EPISODE 240 GOSPEL OF MATTHEW CHAPTER 27 "This Cup but not THAT Cup"

Welcome to Share the Word. In this podcast, Pastor Paul gives us great insight of the Gospel of Matthew chapter 27, leading us through a detailed account of the trial, crucifixion, and burial of Jesus, and then some. This is an important chapter, so let's get started. Matthew 27, night two, this cup, not that cup. If you're just joining us, we've reached the climax of Matthew's Gospel, the last three chapters which describe the betrayal, the arrest, the trials, the crucifixion, the burial, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I'm presenting the story as Matthew tells it, but also as I would adapt his account for a three-night miniseries.

Remember, Mark Burnett, if you or Roma are listening, this needs to happen, like next Easter. Call me. You see what I was saying last time about how this resembles a, say, Netflix espionage drama with multiple players and interwoven plots. As it pulls you in and you get invested in one or two of the main characters, disgusted by others, and there's usually some you're never quite sure what to make of, but you can't stop watching because you want to see if your hunches about where the story is going are right and how it all gets resolved. The story of what happened with Jesus, especially as it moves toward its conclusion that last Passover, has all those elements and then some.

But what makes it more compelling than any TV drama or miniseries I've ever seen, and I've seen some great ones, is that this not only all really happened, but literally changed the world, the whole course of history. Where we left the story on night one, Jesus, remember, was now in the custody of his enemies, the most powerful men in Jerusalem, led by Israel's high priest Joseph Caiaphas. After interrogating him in the wee hours and after Jesus admitted under oath that yes, he did claim to be Israel's Messiah and the Son of God, these religious leaders, who within hours, remember, would be presiding over the temple services at Passover, turned to mocking and beating the shackled and blindfolded Jesus, venting all their pent-up hatred and anger on him. Which brings us to night two, scene one. I'm washing my hands of this.

As Matthew 27 opens, its first verse says, Now when morning came, all the chief priests and the elders of the people took counsel together against Jesus to put him to death. And they bound him and led him away and delivered him to Pilate the governor. All the chief priests and elders. That's a reference to Israel's Sanhedrin, Israel's Supreme Court. Those gathered in Caiaphas' residence in the middle of the night, I imagine, were just an inner circle of his, members of the high priestly clan and probably a couple of their closest cronies, who were Sanhedrin members. But when morning came, more of the members were gathered together, at least a quorum, so that their judgment of Jesus would be official.

Official, yes. Just obviously not, as Jesus was tried by the very same men who had been conspiring to kill him for months. The Sanhedrin was given quite a bit of latitude by the Romans to govern most things in Israel. But for killing someone, especially someone as prominent as Jesus, for that they knew they needed the Romans' cooperation. And that is why early Friday morning they took Jesus to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate at his Jerusalem residence. The government offices were actually in Caesarea on the coast, but Pilate was in the city for the Passover festival with several hundred extra soldiers to ensure the peace.

Matthew's version of what happened next is truncated. John's Gospel gives a fuller account. I'm sure Pilate was none too happy to be awakened very early Friday morning with someone telling him the Jewish high priests were outside his residence, demanding an audience with him. What could they possibly need so urgently that they're here at 6 a.m.? I'm sure that was his first thought. What followed were discussions, private interviews with Jesus inside his residence, and then combative ones back and forth with Pilate and the priests and the gathering crowd outside.

Realize the Roman governor would have not cared much, if anything, about the religious charges like blasphemy the Jews seemed so upset about. But he would be very concerned if Jesus and his followers posed any real threat to the peace. That is why the priests presented political charges to him, that Jesus was subverting the nation, claiming to be a rightful king in Israel, twisting his words, of course, but they knew treason or insurrection were the most readily and severely punished crimes in the empire. Pilate was surprised that as the priests hurled these kinds of accusations against him, asserting that he was some kind of dangerous rebel, Jesus did not protest or answer him at all, actually. Throughout, Pilate was not convinced Jesus was dangerous, yet he could sense the Jewish authorities were, for some reason, almost desperate to see him dead.

