Well this morning we are beginning a series of messages that will take us, God willing, up to Easter Sunday that focus on the gospel accounts of various groups that gathered around the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. This morning we are going to reflect on the soldiers who nailed Jesus to the tree in all their brutal efficiency. Then next week we’ll look at the scoffers who stood mocking Jesus as He hung there in agony. And then there were the robbers, nailed one on each side of our Savior’s cross, and what a contrast these two men present in their respective responses to Him. And then on Good Friday, we will consider the two unusual mourners, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who came to take down Jesus’ body and prepare Him for burial. Then finally on Easter Sunday we’ll move on from Golgotha to the garden tomb and to think about the angels who first bore testimony to the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
And we’re looking at each of these groups not first of all to learn from their example, although certainly there are many lessons to glean from their various responses to Christ and to His cross, but our great priority – and I think the principle intention of the gospel writers as we read their narratives – is to see how the words and actions of the people clustered around the cross teach us about the individual nailed to the cross and what was really taking place that fateful Passover outside the city walls of Jerusalem two millennia ago. And so with that in mind, let me invite you to take a Bible in your hands and to turn with me to the nineteenth chapter of the gospel according to John as we begin today by thinking about the soldiers who performed the grizzly business of executing the Lord Jesus Christ. If you don’t have your own Bible with you, you can find John 19 on page 905 in our church Bibles.
We are going to think about four themes that I think the conduct of the soldiers is intended to teach us. First, we will simply note their cruelty. Here is the depravity of the human heart unmasked for all to see. Depravity unmasked. Then secondly, we’ll think about kingship. The one the soldiers brutalize and torture and mock as King of the Jews is indeed the King we so badly need and the true nature of His kingship is here fully revealed. Cruelty unmasked. Kingship revealed. Thirdly, as we watch the soldiers strip Christ of His clothing and cast lots for His garments, we are reminded of the price that was being paid in order to cover and hide our shame, the shame that exposes us to the judgment of God; the shame of our sin. Cruelty unmasked. Kingship revealed. Then, a covering provided. And finally, we are going to hear falling from the lips of soldiers, the ones who nailed Him to the tree now stunned at His death, the confession that is required. The confession that is required. Cruelty unmasked. Kingship revealed. A covering provided. And the confession that is required.
Before we read the passage, let’s bow our heads together briefly and ask for the Lord to help us to understand His holy Word. Let us all pray.
Our God and Father, as we come together now back to Calvary, back to Golgotha, back to the scene of our Redeemer’s execution, we ask that You would rivet our attention to the words, to the details, that You would solemnize us and grant us some sense of the enormity and the gravity of what was taking place. We pray, O God, that You would save us from a casual and flippant read. Instead, transport us back there and remind us that it was our sin that held Him there until it was accomplished. O Lord, we ask all of this that Jesus may have first place, and so we ask it in His name. Amen.
John chapter 19 at verse 1. This is the Word of God:
“Then Pilate took Jesus and flogged him. And the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head and arrayed him in a purple robe. They came up to him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ and struck him with their hands.”
Then skip down to verse 16:
“So Pilate delivered him over to them to be crucified.
So they took Jesus, and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called The Place of a Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them. Pilate also wrote an inscription and put it on the cross. It read, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.’ Many of the Jews read this inscription, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek. So the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, ‘Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but rather, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’’ Pilate answered, ‘What I have written I have written.’
When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his garments and divided them into four parts, one part for each soldier; also his tunic. But the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom, so they said to one another, ‘Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it shall be.’ This was to fulfill the Scripture which says,
‘They divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.’
So the soldiers did these things, but standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold, your son!’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold, your mother!’ And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.
After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), ‘I thirst.’ A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, ‘It is finished,’ and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
Since it was the day of Preparation, and so that the bodies would not remain on the cross on the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was a high day), the Jews asked Pilate that their legs might be broken and that they might be taken away. So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first, and of the other who had been crucified with him. But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water. He who saw it has borne witness—his testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth—that you also may believe. For these things took place that the Scripture might be fulfilled: ‘Not one of his bones will be broken.’ And again another Scripture says, ‘They will look on him whom they have pierced.’”
Amen, and we praise God for His holy, inerrant Word.
