There are a number of scriptures I would love to read, but I'm going to limit myself to just two here, the passage for today, and then I'm going to read some selections from Psalm 69. This is also taken from Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53, but you're more familiar with those, and we will hit on Psalm 22 more next week. So I'm going to read from Psalm 69 first. This is a psalm of King David, and it's a messianic psalm. There's a lot of prophecy in it that refers to Jesus. Psalm 69, starting with verse 1. I'll read a bit and then I'll skip over some and read some more. Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire where there is no foothold. I have come into deep waters and the flood sweeps over me. I am weary with crying out. My throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God. More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause. Mighty are those who would destroy me, those who attack me with lies. What I did not steal must I now restore. God, you know my folly. The wrongs I have done are not hidden from you. Let not those who hope in you be put to shame through me. Lord God of hosts, let not those who seek you be brought to dishonor through me, God of Israel. For it is for your sake that I have borne reproach, that dishonor has covered my face. I have become a stranger to my brothers, an alien to my mother's sons. For zeal for your house consumes me, and the reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me. When I wept and humbled my soul with fasting, it became my reproach. When I made sackcloth my clothing, I became a byword to them. I am the talk of those who sit in the gate, and the drunkards make songs about me. Skipping down here to verse 19. You know my reproach and my shame and my dishonor, for my foes are all known to you. Reproaches have broken my heart so that I am in despair. I looked for pity, but there was none, and for comforters, but I found none. They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst, they gave me sour wine to drink. Let their own table before them become a snare, and when they are at peace, let it become a trap. Let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see and make their loins tremble continually. Skipping down to verse 26, where they persecute him whom you have struck down and they recount the pain of those you have wounded. Add to them punishment upon punishment. May they have no acquittal from you. Skipping on down. I will praise the name of God with a song. I will magnify him with thanksgiving. This will please the Lord more than an ox or a bull with horns and hooves. When the humble see it, they will be glad. You who seek God, let your hearts revive. For the Lord hears the needy and does not despise his own people who are prisoners. Let heaven and earth praise him, the seas and everything that moves in them. For God will save Zion and build up the cities of Judah. And the people shall dwell there and possess it. The offspring of his servants shall inherit it. And those who love his name shall dwell in it." Then today's text, Matthew 27. 2727 Pilate has just delivered Jesus to be sentenced him to be crucified Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor's headquarters and they gathered the whole battalion before him and they stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him and And twisting together a crown of thorns, they placed it on his head and put a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him, they mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews. And they spit on him and took the reed and struck him on the head. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the robe and put his own clothes on him and led him away to crucify him. As they went out, they found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name. They compelled this man to carry his cross, and when they came to a place called Golgotha, which means place of a skull, they offered him wine to drink mixed with gall, but when he tasted it, he would not drink it. And when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots. Then they sat down and kept watch over him there. And over his head, they put the charge against him which read, this is Jesus, the King of the Jews. Then two robbers were crucified with him, one on the right and one on the left. And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, you who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself. If you are the son of God, come down from the cross. So also the chief priests and the scribes and elders mocked him, saying, he saved others. He cannot save himself. He's the king of Israel. Let him come down from the cross and we will believe him. He trusts in God. Let God deliver him now if he desires him. For he said, I am the son of God. And the robbers who were crucified with him also reviled him in the same way. Again, there is so much in this passage that I'm not even going to be able to get into. If you had a chance to look through the scriptures in your homework, or if you follow up on the scriptures that I marked on your outline, you'll see that in detail, so many of these things that Matthew records are directly from Psalm 69 or Psalm 22. And the whole picture is in Isaiah 53 of what's going on. But there's several things I do want to draw out. But before I start, Was it a week or two ago? When was it that Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire? Really recently. Last week. It was interesting. As I was preparing this lesson, I read this article about a French priest, Jean-Marc Fournier, who was the fire brigade chaplain who went into Notre Dame Cathedral to recover. several holy relics, and one of them was Jesus' crown of thorns, that they believe they have the actual crown of thorns. And so that was one of the things that Notre Dame Cathedral housed, and they're hailing this French priest as a hero because he went fearlessly in and recovered this relic. Interesting. The crown of thorns has made such an impression on the church and on Western history that Even those who aren't priests, Francis is notorious for being secular and humanistic and everything, but they even value this as a cultural relic. But I want to talk about, draw out, the identity of the Messiah that we see in these passages. Now all through Matthew we've been highlighting different titles of his, different names he was called or things that he called himself. But I'm going to pick up on the ones that are either alluded to in this passage or are outright said. And the first role we see Jesus filling as the Messiah is that of the second Adam, the representative of humanity. This goes all the way back to Genesis. God created the first man, perfect, and the first man and woman rebelled against him. plunging humanity into destruction, allowing Satan to usurp what rightly belonged to Adam. And the world's never been the same since. But even back then, in the Garden of Eden, when it first happened, God promised to send a seed of Eve, a descendant of Eve, who would destroy the work of Satan and be the Messiah of his people. So we see this. This isn't spelled out. He's not called the second Adam here in