Matthew 27,33-54. Good Friday

✠ We preach Christ and Him crucified ✠

Iesus Nazarenus rex Iudaeorum

Matthew 27,33-50 [51-54]   2113

Karfreitag  031 schwarz 

Eustace, Abbot of Luxeuil, France. Apostle to the Bavarians, † 629 

29. March 2013

1. O silent, blessed Good Friday! O evening after a hard day’s work, O Lovely Evening Star after darkness filled the day! O Divine Rest for sinners! O Hope of eternal life, O Blessed End of suffering, passion and tears! Lord have mercy on us in Your reign, grant and keep us in Your great peace from which all joy grows and hope too. Have mercy on us O Lord, grant us Your peace O Jesus (Löhe 157).  Amen. 

2. And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull), the Romans offered Jesus 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 insurrectionists were crucified with Him, one on the right and one on the left.  And those who passed by derided Jesus, 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, with the scribes and elders, mocked Him, saying: „He saved others;  he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in 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 insurrectionists who were crucified with Him also reviled Him in the same way.  Now from 12 noon there was darkness over all the land until 3 p.m. And about 3 p.m. Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying: »Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?« that is: »My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?« [Psalm 22,1] And some of the bystanders, hearing it, said: „This man is calling Elijah.“ And one of them at once ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine, and put it on a reed and gave it to Him to drink. But the others said: „Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him.“ And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up His spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after His resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many. When the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe and said: „Truly this was the Son of God!“ 

3. The events that occurred at the moment of Jesus’ death are events that filmmakers enjoy putting into their catastrophe and end-of-the-world movies. Indeed, such disaster movies are in vogue again, just as they were in the 1970s. Not to be left behind, the TV networks have cashed in on the genre, with shows like The Walking Dead, True Blood and Revolution. The forthcoming movie Star Trek: Into Darkness also taps into this popular genre. 

4. „It appears at times that our world embraces all kinds of alarming messages of the end time, while fewer hold to the Church and her Biblical preaching of the end time“

 (Wenz 1). Perhaps this is because our 21. century Western culture works hard to avoid death and all appearances of death. Many people are just uncomfortable with death and dying. We work hard to avoid staring at death in all its pain and heartache. We can avoid hospitals, funeral homes, cemeteries and the mirrors in the home, but eventually the cold hand of death catches up with us and we find ourselves in the hospital as a patient or a visitor, we are at the funeral home looking at a loved one lifeless in a coffin, we are paying respects to someone at their tombstone or we are seeing age advance upon us in the mirror. 

5. Christians and churches are not immune from ignoring the reality of death. In many churches you might hear about your good buddy Jesus who is your life coach cheering you on to better and better things. Rarely might you hear about Christ and Him crucified for sinners. Karfreitag, however, forces all Christians and churches to look upon death, yes, the death of Jesus, with our own eyes. Karfreitag does not let us shy away from the horrors of death.  

6. The Romans took death seriously. Their crucifixions  were public. They were carried out along a main thoroughfare so that every one had to pass by and look at the crucified. If you were a criminal condemned to crucifixion, then the Romans humiliated you, made you suffer and ensured that as many people as possible witnessed it. 

7. The Gospel explain how Jesus was found guilty by the Jewish Sanhedrin of blasphemy, which is the sin of speaking sacrilegiously about or claiming to be God yourself. Jewish law held this to be a crime punished by death, usually by stoning. In Jesus’ day, however, the Jews couldn’t carry out capital punishment, so they were forced to bring such cases to the Roman governor and try to convince him that a criminal was guilty of execution by the cross. So the Jewish leaders hauled Jesus before Pontius Pilate and argued for His guilt and execution. Pilate tried to avoid giving such a judgment, but the priests and the Pharisees were unrelenting in their charges. So Pilate assented to their charge of guilt and handed Jesus over to be crucified. 

