3 movements tonight, a prologue, and then we journey to the cross
followed by an epilogue. Would you pray with me on this
solemn day? Holy God, we come and we reflect
on the cost of our salvation. We reflect on the love of our
Savior who came and died for us. Pray that He would come in His
grace and truth into this building, into this
congregation. Teach us tonight, Lord, May the
words I speak be edifying to your church.
May they be glorifying to your name.
We pray in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy
Spirit. Amen.
Prologue. In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God, and all things were made
through Him. Without Him was not anything
made that has been made. In Him was life, and this life
was the light of men. The light shines in the
darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming
into the world. He was in the world and the
world was made through Him, yet the world did not know Him.
With these words, John the Evangelist opens his gospel.
And tonight we come to the climax of the story.
Light meets darkness. Will it be overcome?
And this story matters because the pain and the tears of the
world matter. A holy God cannot just sit there
and hand wave it away. Just pretend like it didn't
happen. He can't excuse it.
Well, what do you expect? You know, it's probably the
best. It's not.
It's not OK. It's not OK.
And I think many of us, we've cried some of those tears.
We felt that pain in our heart. We long.
We long for resolution. We long for justice.
And as we come to the cross tonight, there's validation.
Something needs to happen. This world is not all right the
way it is. There needs to be a response.
We have a Savior, Emmanuel, God, who is with us here in the
darkness, who can walk with us, who can relate to us, who we
pray can heal us with the light of the cross.
It doesn't just validate our longings for justice in the
world, it also convicts. You see, when the light shines,
we learn how comfortable we've become in the darkness.
Our actions and our desires add to the darkness.
How we are complicit in the darkness.
How we don't just endure the darkness, but we add to the
darkness. So we journey to the cross both
as sinners and as victims of sin equally, longing for the light
and fearing the light. The good news start with the
good news on this Good Friday. The good news is that God does
not love us because Christ died for us.
Christ died for us because God loves us.
I invite you to bring your pain and your shame to the cross
defined in the Crucified One, the life that was, the life that
is the light of the world, the light that continues to shine in
the darkness, even this darkness.
And the darkness has still not overcome it.
Let's go to the cross, Peter. Peter again denied it, and at
once a rooster crowed. John 1827, I think this is a
universal memory. Can you remember as a young
person being at the end of a school day or at the end of
practice or maybe a youth group? And you're waiting for the ride,
right? You're with all your friends and
one by one, each of their parents shows up or their older
brothers sister, and they all depart and you're the last one,
You're the last one left. And you start to panic a little
bit and you start to wonder. And this was a bigger deal
before cell phones, believe me. Like, are they going to come?
Have they forgotten? What if I'm left?
What if, what if, what if? Well, we can say a lot about the
Apostle Peter. He's quite an interesting guy.
There's a lot about him. But one of the things you can
say about him is that he was a really good friend to Jesus.
The two of them, they've been through a lot together.
They'd walked on water together. Peter was the only one who got
out of the boat. They had fed the crowds physical
food. They'd fed the crowds spiritual
food. They'd been in confrontations
with the with the priests and the Pharisees, and they talked
to each other as friends, right? They could be direct.
Christ could say, Peter, get behind me, Satan and Peter could
say to Christ, like, you're not going to wash me.
They had a rapport. And now here we are.
It's Thursday night. We're in the garden.
All of human history comes down to these next 72 hours.
This is the hinge, the conflict between good and evil.
It's all right here. And Jesus, fully God, but fully
man. He needs his friend.
He needs his friend to show up. I need you, Peter.
I need you to stand visual with me.
I need you to be there in the garden for me.
Peter doesn't show up. Maybe he doesn't understand.
He doesn't get what this is all about.
Maybe he does understand. Maybe it's all overwhelming.
He doesn't know what to do, and caught in his own inadequacy, he
just falls asleep and bails. And then the crisis comes.
The enemy, the Evil 1, having entered Judas, appears, and
Jesus and the enemy are staring face to face in the dark of the
garden with the torches and the guards.
And Peter comes too. He's completely panics.
He just loses it, goes out on his own, goes rogue, starts
swinging his sword. Jesus has you, Peter.
Peter, put that away. Follow my lead, Peter.
Read the room. Peter, show up for me.