this passage. But the Apostle Paul spells it out later in some of his epistles. But we see the symbolism here very clearly. So it says, John's gospel spells it out even more clearly. He says, so Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, behold the man. And as often as the case in the scripture, you can take that just on a very surface level. Yeah, here he is, the guy we were talking about. But often there's a much deeper significance in what's being said, even deeper than the person saying it realizes. And so behold the man. You've probably heard sermons preached on this, heard songs sung about it. You've seen paintings done of it. There's a whole genre in art called ecce homo, which is the Latin term for Behold the man and that's taken from the words of Pontius Pilate as translated into the Latin Vulgate, Ecce Homo. which means behold the man. And so here we see Christ, the man, the representative of humanity, coming now to take the test again, the one that Adam failed. Not only to take the test again, he's proved that by his life of obedience. Now he's paying the debt that Adam incurred for all of us. So he stands there with his crown of thorns on his head. Now the crown of thorns is not just a random spite spontaneously concocted by Roman soldiers for cruel sports. The soldiers who mocked Jesus unknowingly signified the fulfillment of God's promise that was made all the way back in Genesis 3.15 to redeem humankind from the curse of sin and death caused by Adam's rebellion. Even the spontaneous cruelty of the Roman soldiers carried the weight of biblical prophecy. So crowned with thorns, here he is, we see Jesus wearing the curse of Adam on his head, having it bashed into his head with a stick. To Adam, God said, back in Genesis 3, after Adam fesses up and says what he did, God says, cursed is the ground because of you. In pain, you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you. By the sweat of your brow, you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you will return. So the crown of thorns signifies that this is Jesus, the second Adam, coming to pay the debt of the first Adam. But there's another detail that reveals Christ's role as the second Adam, and that is he was stripped naked. A lot of times we gloss over that. When you see paintings of Jesus or you see a crucifix in a Catholic church, you see him draped with a loincloth, and that's for our sake, not because it's accurate. Part of the stigma and the horror and the shame of crucifixion was that the victims were stripped naked and held up to public display. And we see here, this has happened several times. OK, he's with the soldiers, and they do it the first time. They're undressing him way more than any hazing that you hear happens at the Citadel or some military academy. I mean, these are bad, hardened soldiers who are cruel, who this is sport for them. So they undress him, they dress him up, they undress him again, they put his own clothes back on him, they march him out, and then when he's crucified, he's stripped and hung on the cross. Now, nakedness was not a problem before the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. There was no need for clothing to hide what was glorious and innocent. When God finished the masterpiece of his creation and brought Adam and Eve together, The last verse of Genesis 2 reads, and the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Then chapter 3 happens. And chapter 3 tells us that the very first effect, the very first noticeable effect of man's sin was a sudden, overpowering sense of self-conscious shame. He suddenly realizes he's naked, and now there's shame attached to that nakedness. It wasn't like before, God's going, oh, you're so innocent, you don't know you're naked. It wasn't that. There was no shame. There was no reason for him to be embarrassed. Some commentators actually say that they think there was a visible difference that occurred after the fall, that before he rebelled against God, he was closed with immortal glory, perhaps like the angels, shining, whatever, that there was a noticeable difference. And when he ate it, all of a sudden, poof, that's gone. And it's more than a physical nakedness that occurs. It's the whole spiritual, emotional sense associated with it then. The scripture says, suddenly the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths and hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. When God called to Adam, our first father replies, I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. And here's the compassion of God. God had every right at that point to say, you know what? You did this to yourself. Step out here. I'm going to string you up on a tree right now and let the whole universe laugh at you, because that's what you deserve. But he doesn't do that. He has a compassionate heart of a father. And it says that God had compassion on his guilty children, and the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin and clothed them. See, God offered the first sacrifice. God made the sacrifice, not man. And this is a foreshadowing of what Christ would do for the human race. He would allow himself to be stripped naked in order to clothe us so that we can stand before God and all of creation with dignity and without shame or fear. He took that shame and fear and dehumanization for us. The second role we see Jesus fulfilling is more easily seen because it's spelled out by Pontius Pilate here in scripture. King of the Jews. There are several terms that we've studied coming up to this point. They're all part of this complex of the King of the Jews. This is the deliverer, the Lord's anointed one, the messianic King of Israel, the one that all the devout Jews' hopes was fixed on. He's going to come. He's going to save his people. He's going to deliver us. He's going to restore the golden age of Israel. He's going to sit on David's throne. And he's going to make life good for us. He's going to take care of our enemies as in annihilate them or make them bow and grovel. And we're going to be top dogs. And they had a worldly understanding of what that was. And they thought it was going to all happen at once, that God was going to restore the kingdom of Israel at this time. But as is the case with biblical history, often it's prophesied, and you see the tops of the mountains going out. You don't see the depths between. You see the highlights of history that are prophesied. And so they have no idea that this is going to happen in stages, and it's going to happen over time. But Jesus came as the King of the Jews, and the King of the Jews was to be the Son of David. Now that's what he's been welcomed as, coming into Jerusalem with a triumphal entry. The people are calling out, you know, Son of David, and waving, and the children are calling, and they're calling him by this messianic title. And that is, the Son of David was to be King David's descendant. and the rightful heir to the throne of Israel. He was going to be the one that sets up the eternal kingdom and rules and establishes peace on earth. He was also said to be the son of God. And this is taken from Psalm 2. It's a Messianic title metaphorically applied to