"The Passion in John: the Cross"
John 19:16-37
April 5, 1998

v.16 It was now that the great and worst and most severe of his beatings was administered which was the first stage of crucifixion in the Roman practice, leaving the victim devastated by blood-loss and pain. It was all the worse for the Lord because he had already been beaten at the trial that was given before the Sanhedrin (Matt. 26:67) and then had been beaten by Pilate's soldiers, Pilate apparently hoping that if his soldiers gave Jesus a good beating, the Jews would be content to let him go. So with those two beatings already having been administered he is now scourged in this terrible way which was a regular part of the process of crucifixion.

v.17 This conforms to Roman custom. The victim was required as a refinement of the cruelty to carry the crossbar from which he would be hung when he reached the place of execution. As it happened, we learn from the other gospels, Jesus made it only part of the way. Exhausted and bloodied from his three beatings and especially the last, he collapsed, unable to go further and the soldiers compelled a passer-by, one Simon of Cyrene, to carry the heavy bar the rest of the way. Golgotha means "skull" in Aramaic as does the Latin word "calvaria," from which we get "Calvary."

v.18 Crucifixion, Cicero wrote, was the "cruellest, most hideous of punishments." And he went on to say of it, "Never may it come near the bodies of Roman citizens, never near their thoughts or eyes or ears!" The Romans reserved it for criminals and especially for slaves who rebelled in some way. After the great rebellion of Spartacus in the first century the Apian Way south of Rome was bordered by corpses on both sides for some fifty miles or more with the slaves who had participated in that rebellion -- a way of advertizing what happens to rebels in the Roman Empire. But, as a matter of fact, Romans themselves were quite embarrassed by the fact that crucifixion played a role in their socio-political life and spoke and wrote of it very infrequently in the materials that survive from the classical world. It was simply too barbaric for urbane and sophisiticated Romans to feel that they could justify it.

v.19 It was the custom for the crime of which the victim had been found guilty to be written on a tablet or placard that often was hung around his neck in the first place and then affixed to the cross when he was hung upon it. This charge was technically accurate in the sense that, if anyone had asked, it would have been said that Jesus was being executed for sedition, for having political ambitions as a would-be-king. But, it was chiefly Pilate's way of further irritating the Jews, for he knew full well that Jesus had no political aspirations.

v.20 The local language and the great languages of the world of that day. As one has written, even on the cross, "on his head were many crowns" (Rev. 19:22) and there was promise of the message of his salvation going to all the nations of the world.

v.22 This view of Pilate is confirmed in other sources. Philo, the great Jewish scholar of this period who lived in Egypt, writes of him that he was "naturally inflexible, a blend of self-will and relentlessness."

v.23 That is, there were four soldiers in the execution squad and they probably divided among themselves the outer robe, the belt, the sandals, and the head covering. That left the inner tunic, not the equivalent to an undergarment, really, though it was worn next to the skin, but to the regular clothing over which an outer garment might be worn. One commentator suggests a more appropriate analogy would be a man's suit over which a top-coat might be worn.

v.27 The Lord is not conferring a legal obligation on John, only a moral one. He had, of course, other brothers who would have been legally responsible for Mary, but they were not at this time sympathetic.

v.28 Probably a reference to Psalm 69:21 ("They gave me vinegar for my thirst...") as the following verses further suggest.

v.29 This is not to be confused with the drink offered to him earlier, according to Mark 15:23, by some charitable people. That was a sedative designed to dull the pain. Jesus refused to drink that, because he intended to drain the cup of the divine wrath to its dregs. This drink, far from being a sedative, could actually prolong life and pain. Jesus took it for the raging thirst that accompanied crucifixion, but he did it primarily, it seems, to fulfill the prophecy.

v.31 That is, it was Friday, which was ordinarily called the day of preparation, that is, for the Sabbath. It was a special Sabbath not because it was the Sabbath of Passover week, but because it happened that the second day of the festival week, which this year happened to fall on the Sabbath, was devoted to the very important sheaf offering (Lev. 23:11).

The Romans usually just left the bodies hanging to be devoured by vultures -- it was a way of prolonging the message that was being sent by this cruel form of execution. But that practice was contrary to Jewish law. The point of breaking the legs was that this prevented the victim from pushing his body up with his legs to keep his chest cavity open and maintain his breathing. Strength in his arms was soon lost and his body would collapse and he would die soon of asphyxia.

v.34 Medical experts can explain how this can happen and has happened. But, John is especially interested in the demonstration that Jesus was dead and dead beyond the shadow of a doubt. Apparently, by the time John wrote his Gospel, there were already at work in some segments of the church docetic influences. Docetism was a kind of gnostic philosophical theology that took its cue from the prevailing philosophy of the Greco-Roman world which thought of the physical creation as a lower realm and as the seat of evil. For such people the idea that God -- the purely spiritual being -- would take human flesh, that he would live as a real man, and die a human death was philosophically impossible. So in its Christian form, Docetism held that God only seemed (dokeo) to be a man and only seemed to die. Islam's view of the crucifixion was, apparently, mediated through docetic influences. Muslims likewise argue that Jesus did not really die on the cross, he only was thought to have died.