Outside his residence, there was a paved courtyard, a place public hearings were held, and it was there that the governor sat in his judgment seat. Trying to find a way to defuse this situation. To make matters more complicated, personally, his own wife, who learned what was going on, sent him a message to not get involved with the situation. She said she had a dream about Jesus and believed he was a righteous man. But by this time, a large number of people had gathered, many of them allies of the priests, people summoned specifically so they could apply more public pressure on him, and the crowd was feeling more like a mob now.

Although Pilate tried a few different ways to avoid caving in to the priests' demand that Jesus be condemned to death, even offering to release a man named Barabbas, a notorious anti-Roman zealot he had in custody, when his alternatives were all shouted down, ultimately he opted to do what was expedient. Again, not just, but expedient. He gave in to the demands of Jesus' enemies, and to demonstrate his reluctance and misgivings, he called for a basin of water, Matthew says, and he washed his hands in front of the crowd. And he said, I am innocent of this man's blood, but see to it yourselves, meaning Jesus' execution. You're no doubt familiar with the idiom washing your hands of something. Well, this is where it originated.

Pontius Pilate symbolically showing he wanted nothing to do with Jesus' execution, but nevertheless, by default, giving in to the Jewish authorities, giving them the go-ahead to crucify Jesus. Scene two, the potter's field, is a brief flashback. I've often heard that the thirty pieces of silver Caiaphas paid Judas Iscariot for betraying Jesus was a very paltry sum. Not true. It was at the time equivalent to about four months' wages for an average worker, so, in our economy, maybe fifteen, twenty thousand dollars. A ridiculous price, yes, to betray a friend, much less Jesus, but no small sum.

Judas' conscience tormented him, however, so much so that he tried to undo what he had set in motion, returning to Caiaphas at the temple sometime after Jesus' capture, but there was no undoing it. When Judas expressed remorse for betraying an innocent man, the high priest answered him, What is that to us? See to that yourself, meaning, that's not our problem, that's your problem. Judas then flung the silver coins across the temple floor in self-loathing anger. The priests, who you can be sure found and collected each one, later decided they could not return that money to the temple treasury because it was now blood money. Instead, they used it to purchase a field near Jerusalem to be a burial place for the indigent, a field that was known locally as the Potter's Field.

Apparently, this was a field where the soil was no good for farming because it was too full of clay, so it had become a place potters dug clay to make their wares. To this day, the term Potter's Field is used for a place those who have nothing and no one are buried. It's possible Judas himself was buried there because, in his shame and mental anguish, his tortured conscience drove him to commit suicide, and he hung himself. Scene three: Why have you forsaken me? Returning to the timeline now, after Pilate gave in to the Jews' demand, Jesus was taken inside the governor's compound, the praetorium as it's called, where he was flogged. This was a brutal beating with a whip like a cat o' nine tails.

It was extremely cruel because the ends of the leather tails extending from the whip's handle were usually tied with shards of glass or bits of bone. With his back shredded and oozing blood, they then wrapped Jesus in a royal-looking robe and pounded down thorns someone had platted into a rough crown into his head. John, who may well have witnessed some of this, reveals in his gospel that Pilate hoped the Jewish leaders, after seeing Jesus degraded to this extent, might be satisfied. But when he had Jesus brought outside again before them in this pitiful condition, they only yelled louder for him to be crucified. And so, out of options, Pilate signed his death warrant, and a detail of soldiers led Jesus through the city streets, half carrying, half dragging his own cross.