the kings of Israel, descended from David, but ultimately fulfilled in the actual divine son of God, the only begotten son of God himself. who would not only rule Israel, but the nations. And this is all taken from Son of David, Son of God. It's all taken from God's promise to David, King David. When King David's kingdom was established and he said, I want to build a house for God. I want to make a glorious temple for the renown of his name. And God spoke to the prophet Nathan and said, Nathan at first was like, yeah, good idea. Great, go for it. God's with you. And then God spoke to Nathan and said, no, it's not going to be this way. David is not going to be the one to build my temple. David's son will build my temple. But I'm going to establish the house of David, and there will always be someone sitting on his throne. And so this is prophecy that the Messiah is going to come from the line of David. So the king of the Jews, all this, is tied up in this. And back when the Sanhedrin examined him, when the high priest finally got frustrated and cut to the chase, he said, are you the son of God? And that's what he's referring to. Do you claim to be this, the king of the Jews, this messianic hero that's to come? And Jesus said, you've said that I am. Yes. This is the crime that sent Jesus to his death. This is the sentence that Pilate had printed. And he had it printed in a bunch of different languages. And where the crucifixion happened was at a crossroads. So people from all over are seeing it. This is his crime. He is who he claimed to be. He's the king of the Jews. That messianic son of David, the son of God, the one who would himself build the true temple of God. See, Solomon fulfilled that prophecy immediately on a small level, but ultimately the prophecy would be fulfilled in Christ, who was the temple of God, the dwelling place of God with man, and who would build the house of God, the church. He's the one who will rule the nations with an iron scepter. And you see the soldiers taunting him. They give him this little reed to rule with as a scepter, making ridiculous. But Psalm 2 says that he'll rule with a rod of iron, and he will crush those who oppose him like pottery with an iron scepter. His kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom, and he's going to establish peace on Earth. Well, wow, tough luck, huh? Tragic mistake. Too bad they didn't recognize him, right? They missed their chance. No, that's not what the King of the Jews came to do. And it would be accomplished, what he came to do, it would be accomplished by his sacrificial death on their behalf. Yes, he was going to save his people. His people was much bigger than the ethnic people of Israel or the geographical location of Israel. and the salvation he brings is brought about by the sacrifice of himself, his own death. This presents a third role that Jesus fulfilled as the Christ, and that is the suffering servant that's talked about in Isaiah 53 and that the details of are recorded in Psalm 22 and 69 and other places throughout biblical history. See, this is what the people didn't understand about the king of the Jews. They were so excited when he came into the city. Oh, here he is, son of David. God save us. Here he is, the king of Israel. And then less than a week later, they're ready to crucify him. Why is that? Well, their version of the Messiah was a little bit different from the whole picture of scripture. See, the version of the Messiah as the suffering servant is clearly in the Old Testament prophecies, but it was not widely recognized or embraced by the people of Jesus' day. Truthfully, we don't like it very well either. We don't like suffering. We tend to suspect and look down on those who suffer. I'm sure you've heard the story of it. I forget which hymn it was, one of those beautiful hymns of reassurance and peace and everything. The author of the song had one tragedy after another after another happened to him. His wife died. His children died. He's just like suffering like Job. And the church couldn't figure it out. And so they basically ended up excommunicating him because they couldn't bear his suffering. And they had to blame it on something and say, you must be a terrible secret sinner. And so insult upon injury. That's what the people did on a grander scale to Jesus. Here he comes suffering redemptively by the will of God, and they hate him for it. They don't want him. That's not the kind of Messiah they want. We want our leaders to be stately, impressive, powerful, take charge, get the job done, even if you have to stoop and get your hands dirty a little bit. We don't tend to think of our leaders as those who suffer more than anyone else, who suffer willingly for the sake of the people they lead. That's not our picture of leadership. That's not a worldly understanding. Jesus' picture of leadership is much different. He is those other things, not to get your hands dirty and do the wrong thing to do the right thing, but all those other things. He has the power and when we see him again, when he returns, it will be in stately majesty and power and he will get the job done. But that's not who we tend to think of as leaders today. It's not who we tend to honor in religious circles. We want to present the ones who are healthy, wealthy, and wise, who name it and claim it, who, oh, I came to Jesus, and all of a sudden, I got rich and healthy, and everything turned out happy for me. You just come to Jesus, and it'll happen for you. Where do they get that in the scripture? But that's a worldly understanding of success. And that's what we want our leaders to bring to us. But Jesus came as the King of the Jews, as the second Adam, the rightful ruler of the earth, but also as the suffering servant to redeem us from the curse and from our sins. So as the suffering service, what did the Messiah experience? Isaiah says, surely he has borne our grief and carried our sorrows. He was wounded for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace. With his stripes, we are healed. The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of all of us. He was stricken for the transgression of my people. His soul makes an offering for sin. Out of the anguish of his soul, he shall see and be satisfied. He bore the sin of many and makes intercession for transgressors." So what do we see him in this part of the scripture here, this passage we're studying today, experiencing as a suffering servant? The first thing that leaped out at me is helplessness. Here's the divine Son of God, Son of the Almighty, who has power, as we saw back in Matthew 4, he had the power to turn stones into bread. He had the power to jump off the temple and not be hurt. He could do miracles, but he wasn't going to do that. That was not the will of God for him to use his power in that way. It kind of reminds me of that first Superman movie of the new batch, the new Superman, where the people of Earth feel threatened by Superman because he has these superpowers that they don't have. And so in this one scene, They handcuff him, and they tie him up and lead him over to the enemy, because they don't want trouble with the enemy. And somebody makes a