Cruelty Unmasked
Well think with me first of all about cruelty unmasked. Cruelty unmasked. When we read the gospel accounts of the brutal treatment of the Lord Jesus, I think we rightly recoil in horror at the callous contempt for human dignity, the torture, the mockery, the casual violence that all seem to sit so lightly on the soldiers who inflict it. Maybe it’s because we don’t know their names and their stories, or maybe really because we can’t handle what they have done, but we tend to skip a little too quickly in my judgment right past these men and their actions. “They are anomalies,” we tell ourselves. “They’re monsters. We would never do such awful things and so we really don’t need to linger over their words or their works after all, do we?” In an article in The New Yorker, Paul Bloom noted, “Early psychological research on dehumanization looked at what made the Nazis different from the rest of us.” That’s what we do with the soldiers in the gospel story, isn’t it? “How could they do that?” We ask. “They must be unusually monstrous, sociopathic, twisted men. Not like us at all.” But Bloom goes on. “Psychologists now talk” – listen to this phrase – “about the ubiquity of dehumanization.” It’s an uncomfortable phrase – “the ubiquity of dehumanization.”
Nick Haslam at the University of Melbourne and Steve Loughnan at the University of Edinburgh give a list of examples, including some painfully mundane ones. “Psychopaths treat victims merely as means to their vicious ends. The poor are mocked as libidinous dolts; passersby look through homeless people as if they were transparent obstacles. Dementia sufferers are represented in the media as shuffling zombies.” It happens all the time, actually. It’s how we cope with uncomfortable people and give ourselves an excuse for ignoring, as in the case of these soldiers, in extremis, brutalizing them. That’s how the soldiers, actually, were able to do what they did. In fact, verses 1 through 3 tells us they did it all with considerable amusement along the way. On Friday, they beat Jesus and whipped Jesus and pressed a crown of thorns into the scalp of Jesus and made a joke of Jesus and then they drove nails into His hands and feet and then they went home at the end of their shift and kissed their wives and played with their children and slept soundly in their beds.
Bloom, in the same article, quotes the psychologist Herbert Kelman who says that, “The inhibitions against murdering fellow human beings are generally so strong that the victims must be deprived of their human status if systematic killing is to proceed in a smooth and orderly fashion. The Nazis used bureaucratic euphemisms like ‘transfer’ and ‘selection’ to sanitize different forms of murder.” He goes on to quote another anthropologist who says, “Human kind ceases at the border of the tribe.” “And today,” Bloom says, “the phenomenon seems inescapable. Google your favorite despised human group along with words like ‘vermin,’ ‘roaches,’ or ‘animals’ and it will all come spilling out. Some of this rhetoric is seen as inappropriate for mainstream discourse, but wait long enough and you’ll hear the word ‘animals’ used even by respectable people referring to terrorists or Israelis or Palestinians or to undocumented immigrants or to deporters or undocumented immigrants. Such rhetoric shows up in the speech of white supremacists but also when the rest of us talk about white supremacists.”
His point is we all do this. That’s the point. We distance ourselves from those we consider undesirable or threatening or unclean. That’s what these soldiers did in order to rationalize the brutality of torture and the calm efficiency of crucifixion and then wile away the time with a casual game of dice as they gamble for Jesus’ clothing. After all, He is not really as human as they are. Human kind ceases at the border of the tribe. “Jesus isn’t one of us,” they would have assumed. He is one of them. And so who cares? But folks, when we distance ourselves from the soldiers in the story, as if we were somehow cut from different cloth than they are, do you see we are doing the very same thing? We recoil from our wickedness and the ugly violence of their actions with such distaste and we refuse to linger over what they did because we are better than they. We would never descend to such depths, good church-going people like us. But we are wrong. Read your history. How many lynchings waited until church got out before the violence began?
No, the uncomfortable truth is, these cruel men are not a special class of unusually depraved monsters. No, no, they are us and we are them. The ubiquity of dehumanization, otherwise known as total depravity, is right here, isn’t it, on full display for us all to see. And it is shown to us as the mirror of our own hearts. The monstrous truth is, these men were ordinary, average guys lost in sin and without hope, save in God’s sovereign mercy. Their problem is your problem and my problem. And the irony is, the thing they most need to address that problem, the problem of sin that festers in your heart as well as in theirs, the thing they need to address that problem is the very thing they are the unwitting instruments in securing. They need the cross of Jesus Christ and so do I and so do you.
Kingship Revealed
And noticing that initial irony brings me to a second irony. Here’s the next thing I want you to see. First, cruelty unmasked. Then notice Jesus’ kingship revealed. Kingship revealed. After Jesus was flogged in verses 2 and 3, chillingly the soldiers make of Jesus a play thing for their entertainment, for their amusement, adding dehumanizing shame to His already acute physical agony. Look at the text. They twist together a crown of thorns and put it on His head and array Him in a purple robe, the color of kingship. And they came up to Him saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and struck Him with their hands. Actually, on the lips of His Roman torturers here in verse 3, and again in the denials of the Jewish antagonists in verse 12, and in Pilate’s spoken verdict in verse 14, and in the written notice nailed above His head in verses 19 through 21, seven times over in this chapter in fact, Jesus is named “King.” I suppose if we were looking for a chapter in the Scriptures dealing with the subject of Messianic kingship, if you were to do a Bible search on some software, it might flag quickly John 19 as dealing with Jesus as the true and great King. Because this is a chapter especially full of references to His Messianic kingship.