As they exited Jerusalem through one of its northern gates, likely the Damascus Gate, Jesus must have been struggling so much from loss of blood and shock and exhaustion, the soldiers pressed a random man who was coming into the city to carry the cross for him the rest of the way to the execution site. It was a place called by the Jews Golgotha, which means the place of skulls, and in Roman Latin, Calvary, which meant the same, probably because the rocky hill viewed from one angle resembled a human skull. The Romans didn't invent crucifixion, but they perfected it as the ultimate punishment and crime deterrent. They would crucify criminals in a prominent place, very visible, as in this case where people were entering or exiting Jerusalem from the north, and everyone passing by could easily see it.

They usually hung a placard around the condemned man's neck stating their crime, a very graphic way to say, Here's what happens to criminals who cross Rome. In Jesus' case, he'd not committed any crimes worthy of death, and the governor knew that. But he had a sign made anyway, and he had it tacked to the top of Jesus' cross, and it read in three languages, so no one could possibly not understand. This is Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. He may have intended it to underscore what rebellion against Caesar could lead to, but my hunch is he intended it more as a jab at the high priest who pressured him into this injustice by falsely insisting Jesus was guilty of treason. Crucifixion.

What an awful way to die. We derive from it our word excruciating. A man was laid out on rough hewn wooden cross members, then stretched out and pinned to them with large nails through his wrist bones and through his instep or ankle bones. Then the cross was hoisted up, dropped into a hole, and the victim left to die, naked, humiliated, agonizing in pain. Hard for us to even imagine that kind of horror, but Rome effectively ruled its provinces through this kind of terror. Jesus was hung up to die like this around nine in the morning that Friday, along with two criminals.

Once the soldiers had completed their work, they sat down and waited. One perk for this gruesome assignment was they could have the condemned men's clothing, and so they gambled to see who could take Jesus' robe and whatever the other two had as well. Also hard to believe, but although this was the day of the Passover and lambs were being sacrificed at the temple, the high priest and some of the elders of Israel came out apparently just to gloat over Jesus' demise. Matthew writes that they mocked him, saying, He saved others, but he cannot save himself. He's the King of Israel. Let him come down now from the cross and we'll believe that.

And he trusts in God. Let God rescue him now, if he delights in him. Didn't he say, I'm the Son of God? Wow, it's amazing that they would take the time to come out of the city for such a purpose, especially on the day of Passover preparations, probably their busiest of the year. Because it was on that Friday that the Passover lambs were sacrificed, people brought a lamb to the temple or could buy one from the vendors in the temple courtyards. They would be led in in groups all day long.

The priests would sacrifice their lambs on the altar, catching the blood in bowls to be poured out on the altar. This ritual harkened back to the instructions given Moses for the people of Israel at the inaugural event of their nation, the Exodus, to slaughter a lamb for their final meal in Egypt and use its blood to mark the door frames of their homes. That night, when God sent the death angel over Egypt in a final blow to force the Pharaoh to release the Jews from bondage, the angel passed over the homes marked by the blood. That's what the ritual at the temple was commemorating: the deliverance of God's people in Moses' time, centuries before, which was the beginning of their nation. And now, today, there were thousands upon thousands of Jews in Jerusalem for that purpose, commemorating Passover. So these priests couldn't stay out watching Jesus die all day.

When they had their fill of mocking him, they got back to their solemn duties at the temple. Then at noon, it got strangely dark. Not from some natural phenomenon either, like a solar eclipse, which lasts only minutes. This eerie, supernatural darkness lasted for three hours, at least. Crucifixion was a slow way to die, purposely. Jesus struggled in the darkness of that afternoon to breathe.

To do so, he had to push up and pull up from his nailed limbs to inhale. How long you could gather the strength to keep doing that determined how long you lasted. Eventually, exhausted and unable to fill your lungs with air, a victim of crucifixion expired from suffocation, usually. But in the darkness that enshrouded Jerusalem that afternoon, much more was going on in Jesus' drawn-out death. The Lamb of God was suffering the wrath of God for our sins. As Isaiah had written, he was pierced for our rebellion and crushed for our sins.

He was beaten so that we could be made whole. He was whipped so that we could be healed. All of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have turned away from God's paths to follow our own. But the Lord laid on him the sins of all of us. Think of that.