comment, you know, like, what is this? You know, you let them handcuff you, and he said, well, it made him feel better. It made him feel safer. That's kind of what you see happening here. Here's the ultimate Superman, allowing petty, weak, cruel little human beings to tie him up. And he stands there and takes it. He could have at any moment incinerated them with a word or a look, and he humbled himself. He became helpless as a human. And helplessness is not being able to do for yourself, right? And we've all experienced it in one way or another. As a little child, you're helpless, right? You know, you can't get what you need. You depend on your parents. It was humbling for Jesus, who was the almighty son of God, the creator of the universe, to come down and become an infant and to be dependent on his mother to feed him and change him and care for him and teach him to walk. That was humbling enough. But here he humbles himself to experience cruel violence. the physical violation of his person. And if you have experienced physical violence, Jesus understands those feelings of violation. Now being randomly attacked by one evil or desperate person is traumatic enough, fearful enough. Can you imagine being the calculated target of a whole battalion of enemy soldiers? Men who are far from home, who are angry with life, who are probably raging alcoholics, who are hardened in cruelty, who have seen crucifixion after crucifixion after crucifixion. And what do you do with that as a human being, that type of evil and horror? It destroys you or you embrace it. Without the spirit of God, it's going to do one or the other. So they're hardened in their cruelty. and they have nothing better to do than egg one another on to torment you. Can you imagine that kind of helplessness? We feel helpless as women with one man that's bigger than us. Imagine a whole battalion of soldiers. See, Jesus took all the violence of sinful, barbaric humanity, both the guilt of the ones who committed violence and the grief and devastation of those who were violated. He took that into himself. He experienced it. He carried it to the cross. So if you feel that sense of violation, your Lord experienced that and he carried it for you. Jesus experienced in this helplessness, he also experienced mortal weakness. Here he is, immortal. But he takes, he clothes himself with mortality and humbles himself and becomes a man and as Paul writes to the Philippians, becomes obedient even to the point of death. Now Jesus, just piecing the pieces together here of the story, Jesus was a strong man. says he was a carpenter. Joseph was a carpenter, and he followed in his father's footsteps. It's strong enough, somebody who goes hammering and building, but it could also mean he was a stonemason. He chiseled stone and that kind of thing. He was a strong man. He was a man in the prime of his life. He was a perfect specimen of masculine strength. Those of us who've been around a while have watched our husbands and our fathers struggle with this, right? This, you know, at one time they were strong, powerful, the guy you went to. And as they age, they lose their strength. And it's hard to deal with. Just like it's hard for us when we lose our beauty, it's really hard for men when they lose their strength. Jesus experienced that. He had been punched and slapped and beaten with a rod repeatedly. He had lost blood before he even got anywhere near the cross. He was bruised internally, lacerated externally. He was sleep deprived, remember? He's been up all night being shuffled around from the Sanhedrin to Pilate to Herod, back to Pilate, back now, you know, abused by the soldiers and then he's let out to be crucified. He's completely exhausted. And by the time he's finally turned over for crucifixion, he is so weak that he stumbles under the weight of his own cross. He was physically incapable of doing for himself what had to be done, what he came to do, what God had commissioned him to do. He was physically incapable of carrying it out at that point. That's why the soldiers conscripted Simon of Cyrene from the crowd to carry it for him. And we'll talk about Simon in a minute. But think about this. If the Son of God couldn't even carry his cross the whole way to the finish without help, why are we surprised when we need help to carry our crosses? Why do we judge other people who are struggling and falling down under the weight of the burdens they carry? One of the hardest things for me while my father was dying was to see the man who is my first picture of strength come to the place where he could no longer get out of bed for a bath. He couldn't roll over in bed to change his position. He couldn't keep his eyes open. And at the very end, he couldn't even clear his own throat. That's how weak he became. And we'll all experience that at some point. That's the human condition that is the result of Adam's sin. And Jesus came willingly and experienced all of this for us. I think we all dread the thought of coming to the point where we can no longer take care of ourselves, where we're going to need to depend on someone, probably our children, to do the basic things for us. Oh no, please God, not that. Take me now, right? I've said that prayer many times. Just take me. I'm ready to go down. Don't reduce me to that. I've done that for my parents, and it was so painful to watch them. I don't want to be put in that position. And what is that? That's pride. Why do we think we should be spared the indignity of physical helplessness when the son of God was not spared? He came and experienced that and everything that goes along with it. See, Jesus understands the mortal weakness. He knows the frustration and the fear and the dismay of not being able to take care of himself, not being able to pull his own weight, not being able to dress himself, not being able to hold a cup of water to his own lips. He knows what it's like to fall down and not be able to get up again on his own strength. to be physically incapacitated so much that he can't lift his hand to scratch and itch or shoo a fly away on the cross. Helpless. He can't lift his body on the cross at a certain point so that he can breathe. That's the helplessness he was reduced to. Jesus carried the helplessness of debilitating injury, disease, physical handicap, old age. We're all going to taste one of those if we haven't already at one time or another. Jesus came willingly and experienced that for us, carried it for us. Jesus suffered all these things righteously, without grumbling, without threats or angry outbursts, without becoming combative, without doubting or accusing God. How many of us suffer that well when we're reduced to this? And Jesus experienced helplessness in the face of actual death. So scripture says repeatedly, the wages of sin is death. God told Adam, when you sin that day, you sin, you will die. Death is what you get. And we're all subject to death. And Jesus, the Lord of life, the creator of life, comes and voluntarily submits himself to death. He came to take upon himself the very thing that humanity fears most. Because of the love and grace of God, Jesus became human to pay the debt of our sin. To identify