But we don’t typically turn here, do we, when we want to learn about the kind of King that Jesus is. We more regularly turn to passages like Philippians 2:10-11 – “God has highly exalted Him and given Him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.” There’s a King! Or we go to Revelation 19:11-14. “Then I saw heaven opened and behold, a white horse, and one sitting on it called Faithful and True. And in righteousness He judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire and on His head are many diadems, many crowns. And He has a name written that no one knows but Himself. He is clothed in a white robe dipped in blood and the name by which He is called is the Word of God. And the armies of heaven arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following Him.” Now there’s a King! There’s a King! Reigning, conquering with armies following Him and crowns on His head.
But this wretched figure, His back lacerated from the Roman lash, His hair matted, His face red with blood from the thorns piercing His scalp, this pathetic spectacle hanging between two thieves, naked and in agony, the butt of jokes and the object of universal contempt and scorn? Not much of a King. Oh, but whatever appearances might suggest to the contrary, this is precisely the kind of King that we need. And friends, His present, glorious reign on the throne of heaven at the right hand of the Father, His final triumphant return at the end of the age to judge the quick and the dead, all of that rests upon this foundation. He died that sinners might live. He was plunged into the appearance of utter and abject defeat that in His destruction, the kingdom of darkness might be destroyed. He was emulated and torn that by His wounds we might be healed. You see, He’s not a tyrant, He’s not a despot, He’s not a dictator, He’s not another political operator running for high office. He is a King who reigns from a cross. He reigns from the cross. He builds His kingdom by the shedding of His own blood, redeeming for Himself a people from every tribe and language and nation. He is a Servant-King. The Son of Man who came to seek and to save the lost, who came not to be served but to serve and to give His life a ransom for many. It’s because He’s a King like this that God has highly exalted Him. It’s because He loves like this, suffers and dies like this, for us and our salvation, that one day every knee will bow and every tongue confess Him Lord.
And yet how like the soldiers we are – more impressed by raw displays of human power than with the man upon the tree. We are glued to our screens as candidates begin to announce their run for president. We worry over the latest maneuverings of the great geopolitical powers on the present world stage. But the crucified King, whose kingdom is not of this world, whose subjects are drawn from every nation and of the increase of whose government and peace there shall be no end, well how easily we skip right past Him. If He claims our attention at all, doesn’t He get only the dregs of our time and the leftovers of our lives? But look again at the crucified Messiah. Look again at Christ on the tree. Who would not bend their knee to a King like this who, having loved His own, loves them to the end? He is the Master who stoops down to wash His disciples’ feet. He is the Lord of glory who publicly degraded and shamed praise for the forgiveness of the very men who hung Him there and drove those nails into His hands and feet. Our King, reigning today on the throne of heaven, is a King who was mistreated, dehumanized, agonized, so that now He who rules over all is able to sympathize with us in our weaknesses. “Jesus ready stands to save you, full of pity, joined with power. He is able, He is able, He is willing, doubt no more.” Full of pity joined with power. That is the King we see revealed here at the cross – full of pity joined with power.
A Covering Provided
Cruelty unmasked. Kingship revealed. Thirdly, there is a covering provided. Come with me for a moment to Golgotha. The jeers and the catcalls. Can you hear them? They fill the air as Jesus staggers into view. The other gospels tell us that Simon of Cyrene had been forced to carry Jesus’ cross behind the too weak Christ as they made their way to the place of execution. Now they’ve arrived. Simon is relieved of his burden. The cross is dropped to the ground and Jesus, stripped naked, is thrown down upon it. Quickly now with precision and efficiency, someone from the Roman death squad wields the mallet. With a few practice blows, he punches the nails through His flesh, unmoved by the agony he is clearly causing before he moves on to do the same for the other two prisoners to be executed with Jesus. Our Lord’s body now secured, they hoist His cross upright, and with a sudden dislocating jolt, they drop it into its stand.
Their principle business now concluded, they leave the crowds to enjoy the spectacle. After all, these hardened soldiers have been there, done that a thousand times. And to their spiritually blind eyes there is nothing at all unusual about the crucifixion of three more Jewish men. And so to relieve their boredom, while they wait for their latest victims to expire, they find a convenient spot and start to roll the dice, gambling for Jesus’ clothes. In verse 24, you’ll notice that John inserts a little comment quoting Psalm 22 verse 18, “This was to fulfill the Scripture which says, ‘They divided my garments among them and for my clothing they cast lots.’”