8. Jesus’ path to death began when He was beaten to a bloody pulp: twenty lashes from whip formed deep cuts in an „x“ pattern across His back, and then nineteen more lashes across His chest. The Romans didn’t use an Indiana Jones-style bullwhip, but a Roman a cat-of-nine tails fashioned with broken pottery, bits of metal and even nails to tear into the condemned’s flesh. A crown with 6-inch long thorns cut deep lacerations into Jesus scalp. Then Jesus was forced to carry an 100 pound cross beam out to Calvary where He would be stripped naked and crucified. The crucified reeked sweat mingled with blood urine and other bodily releases. The body was bruised and joints often dislocated. Groans and cries for mercy were uttered by the crucified and the onlookers. 

9. At Calvary the Romans stretched out Jesus arms and nailed each wrist to the horizontal cross beam. Then His feet were nailed together on the vertical beam so that His body formed a T. „As the crucified slowly sagged down with more weight on the nails in the wrists, excruciating, fiery pain shot along the fingers and up the arms to explode in the brain. As he pushed himself upward to avoid this stretching torment, he placed his full weight on the nail through his feet. Again, there was searing agony as the nail tore through the nerves between the metatarsal bones of his feet. Hanging by the arms, the pectoral muscles were paralyzed and the small muscles between the ribs were unable to act. Air could be drawn into the lungs, but could not be exhaled. The crucified fought to raise himself in order to get even one short breath. He suffered hours of limitless pain, cycles of twisting, joint-rending cramps, intermittent partial asphyxiation, and searing pain as tissue was torn from his lacerated back from his movement up and down against the rough timbers of the cross. Another agony was a deep crushing pain in the chest as the sac surrounding the heart slowly filled with serum and began to compress the heart. The compressed heart struggled to pump heavy, thick, sluggish blood to the tissues, and the tortured lungs were making a frantic effort to inhale small gulps of air“ (Dr. C. Truman Davis). Jesus suffered this way for six grueling hours. There were two ways to end this horror: 1. when the crucified could not, or refused to, push up with his legs to breathe, thereby asphyxiating in seconds, or 2. if the fluid pooling around the heart caused congestive heart failure. 

10. This is how Jesus suffered, but the Gospels tell us that He did not suffocate or suffer heart failure. Rather, Jesus yielded up His life by His own accord. Let us not avoid this death, but let us look it straight in the eyes, for „the death of Jesus Christ on the cross at Calvary is the end of the world, as we have known it“

 (Wenz 3). Let us confess the whole truth here too. On Karfreitag, God died. We don’t think of God being capable of dying because He is immortal and omnipotent. Q: How can God die? A: He took upon Himself mortal human flesh and blood. The reason Jesus was incarnated in a human body was so He could be the sacrificial lamb for the salvation of the world. The moment Jesus left Mary’s womb He began a path that lead to the cross with His very death for sinners. 

11. When Jesus died, the Jewish leaders who had handed  Him over to Pilate were elated. That blasphemer who equated himself on par with God the Father was dead. So much for being the Son of God, for he had died. Not much of a God there, suffering and dying humiliated and condemned by the law and the covenant as a Roman criminal against the State. Pilate who knowingly condemned an innocent man to death, comforted his conscience that in doing so he settled the bloodlust of the Sanhedrin against Jesus and thus quelled a potential mob uprising during the very important Jewish feast of Passover. Peace was tentatively maintained, all at the cost of a single man’s life. 

12. Behold, the Son of God crucified, and the Lamb of God sacrificed for the sin of the world, yes, for all your sins! Christ crucified is the costly ransom that paid in full all our sinfulness. Behold, there is Jesus, the King of the Jews, and He is dead! 

13. But what does the Christ crucified mean for us? His crucifixion means that there can be no doubt that God loves each and every fallen, sinful man and woman. Three years before He was crucified, Jesus told Nicodemus: »For God loved the world so much that He gave His Only Son so that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.« (John 3,16). God desired to save the world from sin, death and hell so He sent His one and only Son as a vicarious sacrifice to redeem the world. God did not spare Himself, but rather He sent His very best for you and your salvation. 