with us in it, to take it upon himself, and to pay that debt. He died so that we could live. Do you fear death? Yeah, there's always a little uncertainty. You know, it's something we haven't experienced before, and I have to say, it's not really the thought of death so much as the process of death that I dread. Jesus covered all of that. He covered all of that. And thanks to Jesus, we don't have to fear death. It's an enemy. He's already conquered it. Thanks to Jesus, death is not permanent for us. Jesus experienced not only the pain of physical abuse and helplessness, he also experienced humiliation. He carried our shame. See, often in the face of pain and suffering and abuse, the victim takes on a sense of shame. Not the victim's fault, but that's the reality of the way it's experienced often. Isaiah writes, he was despised and rejected by men as one from whom men hide their faces. He was despised and we esteemed him not. They made his grave with a wicked, although he had done no violence and there was no deceit in his mouth. Jesus experienced humiliation. First of all, as we said, he was stripped and exposed, physically and emotionally vulnerable and shamed in front of soldiers. in front of the world. Think about this. He's stripped naked, stretched out, pinned down, and held up for everyone to see. Think about what that would do to your psyche. You know, in one sense we glorify nakedness, you know, pornography and everything, but it's airbrushed, right? Maybe some of these people will do it for a photo shoot and they act like they're really good with that. Why do they have blinds on their windows at home? There are certain things we just don't want people to see about us. It's dehumanizing to be stripped like that, to be held up naked. Ever since the fall of Adam, nakedness has produced anxiety and shame. Stripping was part of the shame of crucifixion, part of the psychological torture. It's dehumanizing. It's intended to insult, to diminish the victim's dignity. Nakedness makes a person physically and emotionally vulnerable. You can't hide anything. Every part of you is open to scrutiny and to ridicule. You don't want people to see everything the way we really are. You don't want people to remember us that way. You don't really want to go to church with your gynecologist. You don't want to come to church and think, no. We all have that sense. A lot of people even have that sense of, They don't want people looking at them when they're dead in their casket. They say, I do not want an open coffin. Close it. Don't want people looking at me that way. It's not going to look right. I'm going to be old and shriveled, or they're going to do a bad wax job. And I don't want people to remember me that way. Remember me the way I was. Close the casket. That sense of modesty about our bodies and that sense of this is who we are, what we want people to see. Everyone's felt this kind of shame or vulnerability in some way, to some degree. Maybe you've had attention called to your physical defects or flaws, and they've been ridiculed by other people. Kids are notorious for this. They pick on your one characteristic. Oh, you have big ears. You're fat. You're skinny. You're whatever. And they torment other children based on that. Oh, adults do it, too. It's all over social media, the mean girl thing. It's horrible. This is human beings. This is what we do. So maybe you've had your physical characteristics that you don't like about yourself ridiculed. Maybe you've had your beauty pointed out in a way that felt threatening or dehumanizing, reducing you to an object of lust and making you feel very vulnerable. Maybe you had your innocence stolen by someone who overpowered or manipulated you or abused your trust in order to gratify his own lust. And you felt shame because of what he did to you. Jesus understands the devastation that you feel. Jesus came and entered into that devastation. Jesus took that shame upon himself. This is not your shame to bear. You don't need to live with that shame anymore. If you are in Christ, there is no shame on you. I hate that saying, shame on you. We really should go around and say, shame off you. Shame off you. Jesus took our shame. Jesus bore our shame to the cross. There's no shame on the people of God. Jesus carried that shame to the cross for you and for me. Jesus was further humiliated by being labeled a criminal. You know about labeling. Name calling reduces and unfairly caricatures or convicts somebody in the court of public opinion just by being labeled. Everyone has experienced being called a name. reducing somebody usually to one uncomplimentary attribute or something that other people hate, applying it to one person and then they're castigated for it. It becomes the verdict on who you are in the minds of a lot of people who don't know you. Maybe you were diagnosed with a disability and came to see that disability as your identity. Maybe you were picked on as a child and called a name, like we said, fat, skinny, stupid, ugly, weak, clumsy, loser, whatever. And you begin to think that's who you were. Politicians on social media do this all the time. Call someone a racist or a sexist or a homophobe, and the majority of people without knowing anything about that person will marginalize them and write them off and think they're a terrible person. That's what happened to Jesus. Jesus knows what it is to be reduced to an unsavory name, to be labeled, to be unfairly sentenced both in court and in the unpredictable court of public opinion. He wasn't convicted of any real crime, but he was labeled and executed as a criminal. And that's what people who didn't know him thought about him. And Jesus was humiliated as he was scorned by spitting. Spitting is the common person's ultimate form of contempt and disrespect. Spitting on someone means they're lower than low. Too despicable even to deserve your words. You belong down a drain somewhere with toothpaste scum and phlegm in the company of amoebas. That's what it's saying when you spit on somebody. Besides being gross, in Jewish culture it made you ceremonially unclean. God told Moses back during the exodus, or during the wilderness time when Miriam challenged Moses' authority, God struck her with leprosy and Moses pleaded with God, interceded on her behalf and said, please don't do this, please heal her, please restore her. God said if her father had spit in her face, she would be unclean for seven days. Okay, I'll heal her, but for seven days she's unclean outside the outside the camp. So that whole idea of spitting on somebody, in any culture that's an insult, but particularly in Jewish culture that was just really bad. Who is this enduring spitting covered in the mucus of mankind? This is no despicable criminal. This is the holy and righteous, beloved, eternal son of God. The man in all the world, the one man in all the world, in all of history, who never committed any sin, in whose mouth there was never a lie, who is the very image of the invisible God, in whose body the spirit of God dwells without measure. As I was writing this, I kept thinking of the Indelible Grace hymn, which I don't have time to play for you, but if you