Peter, I need you. You see, in this moment when
Christ had literally been sweating drops of blood, he has
to stop and he has to clean up Peter's mess, take time to like
get that stuff straight. And Peter, he disappears into
fear and shame. He spirals, he denies, he
denies, he denies. Have you ever needed somebody to
show up? Friend, family member, you were
going through something. It's so much more important than
a ride. This was a dark moment, a
crisis, and you needed your friend to be there.
You needed somebody to tell you it was going to be OK.
You just needed a hug. You just needed somebody to grab
your hand, to shake your grab. You by the shoulder, say I'm
here with you, I see you, I'm proud of you.
And they didn't show up. They weren't there.
Maybe like Peter, they promised and promised that they would be
there. And here's is the moment when
you just need them and they're gone.
They bail. Or they do show up and they
panic and they just say something really inappropriate.
They try to make it about themselves.
Oh, it's so much worse when I and it's not helpful.
I need you to see me. I need you to be here for me.
This is darkness, my friends. This is the way of the enemy.
Leaving us all alone, abandoning us, betraying us.
Christ went to the cross for the sins of the world.
So the band of soldiers and their captain and the officers
of the Jews arrested Jesus and bound him.
But what if it was us? What if it was you?
What if it was me? What if we were the ones that
bailed? I was our friend.
We didn't. I didn't know it was so serious.
I knew it was kind of rough, but I didn't know it was that bad.
I would have taken time. I should have asked them a
question. I was trying to help and I said
it was dumb. I shouldn't have said that.
I could see their hurt on their face as soon as I said it.
Now it's awkward. I mean, how do you apologize for
that? I don't know.
We don't really see them anymore.
We weren't there. They were counting on us.
Like Peter. We didn't show up.
We left them hurt. I suspect we can all relate to
this interpersonal pain at some point.
We've experienced the pain of broken trust.
And if we're honest, we've not only received or been on the
receiving end of having our trust broken, we failed to live
up to what somebody expected of us.
Jesus light. It is not overcome by this
darkness. Well, we were yet sinners, the
one who will never leave us or forsake us.
He continued on to the cross for us.
The faithless priest. The chief priest answered we
have no king but Caesar. We don't know a lot about Jesus.
As a young person, one of my friends would say Jesus is a
Shorty, But the one scene we get in the Gospel of Luke is Jesus
in the temple, Jesus in the temple with all of the
professional priests and elders. And they're whole, you know,
they're talking shop and they're, they're going over the
Scriptures and Jesus is just eating this up.
I imagine this being like when the principal cellist comes to
the Youth Orchestra and he's playing with them or she's
playing with them or here at basketball camp and there's a
pro player there. This guy's in the NBA and he's
going to play basketball with me.
I mean, there's a little bit of mystery here because it is
Jesus, but I just imagine his humanness, how excited he was to
be around these men. He looked up to them.
These were heroes to him and he got to talk about the things of
God with these men in the temple.
And we could imagine a world where these men became pastors
to him and the Holy Family. They nurtured him in the faith
and his he started to reveal himself.
They celebrated his wisdom and insight.
They went from being his shepherd to being his followers,
and they championed him. But we know that's not the
story, is it? Sort of seeing him as one of
their sheep to be encouraged. They saw him as a threat, as a
problem. They branded him evil, they
warned people against him, they tried to trick him, they tried
to trap him, they tried to embarrass him, and now they're
trying to destroy him. But not only are they against
him personally, these words I just read, these words haunt me
every Good Friday when we say them, the chief priest answered.
We have no king but Caesar. And I wonder, what did it cost
these men to say those words? What did it cost you say?
They had been the ones who had taught Jesus and countless other
youth about how Moses had stood up to Pharaoh and all the gods
of Egypt and he had spoken truth to them and he had got the
people out of Egypt with acts of power.
How Daniel had stood up to Darius.
When Darius said you can worship nobody else, you must pray to
me. Daniel refused to pray to Darius
and God vindicated Daniel. How Esther for such a time as
this? How Esther liberated or
preserved the Jewish people from genocide by breaking the norms
of Xerxes court, by coming to him, by demanding an audience
with him? See, they knew that Yahweh is
the king of kings, he's the Lord of Lords.
Yet here, push has come to shove.
It's their time with a Pagan tyrant, and they sell out.
They give the game away. We have no king but Caesar, like
all the other conquered people, you know, to keep their
position, to keep the peace, to solve the problem, to get rid of
Jesus. They're willing to go against
the core teaching of their faith.
And I know some of you, some of us have had spiritual leaders in
our lives, men and women, and we've looked up to them and
they've shown us the way ways of God.