Now we are right, I think, to be appalled at the banality of the scene – murderers playing a game of chance to see who wins their dying victim’s tunic. But let’s not allow the horror of the scene to blind us to the potent picture of the Gospel that Jesus’ nakedness at the cross provides. Do you remember the nakedness and the shame of our first father, Adam, in the garden in Eden? Do you remember when Adam sinned and ate the fruit forbidden to him? His eyes were opened and he hid from God, or he tried to, because he said he was “naked and ashamed.” In other words, his sin, made of his natural condition, a mark and emblem of his guilt of being exposed under the scrutiny and judgment of God. And then Genesis 3:21 tells us, “The Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin and clothed them.” It’s the first time, as you probably know, that we read in the Scriptures of death taking place. Animals have had to die and God killed them to make a covering for Adam and for Eve. God acted to provide a covering by the death of another.
Now we know, don’t we, in the words of Hebrews 10:4, “The blood of bulls and goats can never take away sin,” but the coverings God made for Adam and Eve and all the bloody sacrifices of the Old Testament scriptures that followed upon it down through all those long years, they were all pointing actually to this moment right here – John 19:24 – when the second Adam “who knew no sin was made sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” And He was stripped naked to bear shame and divine condemnation, exposed to the full fury of the wrath and curse of God. God provided no covering for Him because He was providing, in His nakedness, a covering for us. He bore the curse that we, who are by rights and by nature exposed to God’s judgment, might be hidden away beneath the garments of His perfect righteousness.
The roll of the dice that day at the foot of the cross fulfilling the Scriptures is meant to teach us not just that God is sovereign, controlling and governing even the roll of a die, bringing to pass His purposes long promised in the twenty-second psalm. That is gloriously true. Here is the sovereignty of God on display. But more precisely than that, the sovereign purposes of God promised long ago in Psalm 22, principally aim at this – the garments taken from Jesus, God provides for us. He was stripped that we might be clothed beneath his perfect obedience and blood.
You are here today and you feel, you feel the terrible weight of your sin, your guilt, you are ashamed, you are downcast, you wonder if you belong here among Christian people. Like Adam long ago, you just want to go run and hide if such a thing were possible from the gaze of God. Well listen to me, if that’s you, dear friend, no matter the guilt that you bear, no matter the weight that you carry, no matter the depth of your shame or the dark stain of your sin, Jesus Christ has provided a hiding place, a covering for sinners like you. And you may come and take shelter under His wing. Jesus will shade you from the just judgment you deserve and I deserve. He has taken the curse, do you see? That’s what’s happening here. He has taken the curse, stripped and laid bare to the wrath of God for any and every sinner, for you if you would but come to Him for deliverance. Some people will tell you, “Oh don’t worry about your sin.” Some people will tell you, “Your guilty conscience is just the product of other people’s oppressive values forced upon you.” Some people will tell you, “Just go ahead and drown your guilt, medicate your shame.” But none of this can provide the covering you need. You are exposed before the gaze of God with whom you have to do and to whom you will one day give an account. There is no hiding from Him. But you don’t need to hide anymore. A covering has been provided in the Lord Jesus Christ. Would you go to Him with your sin and your guilt and your shame? He is able to cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living and true God. He will robe your nakedness with the garments of His righteousness. And by the nakedness of the cross, He will have made full payment for all your sin.
A Confession Required
Cruelty unmasked. Kingship revealed. A covering provided. Come and hide yourself beneath the wounds of Jesus Christ. His blood can make the foulest clean. Then finally there is a confession required. In verse 35, John says, concerning the account he has just given us of the death of Jesus – “He who saw it has borne witness—his testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth—that you also may believe.” What should you do with the cross of Jesus Christ? How should we respond? Well it’s really very simple, isn’t it? We must believe. Sometimes we think the way to peace with God must involve some great sacrifice on our part, some profound work we must do to satisfy or persuade Him, some grand ritual that must be performed, some long, drawn out process to be undertaken. No, no, listen. There is nothing to be done for you to find a hiding place and a refuge in Jesus Christ but for you to turn from sin and self and entrust yourself to Him. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you, you will be saved.
Mark 15:39 tells us the centurion, likely the officer who led the execution squad that day, at the moment of Jesus’ death the centurion declared, “Truly this man was the Son of God!” That’s what you must do. That’s what you must do. Like the centurion presiding over the cross, you need to change your mind about Jesus today. He’s no longer an object of scorn or indifference; He must, today, become the only object of your trust, your hope, and all your confidence. May the Lord make it so in all our hearts. Let us pray.
Our God and Father, we bless You that Jesus Christ gave Himself, the just for the unjust, to reconcile us to God. As we look to Him now, we pray for that covering He has provided for sinners, for sin, in His nakedness under Your curse. Cloth us anew or for the very first time in His righteousness alone we pray. For we ask it in His name, amen.