want to look it up and Google it, who is this? Indelible Grace, beautiful, just that contrast of Jesus is experiencing this, this shame, this mockery, this mistreatment, people disdaining him, scorning him, who is this? And then it talks about who he really is. This is the Son of God. This is the Lord of Heaven. And he's doing this. Why is he doing this? He's suffering. He's taking all this. But he's raining down blessings on his church through this. So listen to the song if you can. But for our sake, Jesus experienced helplessness. He experienced humiliation. And he also experienced outright mockery, insult, ridicule, gloating, insult upon injury, literally. He was mocked by all kinds of people. He was mocked by the Roman soldiers. And this is a picture of how the strong of the world look down on the weak, rule by force and domination, and love to bully to show their strength and superiority. The soldiers dress him up to look like a king, scarlet robe like a military commander, crown of thorns, a reed for a scepter in his hands, and they make a show of bowing to him and saying, hail, king of the Jews, not recognizing that what they're saying is true. Who's the joke going to be on ultimately? They don't recognize Jesus' true kingship. They proclaim him king in jest. What they're saying, though, is if you were a king, you would be strong and able to defend yourself. You're weak and ridiculous. You're no king. He was mocked by the Jewish leaders representing the religious establishment. Religion without Jesus can be pretty ugly. These people rule by the pretense of moral superiority. And they say, oh, he saved others, but he can't save himself. And they don't realize, yeah, that's right. He can do one or the other. He's choosing the more noble of the two. Remember in the Garden of Eden when Jesus pleaded with his father and said, if there's any other way, please take this away from me. Guess what? There was no other way. He can do one or the other. Yes, he could have saved himself. Yes, he can save himself at this moment while they're taunting him. But he doesn't because he is determined to save us instead. He's the king of Israel. Let him come down from the cross and we'll believe in him. He trusts in God. Let God deliver him now if he desires him, for he said, I'm the son of God. And what they're saying is, God doesn't love you, Jesus. If God loved you, he would rescue you. Sound familiar? Remember back in Matthew chapter 4, Jesus' temptation in the wilderness? Where have we heard this before? If you're the son of God, prove it. Throw yourself down from the pinnacle of the temple. Wow, everyone. People will believe when they see God rescue you, when they see angels and miracles, right? No. Jesus didn't buy it then, and he doesn't buy it now. They want him to prove that God loves him by God rescuing him from death. But guess what? God's going to prove that he loves him and that he's the beloved son with resurrection instead. God does not always rescue us from death. Sometimes he resurrects. Jesus is mocked by careless passersby, the clueless who are hasty to judge without knowing anything. The know-nothing, know-it-alls kind of people that you find on Facebook all the time that comment on everything. Jump on the bandwagon. Don't you hate that? Ignorant people who are eager to jump on the bandwagon of social condemnation because it makes them feel good about themselves. People who don't know the person being criticized and they don't understand the issues involved, but they are quick to condemn. Hey, Miracle Man, you said you could destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days. Yeah, right, you can't even save yourself. And they don't understand. that Jesus was speaking of his own body when he made that statement, I'll destroy this temple and rebuild it in three days, and they don't understand that they're actually seeing the fulfillment of what he says here, the beginning of it. They're seeing the temple being torn down, the temple of his body, and in three days he will rise from the dead. But they're taunting him, they're ridiculing him, they know nothing, they understand nothing, and Jesus took it. Jesus is even mocked by the other criminals. And isn't this typical of humanity? Especially typical in prison, from what you hear. I mean, there's a pecking order among criminals. They love to find somebody worse than they are, and they love to punish that person. So if you're in there for murder, you can be a pretty tough guy. If you're in there for abusing a child, oh, everybody will execute vengeance on you. And so here's the other criminals looking down on Jesus and joining in the condemnation of him, ridiculing him. What is that? When there's something in ourselves that we hate and we see it in somebody else and ridicule them. That's the fallen human condition and Jesus took it. He experienced it. If you've experienced that, your Lord experienced it and he didn't answer back. King David wrote out of his own experience in Psalm 22 and yet he wrote prophetically at the same time. He wrote, but I'm a worm and not a man, scorned by mankind and despised by the people. All who see me mock me. They make mouths at me. They wag their heads saying he trusts in the Lord. Let him deliver him. Let him rescue him if he delights in him. And here are the leaders of Israel They don't even realize they're quoting scripture. They're fulfilling the scriptural prophecies of the Messiah, almost word for word, action for action. They're acting it out, what was prophesied hundreds of years before. But what's this? David's writing his own poetry, acting out of his own grief and processing his own trauma. And yet it's a messianic psalm, it's a prophecy of Jesus. You see, all the worst experiences that you and I have had in life, all the things that have hurt us most deeply, find understanding and comfort and remedy in Jesus, who experienced them all. When you suffer, remember that you are feeling only a small part of the human condition that Jesus experienced in you. full, voluntarily, without pain medicine. Part of what was involved when they gave him the sour wine, the wine and gall, one of the other Gospels says it was mixed with myrrh, which was a painkiller. There's several reasons that he didn't drink it when they gave it to him. One was it was so bitter that he couldn't drink it. Going back to Psalm 69 saying they gave me poison for food and and bitter wine to drink, couldn't even stomach it. The other is he was not willing to dull the pain at all. Oh, I want my pain dulled. I am the first one to take a Motrin. I get so frustrated with my husband. He goes around complaining. I'm sore. I have allergies. Well, take something for it. No, I don't like drugs. And Jesus willingly experienced the full gamut of human pain and suffering and shame and emotion and horror for us. But I want to end by looking at the man who was forced to carry the cross for Jesus here. Simon of Cyrene, verse 32 says, as they went out they found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name, and they compelled him to carry his cross, Jesus' cross. Church tradition, credible. When certain traditions do the stations of the