Good Friday, 19 April Luke 22:66 – 23:49
Written by Dr Graham Leo. ©2019.
Today’s reading is probably very familiar to us if we have been attending church for a long time. Familiarity can be a problem, however. We can fail to see what we should see.
With his early emphasis on how God has watched over his promises and his word, Luke must have written this chapter with many of those promises in mind. With so many prophecies in diverse parts of the Jewish scriptures, we won't be able to find a specific passage where we will see everything that Luke had in his mind.
Luke is telling us about how much of what our Lord suffered had been predicted in Old Testament prophecy. Today we will compare our reading with just one short section of the book of Isaiah. The following verses printed in bold italics are the first nine verses of Isaiah 53. We’ll intersperse them with quotations and reflections from today’s reading.
1 Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
‘If you are the Christ’, was the sneering challenge of the Council of the Elders (22:67). Although they had seen the strong arm of the Lord revealed in his mighty works of healing and even restoration of life from the dead, they refused to believe.
2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground.
Luke has told us the whole of Jesus’ life, from his birth, through childhood, and his adult ministry. Jesus’s life brought a tenderness of new life to a nation where the spiritual climate was dry and unwelcoming.
2a He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
We have no record of Jesus’ physical appearance, but we do know that in a world that admired and revered noble birth, formalised learning, wealth and status, Jesus came from a poor family and was largely self-taught. He had no pedigree as the Sadducees demanded. He hadn't been to the right schools, or married into the right family.
3 He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Jesus’ life was beset with antilogia, words spoken-against, as we have seen consistently. He spent his life with the poor and oppressed. Sitting with them around meal tables, visiting their houses and villages, he must have heard their stories.
Unlike a politician on a whirlwind tour of an electorate just before an election, Jesus spent three years with people who were invisible to the big end of town and the religious experts. He was familiar with all their pain. But despite his identification with the people, when it came to the crunch, it was the Jerusalem crowd who bayed for his blood.
4 Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.
The taunt of the crowd, ‘If you are the Christ, come down from the cross’, was their rejection of his mission. If he really was not the Son of God whom he claimed to be, then there was no doubt that God was punishing him.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. 6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Luke repeats the sneer that we quoted above, three times. See vv35, 37 and 39. It must be important! If you are the Messiah, then come down off the cross. Save yourself. If you can't save even yourself, then you can't be the Saviour of all.
If you have read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, you will be familiar with what C. S. Lewis called the Deeper Magic. The wicked Queen accepted Aslan’s offer of himself in place of Edmund, whose treachery had given her power over the future of Narnia. She couldn't believe her luck when Aslan freely laid himself down on the Stone Table and offered himself up unto death. She thought that once he was dead, nothing would stand in her way to conquer the whole world and bring it under her own wicked will.
But, as Aslan says, after he has been resurrected, ‘there is a magic deeper still, which she did not know’. That magic was precisely what this taunt was stating. He could not save himself, because only if he died could he save the world. There was no other choice, if he was to be the Saviour of the world. This taunt quoted three times by Luke, is the heart of the mystery of salvation: that the willing offering of God himself for the sins of other people, was able to overcome the very heart of evil itself. We may not understand this, but we do well to stand under it.
7 He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
Read 23:9. Jesus remained silent before Herod. He refused to dignify Herod’s idle curiosity with a response. And neither will we.
8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away. Yet who of his generation protested? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was punished.
By any standard of justice, Jesus should never have been arrested, let alone charged with a crime, and certainly not sentenced to death. At every point in the trial, justice was denied him. False witnesses were called. He became a political football between rival leaders. When the final Judge, Pilate, ruled his innocence and declared his release, the crowd screamed and rioted to such an extent that to save his own reputation with Rome, Pilate capitulated to the mob and gave him over to death.
9 He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.
This is actually tomorrow’s reading, but because it is the last verse in the Isaiah section, we’ll read it today and remember it for tomorrow.
Prayer: What can I say, my Lord? Thank you that you died for me. Thank you for suffering such pain and humiliation for me. Thank you that you loved the world so very, very much. Thank you that have given me the mercy of grace to believe. Amen.