It has always struck the serious readers of the Bible that the accounts of the Lord's death are so chaste, even spartan. Given the emphasis on the cross as the salvation of the world, it might well have been supposed that the Gospels would provide lengthy accounts of the Lord's crucifixion, full of details of every kind, a narrative of the whole, step by step and moment by moment. But they do not. It is really striking how little is said about the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. As Calvin put it, "...these matters call for secret meditation, rather than for the ornament of words."

But, if that is so, how much it becomes faithful Christians and interested hearts to pay very close attention to what is said in these brief accounts we are given of our Savior's crucifixion, and so to this account in the Gospel of John. If John tells us only a little, how carefully, how thoughtfully we should ponder that little he felt essential for us to hear.

And what I want to think through with you this morning is the way in which, in various ways, John urges us to see this terrible event as the culmination of everything -- not only everything in Jesus' own life and earthly ministry, but everything that had gone before in human history.

It has been observed many times by commentators on the Gospel of John that "John deploys more and more 'that the Scripture might be fulfilled' statements the closer he gets to the passion." [Carson, ad hoc] John wants us to know that what transpired, terrible, evil as it was from the human side, was precisely what had been planned from eternity past in heaven, precisely what had to happen for the salvation of the world. It is as if he is reminding us that, as much as it was true that everything, absolutely everything happened in the Lord's life and ministry, from Bethlehem to Calvary, according to the plan of God, that plan that Jesus came to fulfill, it is supremely important that we recognize this fact in regard to his death.

There are features of the narrative that only suggest the way in which Christ's death fulfilled the age-old plan, though they would have unmistakably suggested that fulfillment to anyone who knew his Bible. For example, John reminds us very simply and without elaboration in v. 18, that Jesus was crucified with two others (the criminals Luke tells us more about) -- as Isaiah had said more than 700 years before, "he was numbered with the malefactors (53:12)."

But John does not leave the point to be gathered from hints here and there. He emphasizes it in the most direct way. He gives an account of the soldiers dividing up the Lord's clothing -- quite an elaborate account, given the brevity of the entire narrative -- precisely in order to demonstrate that down to this very detail, all was unfolding as it had been prophesied and determined by the will and plan of God.

In v. 24 he cites Psalm 22:18, one of the psalms of the Messiah, a prophesy of the coming King and his suffering, in which the experiences of David are used as a typology, an enacted prophesy of a King still to come. Everyone knew that in that Psalm there is something more than just an account of David's own suffering and anguish. For David never had experiences such as are recorded there and such as are minutely fulfilled in the crucifixion of Jesus. The Psalm may have been born in the spiritual struggles of David the King, but it was always a prophecy of someone greater who was yet to come, "great David's greater Son." In that psalm David uses the symbolism of an execution scene to describe the hatred, the mockery, and the vindictive persecution of his opponents and his sense of abandonment as a result. And in that description of the execution scene, he refers to their casting lots for his clothes. Jesus, on the cross, Matthew tells us, gave expression to his terrible sense of abandonment by crying out the words of the first verse of this same psalm, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me." Jesus, in other words, directly asserted that Psalm 22 was about Him!

And lest anyone miss the point, John makes it for us at the end of v. 24: this is what the prophecy said would happen and "this is what the soldiers did."

Then, again, in v. 28, "that the Scripture would be fulfilled," Jesus said, "I thirst." Here the reference is, apparently, to Psalm 69:21. Here is another psalm of David, and here another typology, another instance of David himself, and his own experiences, prefiguring the coming King. In v. 9 of Psalm 69 we read of the zeal for God's house consuming him, which is applied, you remember, to Jesus in the Gospels -- especially when he drove the moneychangers out of the temple --, and in v. 21 we read of his being given vinegar for his thirst. But what David received in the form of a metaphor, Jesus received in fact. [Kidner]

And John's narrative of the crucifixion concludes with a similar demonstration that the events of Jesus' death were the fulfillment of a long-before developed plan. The fact that none of Jesus' bones were broken and that he was pierced through the side, these details of his death were the fulfillment of prophecy and unfolded according to the plan of God. Even the minor details of this story -- Who cares who got the clothes and how they got them and how it came that they divided the last piece among themselves? Who cares about that, really? John wants us to know that all was done down to the last detail transpired according to the plan of God.

But, still more than all of that, there in the middle, in v. 30, we have that assertion, that confession, on the lips of the dying Savior himself. "It is finished." What is finished? Well, "all things" as we read in v.28. And what are "all things?" What else but that entire plan of redemption for which he had come into the world, the salvation of his people, the fulfillment of his Father's will, and the consummation of the kingdom of God.