cross, they act all this out of Jesus stumbling, of Jesus being greeted by the women, of all the things that happened to him that are kind of combined from all the Gospels and some of them maybe aren't spelled out, but it's tradition that this happened. Well, they grabbed Simon of Cyrene to carry the cross for Jesus, as I said, because Jesus did not have the strength at that point to carry his own cross. He fell under it and he couldn't even get up and carry it. What do we learn about Simon of Cyrene? Well, first of all, he's from Cyrene. Where's Cyrene? Cyrene's a city in Libya, in Africa. He may have been black. It's very likely that Simon of Cyrene was black. You know, when some people say God's colorblind, you know, he doesn't notice race. But I want to say, when race is significant, God mentions it. God created color and God likes color. When race is significant, he mentions it. And Simon's race is alluded to here. This isn't the only time we see it in scripture. The Queen of Sheba was from Africa, Ethiopia, we think. There's a whole tradition there. You can look it up in National Geographic. They have a whole tradition in Ethiopia of where she was supposed to be. Jesus cites her as a positive example of a foreigner who was so drawn to the wisdom of Solomon that she traveled to Jerusalem from her own faraway country just to meet him, to see and hear for herself if this guy was all he was cracked up to be. Jesus held her up as a positive example of what the Jewish cities that had him right there were not doing. They had him and they didn't appreciate him. The Queen of Sheba traveled all across the world just because she heard a rumor of a guy like this. And scripture says she brought Solomon spices and gold and all kinds of treasure and Solomon gave to her anything she asked for. There's an extra biblical rumor that has some basis that one of the things she asked Solomon for was a baby. As in, not give me an Israelite child, but I want to have your baby. Guess what? There are Ethiopian Jews whose DNA is Jewish and they're black Africans. The Ethiopian eunuch in the Book of Acts is a foreign dignitary, high up in the service of a later Ethiopian queen. And the Holy Spirit sends Philip the evangelist out to the desert road to meet this man after Pentecost. Philip finds the Ethiopian eunuch reading from the scroll of Isaiah in his chariot. And Philip goes up and listens, strikes up a conversation with the man, explains Isaiah's prophecies as being fulfilled in Christ. leads the man to Christ, baptizes him there beside the road, and the Ethiopian eunuch returns to his country and to his queen with the gospel of Jesus Christ to add to the Jewish scriptures that maybe they had for some reason through Solomon connection. And guess what? Isaiah is the one that prophesied that foreigners and eunuchs would be welcomed into and honored among the people of God. So in recent years, many black Africans from Ethiopia have actually immigrated to Israel because there was persecution going on and Israel had a program of sponsoring Jews around the world who were being persecuted to come and immigrate to Israel. And a lot of Ethiopian, black Ethiopian Jews have moved to Israel on account of it. Their DNA shows that they are, in fact, ethnically Jewish. Now, Simon of Cyrene from the city in Libya is just coming in from the country. So he may have lived near Jerusalem, been working in the fields, and come into town, or he may have been in town for the Passover. made a pilgrimage from Cyrene, we don't know. He was not from Jerusalem originally, we know that. He was from Cyrene, and it's quite likely that he was black African. I'm going to talk about the unjust nature of his selection for this task here. Why was this man picked out of the crowd? to carry the cross for Jesus. It seems like this was a random spur of the moment decision made by one of the soldiers. Just practically speaking, got to have somebody carry it. And soldiers were known for doing this. The Jews had all kinds of laws and agreements with the Romans. One of them was the Roman soldier could compel you to walk for a mile carrying his stuff. Well, they were allowed to conscript somebody from the crowd to help a prisoner carry his cross. Why did they pick Simon? Maybe it was his dark skin that stood out to him in the crowd. Maybe Simon was big and looked strong, just the muscle needed to get the job done. They don't care who he is. They're dehumanizing him. You muscle, you muscle. You look different from this crowd here. Come carry this guy's cross. Whatever the reason, Simon happened to be in the right place at the right time, or as some people might say, in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it wasn't fair. He hadn't done anything wrong. Why was he targeted and compelled to perform this humiliating manual labor? Why was he made a slave? This is just one of the daily indignities of being ruled by a foreign empire. Another day in the life of your average conquered people, right? But something happened to Simon when he picked up that cross and carried it for Jesus. So it was different from having to pick up his own burden and do whatever. Something changed in him. And the point I want to make is that injustice that has suffered with Jesus and for Jesus is holy and powerful. It is not dehumanizing. We have a choice how we respond to the injustices of life. Simon could have become bitter. He could have just railed again, you know, here we are, here's the man, figuring me out because I'm black, you know, just dehumanizing me, conquering people, colonization, imperialism, you know, angry, angry, angry, let's go overthrow the government. We see that. And we can understand that. And, you know, that's how a human wants to respond to injustice. But someone who's met Jesus is different. And Simon does not respond that way. Look at the impact of Jesus' cross on Simon. See, the church knows his name. How do they know his name? Evidently, he became a follower of Jesus. If he wasn't a follower of Jesus up to that point and already known, he became a follower of Jesus after that. The fact that the gospel writers know and record his name implies that he was known to the congregation of the early church. Just say the name, Simon of Cyrene. Oh, yeah, yeah, that guy that carried the cross. Yeah, we know him. We worship with him on Sunday. Look at the impact of Jesus' cross on his sons. Mark notes in his account that Simon of Cyrene was the father of Alexander and Rufus. Love those names, especially Rufus. Obviously, Simon's sons were distinguished members in the early church. So this goes beyond Simon, the impact of Simon carrying the cross of Christ. It goes on to his children. I think the way that Simon took up the cross and followed Jesus, and the way he did not do it, but the way he chose to do it, and what happened in his life as a result deeply impacted the faith of his sons. The witness of a father who embraces the cross and follows Jesus in the sight of his children is powerful. And it affects not just his children. Look at the effect that it had in the church. Look at Acts 2, 5 and verse 10, Romans 16, 13. Luke tells us in his account of the