14. As Jesus died, Matthew the Evangelist points out several important events that miraculously occurred. 1. the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. This curtain separated the holy place from the Holiest of Holies. Only the high priest could enter the Holiest of Holies and be in the Divine presence of Yahweh, and that once a year on the Day of Atonement, the day when corporate absolution was proclaimed upon the people of Israel. As the rightful High Priest, Jesus offered His very own blood for the atonement of all the world when He suffered and died upon the cross. The curtain was now torn in two to show that free access to God’s presence is now granted to all people on account of the atonement achieved by Jesus.  

15. 2. The earth shook, and the rocks were split. This earthquake may have been the event that actually tore the curtain in the temple. This earthquake is a manifestation of Yahweh’s awesome power and dominion over creation. As such, this event bridges the act of the temple curtain being torn and the tombs opening up. 

16. 3. In Jesus’ day the conventional method of burial was to be interred in a cave with a stone rolled in front. Families  were often buried together, depending on the size of the particular cave. Modern day free-standing mausoleums are similar to the cave and stone in the 1. century. Matthew recounts that the tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. Again, the earthquake at Jesus’ death is what probably caused this incredible event to happen as the shaking of the earth would either roll the stones away or shatter them into a pile of rubble. Matthew furthermore reports that these risen saints were coming out of the tombs after Jesus’s resurrection; they went into Jerusalem and appeared to many. 

17. Imagine the scene of dead loved ones coming back to life and visiting relatives and friends. These were no ghosts or zombies, but people with real, resurrected bodies alive again. This mini-resurrection was the fruit born of Jesus’ resurrection and was a foretaste and preview of the great resurrection that is to arrive on the last day when Jesus returns to this earth in a cloud of heavenly glory. Such an event shows that Jesus’ death on the cross had broken the power of death and the grave, for His atoning sacrifice conquers those two ancient foes of mankind. 

18. Finally, when the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe and said: „Truly this was the Son of God!“

 Most of the priests and Pharisees condemned Jesus as a blasphemer for declaring Himself to be God Almighty, but the Roman legionnaires at His crucifixion  confessed Jesus to be the Son of God. Truly the gospel and salvation was given out to the Gentiles! 

19. Yes, the Son of God died on the cross, and in His dying He paid the law’s price for sin, ransomed us back to God the Father and blessed us with eternal life. Jesus went to His cross nobly and lovingly to save you. He wants you in His everlasting presence and He has merited your presence there by His vicarious, substitutionary sacrifice. 

20. The holy apostle proclaims in the Epistle to the Hebrews: »Just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of all, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for Him« (Hebrews 9,27-28). Jesus is the Lord over Death and the Lord of Life. He proclaims: »I am the Resurrection and the Life. Whoever believes in Me, though that person dies, yet shall live, and everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die« (John 11,25-26). We have seen this truth born out again tonight in the Holy Scriptures that speak of His crucifixion. Jesus is your Resurrection and your Life. Go in peace on this night of salvation.  Amen. 

21. Let us pray. We beseech You graciously to behold this Your family, for which our Lord Jesus Christ was content to be betrayed, given up into the hands of sinners and to suffer death upon the cross (The Book of Common Prayer) so that by His holy and righteous merit we, by virtue of His penal substitution, His vicarious atonement and the blessed exchange, receive, by faith in the gospel, the promise of everlasting salvation.  Amen.  

To God alone be the Glory 

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All Scriptural quotations are translations done by The Rev. Peter A. Bauernfeind using the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, 4th Edition © 1990 by the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart, and the Novum Testamentum Graece, Nestle-Aland 27th Edition © 1993 by Deutsch Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart. 

Book of Common Prayer, The. Copyright © 1990 Oxford University Press. 

 Davis, Dr. C. Truman. “The Crucifixion of Jesus”. http://www.ourcatholicfaith.org/crucifixion.html. Copyright © 1982 New Wine Magazine.

ELKB. Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche in Bayern. www.bayern-evangelisch.de/www/index.php. Copyright © Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche in Bayern. 

Löhe, Wilhelm. Lob sei Dir ewig, o Jesu! (Eternal Praise to You, O Jesus). A. Schuster, Ed. Copyright © 1949 Freimund Verlag.