All our sins were laid on Jesus then in that dark afternoon. He became our sin-bearer, a substitutionary sacrifice. God the Father punished him there for our sins so he would not have to punish us for them sometime in the future. Around 3 p.m., Jesus called from his cross, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, which means, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? For the first time in all eternity, he was experiencing separation and worse, the anger of God the Father directed at him. This was certainly the hardest part of what Jesus experienced.

How pitiable that although he knew this was coming, had known for a long time, now, in the midst of it, it was that confusing and that unbearable that he cried that, My God, why have you forsaken me? Those are actually words from the first line of Psalm 22, which we must regard then as a messianic psalm, words written centuries before but finding their ultimate fulfillment that day in the suffering of Jesus. The psalm goes on to say, I call out to God, but he does not answer me, as though I am a worm and not a man. Everyone who sees me mocks me. They sneer and shake their heads, saying, Is this the one who relies on the Lord? Then let the Lord save him.

If the Lord loves him so much, let the Lord rescue him. Further on it continues, My life is poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax melting within me. My strength has dried up like sun-baked clay. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. You have laid me in the dust and you have left me for dead.

My enemies are surrounding me like a pack of dogs. They have pierced my hands and my feet, and they stare at me and gloat. Shortly after that, Matthew writes that Jesus called something out again, then slumped forward in death and gave up his spirit. That final call from the cross just before he died, the apostle John, who was there, says was, It is finished. Jesus had completed what was required in God's plan to ransom us. Scene four: unwilling to drink.

I'm going to roll the tape back several hours. This is not anticlimactic. This is a key point for me. Roll it back to where Jesus and the soldiers assigned to crucify him finally reached the place where that took place. We passed over something important there. Matthew 27, verse 34 says, At that point, Jesus was met by someone, or ones, who tried to give him wine mixed with gall.

The gall, another gospel identifies as myrrh. What was that about? It was the offer of some anesthetic or narcotic to dull his pain. Who offered this, we're not told. I've read, though, that there was a society of women in Jerusalem who performed this act of mercy toward the condemned. The Gospels do mention that several women were there, women who were Jesus' followers.

Perhaps it was them. But here's the thing. Realizing what was being offered and fully aware of what was about to happen, Jesus refused to drink that concoction. Why? Good question. I'm sure those who offered it were perplexed that he would refuse it.

I'm sure Matthew and the others were as well when they were told about this detail. So he records it here, I think, to underscore that Jesus' assignment was to suffer the wrath of God for our sins. And he was determined to complete that assignment fully conscious. This detail Matthew includes makes me think how the night before Jesus had prayed while in Gethsemane three times, in fact, and fervently, Father, is it possible? Let this cup pass from me. And he meant then the coming suffering of the cross, and most specifically, the cup of God's wrath, the punishment for our sins which would be laid on him.

But that was not possible, because that was the ultimate reason for which he had come into our world: to endure the wrath of God, to suffer and die for our sins in our place. And so, he would drink that cup in full: the suffering, the mocking, the abuse, the flogging, the shame and humiliation, the nails, the agony of crucifixion, and the holy, undeserved wrath of God falling on him. All of it. But he would not even take the cup of pain-dulling medication when it was offered him. None of that. That's our Savior.

Come back for the conclusion of Matthew's story. Thanks for listening. This is Paul for Share the Word. As a true believer into Jesus, it's impossible not to be emotionally anguished by the brutality he endured for us on that day. Today we're blessed in knowing the purpose, but when we open our eyes and fully understand that Jesus went into all of this with full knowledge of the level of suffering he would endure, this chapter becomes one of the most significant chapters in the New Testament. And I hold steadfast to the fact that I know no one ever has or ever will make this sacrifice for me other than Jesus, and not only for me, but for all who accept him as Lord and Savior.

Think about that as you decide whether to spend eternity with him or apart from him. The choice is yours. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.