to the same place of the dead he went to, and that it is—as he said to our brother on the cross in the previous passage—paradise? 

He did this first…which means we can do this. The essential “sting” has been taken out of death. It’s still scary, sure, because it’s unknown: but it’s not unknown to him. He did it, so we can do it too.

Images of Hope (v. 47-49)

Now on the heels of these images of humiliation and exaltation, Luke gives us a series of snapshots—not of Jesus now, but of the people who were there watching these events.

Firstly, he mentions a centurion who was there—likely one of the men who drove in the nails and hoisted up the cross. 

V. 47:  

Now when the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God, saying, “Certainly this man was innocent!”

This man wasn’t a Jew; he was a Roman soldier. And we don’t know what happened to him after this day, whether or not he became a Christian. 

But Luke mentions him to give us a glimmer of hope—not only for him, but for all the Gentiles to whom the good news would be proclaimed. Remember, this is Part One of a two-part story, which Luke would conclude with the book of Acts. In that book he is going to tell story after story of Gentile men and women coming to faith in Christ. This man’s “praising God” and declaring Jesus’s innocence is a foreshadowing of what would happen in a short time.

Next we see the crowds of Jewish men and women who had gathered to watch the crucifixion. V. 48:  

And all the crowds that had assembled for this spectacle, when they saw what had taken place, returned home beating their breasts.

The Jews who had gathered there were likely residents of Jerusalem. Among them would have been people who had been mocking Jesus, crying out for his crucifixion. Among them would have been the “dry wood” Jesus mentioned in v. 31—the Jews who had willingly rejected the Messiah they had been waiting for, who were deserving of God’s judgment.

But we see there is hope for them as well—no longer mocking, no longer jeering, now they are all beating their breasts, united in their grief over the indignity of what has just happened.

A few weeks after these events, Peter would stand up on the roof of a house and preach the good news to the crowds surrounding him. That day, three thousand people would come to faith in Christ. It is quite likely that some of the people saved that day were on this hill, on this day. And Luke mentions them here to show there is hope for them as well.

Lastly, we see people who actually knew Jesus, v. 49:  

And all his acquaintances and the women who had followed him from Galilee stood at a distance watching these things. 

This is interesting. Luke doesn’t say anything about how they felt about these things. 

But he doesn’t really need to. Those who had followed Jesus and fled when he was arrested were surely filled with shame over their own fear. Those who had followed Jesus loved him, and were devastated by his death. 

And they were definitely, and quite simply, confused. All of their hopes had been set on this man. He was their Master, their Messiah, and now he was dead. 

Was everything Jesus had said a lie? What was left of their faith now?

Luke doesn’t say yet, but he’ll get there soon. 

And we know because he mentions “the women who had followed him from Galilee.”

We probably wouldn’t think much of it on first glance, but these women will come back more than once in the passage we’ll see next week. Luke is setting the stage for the event that will follow: the resurrection of Christ.

Exaltation Through Humiliation

But before we get there, we need to sit here for a while. 

Because this back-and-forth between exaltation and humiliation is one of the most surprising and confusing aspects of the Christian faith. The story of the Bible highlights over and over again the fact that God does not act the way one would expect an all-powerful God to act. 

In the Old Testament we see that God is not like the gods of the nations surrounding Israel; he distinguishes himself through his holiness, and the holiness of his people. He doesn’t oppress the poor and the needy and the foreigner, he cares for them. He doesn’t take advantage of his people, but provides for them. He doesn’t rule with a dictator’s hand, but establishes a covenant with them.

And in Jesus Christ, we see that he does not come as the warrior-king that everyone was expecting the Messiah to be. He comes as a suffering servant, who takes the place of his people and suffers the punishment of their guilt for them, so they don’t have to.

And it is for this very reason that his exaltation is so glorious. 

Christ could have been exalted merely by right—he is God, and has the inherent right to be worshiped as God. But Christ's exaltation is earned. He works for it, even though he doesn’t have to.

So it’s not just a question of exaltation and humiliation; Christ is exalted through humiliation.

In Philippians 2.5-11, Paul says,  

Christ Jesus…though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 THEREFORE God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. 

God did not exalt Christ despite his humiliation; he exalted Christ because of his humiliation.

So for us as well, these two things—humiliation and exaltation—are at play. Our King reigns today as a Crucified King, and we are his people. And if we are his people, we will follow in his footsteps.

In Christ, we receive a call to humiliation, and a promise of exaltation. 

Of course, our humiliation and exaltation are not exactly the same as his. Our humiliation is far smaller than his—none of us has to take on the sins of our brothers and sisters and suffer as a sacrifice for them. And our exaltation is not the same exaltation as Christ (he alone is King).

But like Christ, we are called to humiliation, and we are promised exaltation. 

Paul summarizes this dynamic so well in Romans 8.15-17:  

15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. 

We are called to humiliation: to suffer with Christ. 

If our Savior passed through humiliation, then why should we refuse to do things which feel “below us”? 

If our Savior suffered, why should we be surprised when we suffer? 

If our Savior served us, why should we be reticent to serve others? 

If our Savior suffered the pain of resisting temptation, why shouldn’t we suffer it as well? 

If our Savior forgave us, why should we feel okay about feeding our anger against those who wrong us? 

If our Savior cleansed us of our sins, why should we refuse to confess those sins to others? 

If our Savior was willing to be brought low, why should we pretend to be better than we are?

We follow in his footsteps because we remember that our suffering is far less than we deserve—like our brother on the cross, we remember that we deserve the eternal punishment of a holy God.

And we remember that we will receive far more than we deserve—we will receive the riches of his grace for all eternity.

Why? Because on the basis of the work of Christ for us, we have been adopted as sons and daughters of God, declared “fellow heirs” with Christ. And on the basis of his finished work, God promises to exalt us to a place far above that which we deserve, because we have been brought into the humiliation of our King.

The good news here, once again, is that Christ has done all of this work for us. He lived and died to be our representative. He has united us to himself through faith. He has given us his Holy Spirit to awaken our hearts and produce in us all we need for salvation. HE is the one who does all of this work.

So no matter who you are this morning, you can do this, because Christ did it for you.

You can turn from your rebellion against God and be united to him.

You can place your faith in him.

You can follow him.

You can suffer with him.

You can die secure knowing you are in him.

And you can be glorified with him.

ALL of this, Christ has already done for us.

So we can do it.

In this text, God calls us to believe in the One who was humiliated and exalted on the cross, and to follow him.

Remember, he gives us these images of hope at the end of the passage: a Roman centurion, a crowd of people beating their chests in grief, a group of Jesus’s followers who will soon see him resurrected. All of these people foreshadow what is to come: the multitudes of people, Jews and Gentiles, who will hear the testimony of the resurrected Christ and come to faith in him.

So look on his humiliation, and ask him, Why would you do this for me?

Look on his exaltation, and ask him, Why would you invite me to be a part of this?

Look on your Crucified King, and believe.