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John 18:28-40 · Jesus Before Pilate
The Terrible Tree
John 18:1-19:42
Sermon
by George Bass
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Jesus had to die, according to the religious leaders of Jerusalem, because his continued existence posed a serious threat to their system of religious beliefs and worship in their God’s holy Temple. And now, just before the beginning of the Passover, they were rid of him once and for all. On the orders of the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, Jesus was marched out of the city, forced to carry his own cross, and brutally nailed to it, after which it was thrust into the ground so that anyone passing that way could see his execution. Cecil Alexander aptly describes the scene:

There is a green hill far away,

Outside a city wall,

Where the dear Lord was crucified ...

The Romans did it, but the Jewish leaders put them up to it, supported by the crowd that chanted for a prisoner’s release: "Not this man, but Barabbas!" John says it was the chief priests and officers of the Jews who actually cried out, "Crucify him, crucify him!" Pilate did just that.

Jesus posed no threat to the continued Roman occupation of Jerusalem and the rest of the Holy Land; Pilate was well aware of that. The Jews knew it too. Anyone claiming to be the long-awaited Messiah would have had a difficult time with them, especially if he did not measure up to their expectations. Jesus didn’t. He was not the warrior Son of David, but the Son of God who came as the Suffering Servant. "If that’s what he wants to be, then let him suffer," some of them must have thought. Their hard-heartedness and spiritual myopia combined to such a degree that they would go to any lengths to get rid of Jesus, even to playing up to Pilate and the Roman emperor. They thought they had pulled one over on Pilate - and gotten rid of Jesus at the same time. Not so.

Pilate, you see, had the last word when he wrote a sign, Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews, and put it on the cross. The protests of the Jews fell on deaf ears, for Pilate declared, "What I have written I have written." The sign was there while he suffered and died on the "accursed tree" that we know as the Cross of Calvary. Golgotha was that "green hill far away ... where the dear Lord was crucified" - not simply to placate the Jews or to get Pilate out of a potential jam with the emperor but, as the hymn puts it so well,

Who died to save us all.

To the soldiers, who were accustomed to cruelty and death, this was just one more execution, one of three that day; Jesus was crucified between two other men. The soldiers had played their part, taunting and teasing Christ, dressing him up in a purple robe and fashioning a crown of thorns to put on his head, and going along with the joke, "Hail, King of the Jews!" When they divided his clothing among the members of the execution squad, they had no way of knowing that they were fulfilling scripture. So they cast lots for his tunic - and waited there for him and the others to die so that they could get out of that hot Palestinian sun and back to their quarters in the city. The sooner he died the better it would be for all concerned. The death of this one man would solve a lot of problems, or so they thought.

Isn’t it still that way with people and religion and politics? Our world’s slogan seems to be, "Eradicate the enemy through execution." The Romans - and the Jews - were rank amateurs alongside of the "Pilates" of today. In her book, All for Christ, Diana Dewar declares, "The 20th century may account for more martyrs than the sum of preceding centuries." Not all of the martyrs are Christian, as Auschwitz and the memory of six million Jews reminds us; members of many religious faiths have been brutally murdered in our day, either to "preserve the purity of the state" or, increasingly, because the Christian faith is seen as a threat to the rule of merciless dictators and unjust governments. Murder the enemies and the crisis - or crises - will be over, or so the logic goes. All over the world people are governing by executing and eliminating those who threaten their rule or reign. The threat of sudden and unexpected death has created modern "reigns of terror" in too many parts of the world. Poverty, corruption, and injustice all contribute to the problem which people and nations try to solve by putting others to death.

That is not what God intended for humanity. Death is not God’s way of dealing with his people. Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who won the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize, was confined and tortured for fourteen months in the La Plata prison. One time he was "in the torture center, in a small narrow cell without light or sanitary facilities ... they opened the door, letting in the light. I could see many inscriptions on the wall. I saw, on one wall, a big blood stain. Below it, written by a finger dipped in blood, it said, ‘Dios no mata’ - God does not kill. That is something that is burned into my memory ... the rest of my life."31 The cross reminds us that men and women kill each other, not God. When Jesus died all the angels who had sung at Jesus’ birth, "Glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace, good will toward men," must have wept with God. The heart of God was not only "laid bare," as James S. Stewart has put it, but it was broken in two at Jesus’ death for the whole world to see. And it was not simply that God suffered because Jesus died on Golgotha’s tree, but because he died at the hands of those he had come to save. God the Father was himself rejected in the death of Christ on the cross. God does not kill; death solves no problems related to faith and politics.