early church that he writes in the book of Acts that at Pentecost, quote, there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And some of them were from, quote, the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene. And Paul sends greetings in the book of Romans, at the end of Romans, to Rufus and his mother, saying that Rufus's mother was like a mother to him, to Paul. This is probably the same Rufus. He's just referred to as Rufus. Oh, Rufus, yeah, we all know Rufus. So the influence of Simon's family and his kinsmen reaches well beyond Jerusalem, and it's felt actually in the world, you see in the Book of Acts. After the martyrdom of Stephen, when persecution scatters the church from Jerusalem, Men of Cyrene who came to Antioch were some of the first believers to bring evangelization to the Gentiles. See, before that everybody had just been talking to the Jews, telling Jews, here's the fulfillment, here's the Jewish Messiah. It was the men of Cyrene that started witnessing to the Gentiles and saying, he's for you too. And Luke records two notable either prophets or teachers in the church at Antioch. Listen to these names. Simeon, who was called, not Simon, Simeon, who was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, side by side here. Simeon called Niger. Niger is the Latin word for black. Simeon is a variant of Simon. Black Simon? Simon Black may well have been Simon of Cyrene. In any case, men of Cyrene were prominent leaders in the church in Antioch, and they were the ones initially instrumental in the church's mission to evangelize the Gentiles. Look at the impact of embracing the cross of Christ in the life of one man and where it led, through his children, into his church, out into the world. A few months ago, I told you a little bit about this a week or two ago, I went with a friend to hear the testimony, to hear a Roman Catholic priest, a charismatic Catholic priest, Father Ubald speak. a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, where the two tribes, the Hutsis and the Tutus, you know, there was animosity and one tribe just tried to totally annihilate the other tribe. Former friends, neighbors turned on each other, hacked each other to death with machetes. And he survived this. And hearing in his testimony, he struggled under the weight of this unjust racial hatred. He was serving the church at the time that this broke out. And they heard that it was happening. And a lot of the people of his tribe who were Catholic came to the church for refuge. And Father Ubald was there and welcomed them in. Well, the townspeople came and said, we're going to kill everybody if you don't leave. Father Ubald, you need to leave. And so they basically decided he needed to leave. He felt terrible, but his bishop told him to leave. And the people said, if you leave, we're going to die. They're going to come kill us. But his bishop told him to go. So he went, and the bishop said, if you die tonight, I'll die with you. So Father Ubald goes. He's chased. Dramatic story. He's hiding out. He's being pursued. He witnessed the death of his own family, his mother, targeted by these people. People saw their children hacked to death in front of them. Horrible, inexcusable, evil, cruel genocide of the first order. He survived this, but after he had been taken out of the country, you can imagine, what do you do with what you've seen, with what you've experienced? And he's just overwhelmed. And so he goes to Lourdes to walk the Stations of the Cross. And there he's just overwhelmed. And he's thinking, I'm a failure as a priest. I have wasted my life. I have taught peace and love, and what have I accomplished? Nothing. This is what the world is. How can I bear this? How can I go on? And it was there as he was walking the Stations of the Cross that the Lord impressed upon him, genocide is the part of my cross that I've given you to bear. And when he understood this, that this wasn't just some random suffering that he had experienced, some injustice, some horror, but this was a part of the cross of Christ that Jesus himself carried, that he now had the honor of bearing with Jesus, then he could take it. He found the will to go on living and he embraced the cross and he carried it, and he went back to Rwanda and he started this powerful ministry of reconciliation for both the victims and the offenders, members of both tribes, bringing them together in the church in repentance and forgiveness by the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. That's what happens when you embrace the cross. It makes your suffering not random, not meaningless, but powerful and meaningful and ministries produced. Think of in our own country, the difference between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Two men struggling with the same injustice and Malcolm X says, we will achieve our rights by any means necessary. And Martin Luther King Jr. says, be careful in your struggle for justice that you don't stoop down and fall into bitterness or act with weapons of the world, act only with the weapon of love. There's the difference. You want to be Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Adolf Hitler. Some people say that one of the things that turned him against the Jews is he was teased. He was accused of being, there was a lot of anti-Semitism long before Adolf Hitler came along. And some people speculate that one of the ways he dealt with that was to turn on the Jews himself. You know, just like the criminal that wants to find a worse criminal, persecute something that you see in yourself that you hate, find it in somebody else and kill them for it. That may have been part of Adolf Hitler's thing. You want to be Adolf Hitler or Father Ubald? See, when Jesus sanctifies suffering, redemption results. Beauty comes. Healing comes. Forgiveness comes. Amazing. Let's pray. Father, we are overwhelmed with what you've done for us. Lord Jesus, you are altogether lovely, perfect, lovable. You didn't deserve any of this. You didn't owe us any of this, but because of your love and your mercy and your grace, Because of the love of your father for us, because of your love for us, because of your love for your father, out of love, you did this for us. You stood there like Superman in shackles and allowed people to hit you, to strip you, to spit on you, to mock you. to crucify you. And you took it because of love. And you forgave us. You forgave the people who were pounding the nails into your hands. We are amazed at the way you take brokenness and evil and darkness and when it's given to you, you transform it into light and beauty and healing and forgiveness. You are a mighty God. You truly are the miracle worker. You are almighty and all-powerful and you are building your church and we thank you and we praise you and we want to be part of it and we want to live out of that same grace. Lord, we offer our brokenness to you, our sufferings, our weaknesses, the injustices that we have experienced. We offer them to you and ask them to do in us as you did with Simon of Cyrene. Use it in the lives of our children and our church and make it a blessing to the world. In Jesus' holy and precious name, amen.