We've experienced great beauty in their presence and love.
And we've experienced, we've heard the words of life.
And then as we've gotten older and we've watched and we've
learned that maybe they were living a double life.
There's a whole nother side of them.
Or maybe they, like the priests, sell out, maybe for an
extramarital affair, and they walk away, maybe for money,
maybe for political power or position.
They give it all up and we're left kind of trying to put
together like, what's real and what's not?
Like, what do I do with my faith?
I looked up to these people. I believed in what they were
telling me. And now, now I don't know.
You feel the pain of betrayal. This is darkness.
This is the way of the enemy. Christ goes to the cross for the
sins of the world. When he had said these things,
one of the officers standing by struck Jesus with his hand,
saying, Is that how you answer the high priest?
But maybe it was us. Maybe people look to us.
They knew we were Christians. You were Jesus follower.
You're one of those religious people.
What are you going to do? Are you going to turn the other
cheek? Are you going to follow the ways
of love and mercy? Are you going to stand up
against the vileness of this world and call it out for what
it is? Vileness.
And what if we just shrink back into the crowd and choose our
reputation? It's going to be awkward if I
say anything. This isn't really the place
those people watch us. And I thought you were
different. I thought this mattered to you.
I thought God was your hope and your salvation.
Instead, we choose our reputation.
We choose our pocketbook. We choose our career.
We have no king but our reputation or our job.
We choose smaller goals. We choose the easier path.
And we sell out Jesus light. It's not overcome by this
darkness. And while we were yet sinners,
the pure Lamb of God continues on to the cross for us.
Pilate. From then on, Pilate sought to
release him, but the Jews cried out.
Do you remember when, like, justice became a real thing to
you and you like, kind of got it?
Like maybe you were in a classroom and you saw somebody
get blamed for something and and you knew because you were in the
back row, like you knew they didn't do it.
You know, like, that's not right.
They shouldn't be blamed for that.
It was it was this other kid. Or maybe your mom came home and
she shared the news that, like, Kyle at work got the promotion
and she didn't get it. And you saw her tears and you
knew how hard she worked and how much she did for that company.
And you were heartbroken. And you said to yourself, if I'm
ever in charge, if I'm ever a boss, I'm going to be one of the
good guys. I'm going to stand up for the
people who deserve to be rewarded.
I'm not going to blame the innocent people.
We don't know a lot about Pilot. I know one thing.
You probably saw a lot of corruption growing up in Rome.
My guess is that at some point, as an idealistic teenager, he
had this thought. Maybe this is even as he was
getting into politics. I'm going to do it differently.
I'm going to do it right. I'm not going to be like all of
those other people who are only in it for themselves.
I'm going to care about justice. But here it is.
There's an innocent man. Crowds want him dead.
They're all crying for his death.
Pilot knows he's innocent. You can tell he's squirming.
He's trying to figure a way out. He has that 15 year old inside
of him saying you're going to be different, right?
You're not going to be like all the rest.
But you see, The thing is, the stakes are real for Pilot.
His patron back in Rome has just been executed by Tiberius.
He's kind of on the outs of the emperor.
Like he screws this up. It's going to be his job, It
could be his life. And it's just one man.
And he's not even. It's a different race.
It's a different religion. Like he doesn't know about this.
Where Jesus needs a leader, he gets a coward.
Pilot advocates his responsibility.
Like let the crowds decide. Like how about A or B?
Whatever you choose, I'm not going to be the leader.
I'm going to bail here. I see you're innocent, but I'm
not going to call it. I'm going to let the crowds have
their way. It's so much easier.
Just let this one guy die. You know, some of you have had
to suffer because God put somebody in charge and they gave
them a responsibility to promote and protect the innocent, to
punish the guilty, to work for justice and human flourishing.
They were called to be a leader and they were a coward.
They chose to enrich themselves. They chose to protect their
friends. They chose to ignore the people
they saw as weak, as unimportant, and you had to
suffer because of those choices, because they didn't do their
duty. This is darkness, my friends.
This is the way of the enemy. Christ goes to the cross for the
sins of the world. Maybe you think like I'm.
I'm not a governor. I'm not an American governor.
So I'm, I'm good here. You know, we all, we have
responsibility for the dignity of our neighbor to promote the
common good. We all have opportunities to
choose to be on the side of justice.
Aren't you? Just let it slide, just this one
time. I'm not going to do the work.