Now, we must not treat the statement pedantically, as if there were nothing else left to happen -- for even on the cross, as we read a few verses later, there was still more fulfillment to come -- his being pierced, for example. And there was his burial as prophesied in Isaiah 53 and, supremely, his resurrection. And still more, his intercession at the Father's Right Hand and his coming again to the earth at the last day, and so on.

But, we must not fail to grasp the weight of that statement, "It is finished," "all is fulfilled." Jesus had told his disciples (Luke 18:31) some weeks before, "We are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written by the prophets about the Son of Man will be fulfilled." And it was fulfilled, and Jesus, who all his life had done nothing else but fulfill the plan of his Father in heaven, had done so to the very end.

Remember, the Scripture teaches us to see our Savior's death as the very center of history and the meaning of history. Jesus is referred to in the Bible as "the Lamb slain before the foundation of the World." That is, before the world was made, the death of the Son of God for the salvation of God's people was the masterplan for human history. And, once the biblical history begins, immediately we have the unfolding revelation of that plan: we read of the seed of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent in Genesis 3, then we learn that this descendant of Eve would also be the seed of Abraham, and then a descendant of Judah, and finally a descendant of David. All along, the history of God's people, whether their deliverance from bondage in Egypt on eagles' wings or in the personal fortunes of their great king, David, is an enacted anticipation of this one event -- the death of the Messiah to take away the sins and the guilt of God's people and to make them the sons and daughters of the Father in heaven. Everything beforehand points to this single event as the meaning and the significance of human history.

And once Jesus came into the world, this was the end to which all pointed, this was the purpose, the aim of his life -- to die. "He would save his people from their sins," the angel prophesied at the time of his birth. And, of course, it would be a terrible thing, that saving. As Simeon said of the baby Jesus in the temple, that work of salvation her son had come into the world to do would make of his mother, Mary, the mother of sorrows, the Mater Dolorosa. All through his life this death hung over his head.

Some of you may know the painting by Holman Hunt, one of the Pre-Raphaelite painters of Victorian Britain, entitled "The Shadow of Death." The Pre-Raphaelites are accused of being sentimental, but they were serious about what they were seeking to achieve. Hunt himself saw his own work as a protest against the triviality and superficiality of the art of his own day. He had gone to the Holy Land and spent three years there, and it was there, in Jerusalem, on his roof-top, that he painted "The Shadow of Death." In the painting, which depicts the inside of a carpentry shop in Nazareth, you see Jesus as a young man, standing by a workbench on which rests his saw. His eyes are lifted up to heaven, and he is stretching, lifting his arms above his head. As he does so, the evening light streaming through an open door casts a shadow, in the form of a cross, on the wall behind him, where his tool rack looks like a horizontal bar to which his hands have been fastened as though he were crucified. In the foreground a woman kneels among the wood chips, her hands resting on a chest in which the rich gifts of the Magi are still kept. We cannot see her face, but we know it is Mary. She looks startled at the shadow on the wall, so strangely like a cross on which her son is hanging. [Stott, The Cross of Christ, 17.]

All his life long this death awaited him. The ministry began with John the Baptist's identification of Jesus as the Lamb of God, the sacrifice, who would take away the sins of the world. And as the ministry continued the Lord made it clearer and clearer that he had come to die, that his death was the modus operandi of eternal life, that his death in Jerusalem at the hands of the priests of Israel would be the explanation and the resolution of everything in human history. Everything in the Lord's life pointed forward to this moment, everything was contributing to it, setting the context for it, leading up to it. And as the ministry came to its end it is perfectly clear that Jesus was orchestrating the events that led up to his death, provoking the crisis that would lead to his crucifixion -- "No one takes my life from me. I lay it down of my own accord. This command I have from the Father" -- he handed himself over to die. His death was the triumphant conclusion of his entire work in the world. He did not shrink back from it, terrible as it was, more terrible than anyone knows, but he loved his people and he obeyed his heavenly Father to the very end. As Shakespeare said of the thane of Cawdor in MacBeth, "Nothing in his life/Became him like the leaving it."

And everything after that death points back to it. Paul summarizes his message, the essential core of the Christian gospel, as "the word of the cross," or he said what he preached was "Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles." And in his short creed, in 1 Cor. 15:3-4, he says, "What I received, I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures..." He summarizes in another place the entire ethos, the entire attitude of the Christian life and spirit mind by saying, "God forbid that I should boast save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ..."

But, if so, if the cross is, as our Savior said while he hung upon it, the conclusion, the culmination of everything, the meaning of his life and existence, the salvation of the world, then must it not be so in our lives, in the life of anyone who wishes to be a Christian indeed?

Tertullian, in a famous passage written in the early 3rd century, speaks of the place of the cross in the lives of early believers.