Strange, then, isn’t it, that God uses the agonizing death of Jesus as the means for reconciling sinners to himself and removing the Garden’s curse - death - from the human race? Surely, there had to be another, a better way. Why did he allow Jesus to die? And why did he allow so many others to suffer pain and anquish when he died? But it was to be so - it had to be - from the time of Jesus’ birth. A few years ago, Archbishop Marcus L. Loane of Sydney, Australia, wrote about one sufferer - Mary.

Mary was no stranger to the stab of sorrow; she must have felt its pain even before His birth. The message of Gabriel had "troubled" her (Luke 1:29), and she had passed through deep waters since then. The prophecy of Simeon must have touched the hidden chords of anxiety with its sombre warning: "Behold, this child is set ... for a sign which shall be spoken against; yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also." (Luke 2:34, 35)

In the face of the cross, he adds:

But now that He was on the cross, Simeon’s prophecy had its ultimate fulfillment. He was in the place of shame and sorrow, and the sword had gone through her soul. Those outstretched arms she had folded in the manger; those nail-pierced feet she had tended in the cradle. Would not those nails pierce her heart no less than His feet? Would not those thorns stab her soul no less than His brow? They were like a girdle studded with spikes round her inmost being, and the sword of sorrow was all that she could bring herself to bear.32

Mary’s mind must have been flooded with memories, and no small measure of pain and doubt, as she and the others watched Jesus dying on the cross. Why was she allowed to be there without being harassed or arrested? Some of them must have known she was his mother; she must have had a hand in all of this. What of the other women - and John? Why did no one accuse them of being revolutionaries, followers of this Jesus of Nazareth, and get rid of them, too? They might have nipped Jesus’ movement in the bud, mightn’t they? Why not make any of Jesus’ followers whom they discovered and could arrest into examples - a warning for any who would dare to think that his mission should continue?

Perhaps it was simply because they thought that Jesus’ death would be warning enough, and Mary’s pain before the cross was worse than arrest and persecution. But before he died, Jesus bestowed a measure of love, devotion, and comfort upon Mary with his word, "Woman, behold your son" and his gift to John, "Behold, your mother." And it was so - until she, too, died some years later.

Was Mary close enough to hear Jesus say, "I thirst," shortly before he died? The soldiers heard it and gave him a sponge soaked with vinegar on hyssop and, again, unknowingly, fulfilled scripture. Not much later, Jesus said, "It is finished," bowed his head, and "gave up his spirit." Sooner than expected, he was dead, but it couldn’t have been soon enough for his loved ones, or for the Jews. He had been faithful to the end, enduring the worst that people could do to him, and he died believing that he had completed the work that his Father had given him to do. When Kim Dae-jung, a devout Catholic, was sentenced to death some years ago, he said that his situation was enough "to break one’s spirit." He had been stripped, held in a dark basement for sixty days, and threatened with death before he was sentenced. He said, "Being a Christian ... my reliance is upon God ... If God wills my execution, I shall die, and if God wills for me to live, I shall live." He lived, because political pressure from the United States and other countries forced South Korean president Chun Doo Hwan to commute it to life imprisonment. God allowed Jesus to die, according to his will. There was no way to stop Jesus’ crucifixion and death if his purpose - humanity’s salvation - were to be accomplished. God, too, had to stand by and watch his Son die on that terrible tree. A tree was involved in the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and God used another tree to reverse the process of sin and death and open up heaven and eternal life to all of his people.

The cross of Christ always reminds us that "My ways are not your ways, says the Lord." God has the power to change hatred, persecution, self-righteousness, and death into love, fellowship, humility, and life, because that’s what he did in the death of Jesus. The Romans and the Jews did get rid of Jesus when they crucified him; he died agonizingly on that tree. They did not know, they couldn’t have known, how short-lived their triumph would be. Three days later he was alive again, and death would claim him - and us - no more.

NOTES

31. As told by George Cornell, AP writer, in The Honor and the Hope.

32. Loane, Marcus L., The Place Called Calvary. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1968).

CSS Publishing Co., Inc., Tree, The Tomb, And The Trumpet, The, by George Bass