I'm not going to ask the question.
And praise God, we get it right sometimes.
And sometimes we do stand up and we do let our voices be heard,
but sometimes we choose ridicule and anger.
We forget the dignity of those people who are on the other
side. We allow ourselves to choose
self-interest over the common good, to cheer for our team and
our side, to look past the, you know, the kind of queasy things
our team does. And we're just excited to see
them advance, or disappointed to see them not advance our
selfishness, loving ourselves and not loving our neighbors.
Jesus light is not overcome by this darkness.
And while we were yet sinners, the Good Shepherd continues to
the cross for us. Then Pilate took Jesus and
flogged him and the soldiers, they twisted together a crown of
thorns and put it on his head and arrayed him in purple robe.
They came up to him saying Hail King of the Jews, and they
struck him with their hands. And those cowards and those
sellouts and all those people who failed to show up, they took
Jesus. And there they crucified him,
and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between
them. But also, but also for all those
who fail to show up, for all those who sell out, for all the
cowards. Jesus went out bearing his cross
to the place called the place of a skull, which an Aramaic is
called Golgotha. And there they crucified him,
and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between
them. When Jesus had received the sour
wine, he said, It is finished. And he bowed his head and gave
up his spirit. Epilogue Later in the Gospel of
John we read these words. Then John said to Peter, it is
the Lord. And as soon as Simon Peter heard
him say, it is the Lord, he wrapped his outer garment around
him and jumped into the water. Peter would write these words.
He himself, Jesus himself, bore our sins and His body on the
tree that we might die to sin and live to righteousness by his
wounds. You have been healed on the
other side of the cross. Peter found a restored
relationship with Jesus. Peter found healing on the other
side of the cross. We're going to be able to come
to the cross tonight and I ask you, come and ask for healing.
We've all been scarred by the darkness and the sin of this
world. We all need Christ to heal us.
You can find that healing at the cross.
Peter found that healing at the cross.
He didn't stay in shame. He didn't stay in failure.
Come and ask God to adopt you into His Holy Family.
Find a brother in Christ when he was the way, the truth, and the
life. In the Acts of the Apostles.
We read these words and the Lord continued to increase, and the
word of God continued to increase, and the number of
disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many
priests became obedient to the faith.
Saul the Pharisee would testify for our sake.
He made him Jesus to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we
might become the righteousness of God.
On the other side of the cross, there's a place for all of those
priests. So it's just months later,
priests are coming to be saved. There's room for the Pharisees
on the other side of the cross. They can be part of the
community. In fact, God goes out of his way
to find Saul and say, Saul, I want you to be included in this.
I want you to don't, don't miss this, join the team.
Saul, who we also know is the apostle Paul, after his
conversion, he would write these words, We bring our sin to the
cross and we receive the righteousness of God.
Even if we've sold out, we can bring that to the cross.
We get the righteous. What an amazing verse.
What an amazing exchange. Come tonight, bring your sins to
the cross. Let Christ make you new.
Deceive the righteousness of God.
A new start, a fresh start. If those priests could get a
fresh start, you can get a fresh start further in the book of
Acts we read. Then the pro council believed
when he saw what had occurred, for he was astonished at the
teaching of the Lord. The author of Hebrews would
testify in Hebrews Chapter 11, that great chapter of faith.
But as it is, they, the the faithful men and women and the
faithful pro councils desire a better country, that is a
heavenly 1 Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God,
for he has prepared for them a city.
There's good news at the cross even for high Roman officials.
Now in this passage it's not Pontius Pilate, it's a man named
Sergius Paulus. Sergius had a similar or even
higher rank than Pilate had. When he responds to the Gospel,
he finds in the teaching of the Lord a calling higher, more
urgent than serving the Roman Empire, an empire that would
outlast the Roman Empire. If you're looking for purpose
tonight, if you need to have your hope renewed, you're
looking for something to believe in.
Come to the cross of Christ, ask him to give you purpose.
If denying disciples, if Pharisees and faithless priests,
if Roman governors can find healing, they can find
forgiveness, and they can find purpose at the cross of Christ,
and so can you. So can I.
Come, John, have the final words here.
The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming
into the world. He was in the world, and the
world was made through Him. Yet the world did not know Him.
He came to his own, and His own people did not receive Him, but
to all who did receive Him, who believe in His name, He gave the
right to become the children of God, the name of the Father, the
Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.