A Righteous Man? Luke 23
A sermon preached on Good Friday 19 April 2019 at Ellenbrook Anglican Church
There is an English preacher who has made himself famous by accusing God of “cosmic child abuse”. Not exactly; but he accuses Bible Christians who believe Jesus died to take away our sins by bearing our punishment – of making God out to be a cosmic child abuser. I mean, Christians say God punished his Son in our place. Isn’t there something wrong here? Logically and emotionally it doesn’t seem right; we believe it because it is what the Bible teaches. But does it? That is Steve Chalke’s contention, and he has many followers. And he himself is following well-known scholars, who will point to the Gospel of Luke and say that Luke has no doctrine of atonement; he thinks Jesus died as a martyr, and that he saves us by his resurrection and ascension. This is a very serious matter. Again and again through the New Testament we read that Christ died for our sins, and that has been at the heart of Christian understanding. You move away from that, you get a very different Christianity.
We have been exploring the Gospel of Luke. Today we jump to the end and want to know the meaning of what Luke says about the Jesus’ death. Because it’s true; he doesn’t say Jesus gave his life as a ransom, in the way Mark does, though he does speak of his death as a sacrifice, in as a powerful way as anything in the New Testament; he says that God bought the Church with his own blood! (Acts 20) But it is true, none of this is easy to see in his account of Jesus suffering and crucifixion.
According to Luke Jesus was seen as a threat to public order and was hated by the authorities for undermining their moral authority. Since Tuesday (four days before Passover) he has been teaching large crowds in the temple. The authorities couldn’t touch him for fear of triggering a riot. His whereabouts in the evenings was are secret – until one of his followers turned against him and offered to lead the authorities there when Jesus was alone. He was arrested late on Thursday night, and condemned to death at a meeting of the Jewish Sanhedrin early on Friday morning. The Jews did not have authority to carry out an execution; only the Roman governor could order that. So, Jesus was immediately taken to Pilate, who allowed the execution to go ahead. Jesus was on a cross by 9am, died about 3pm, and was taken down and placed in a cave tomb before sundown. End of story! Or so everyone thought. Two days later people were saying they had seen him alive, and it was not long before Christians were defying the authorities and preaching that God had raised him up. Peter’s Pentecost sermon took place just six weeks later, and he was able to convince three thousand people that Jesus was the promised Messiah – in walking distance of where they had seen him die.
But the early Christians didn’t have an easy time of it. The formal accusation against Jesus was that he led Israel astray. That meant he was taking people away from God and the teachings of Moses. The proper penalty for that was death. Was he innocent or guilty? The supreme governing council, which was the highest Jewish court, and two high priests, who carried the authority of God, judged that he was a blasphemer. That carried a lot of weight for Jewish people. Also, he was crucified. That clinched it. The religious experts were able to point to their Scriptures which say that a person who is hanged is cursed by God. How could the promised Messiah be cursed by God?
When the gospel started to be heard among non-Jewish people his condemnation by the High Priests was not such a problem, nor anything the Scriptures might say about hanging; the problem was crucifixion itself.
Crucifixion was a terrible end. One Roman wrote of “the utterly vile death of the cross”. Only the worst people were crucified: runaway slaves and foreigners guilty of treason; Romans were not crucified. It was a death that was designed to destroy any idea anyone might have that you could oppose Rome. You were nailed up naked and the public got to see how you looked, and how you smelled at the end. Because the urine, the faeces, the flies and everything else turned you into an object of revulsion, quite apart from your pain and suffering. So, the preachers were met with an emotional reaction: “Impossible! He failed! He turned out to be nothing, and God disowned him!” To this day Muslims refuse to believe Jesus died by crucifixion. God would never have allowed his prophet to die this way; he must have snatched him away. Some think Simon of Cyrene, the man who carried his cross, must have died in his place.
So why did so many people become Christians in those early centuries, when it often meant opposition, ridicule, ostracism and even death, as well as this unthinkable notion that a crucified man might turn out to be God’s king? The answer was his resurrection, and the message that he died for our sins; that he willingly bore the judgement of the human race – for us.
I want us to see that, among other things, this sharpened up the question of whether he was innocent or guilty. There is no question that he claimed to be the promised King-Messiah. On that question the High Priests were correct. He didn’t deny it. So the question is, Was he, or was he not? If he wasn’t (isn’t!), then he was guilty. If he was, then he will one day return to judge us, and to establish a new world. That is why it is an important question. It involves us as much as it involved them. But there is the larger question of whether he was good, in addition to his claim to be the Messiah.
When you read Luke’s account of it – and I want you to do that yourself; it is too long for us to do now – you will see he is making a point. Three times Jesus is declared innocent. The governor could find no basis for a death penalty, and says so three times over. Nor could Herod, the Jewish governor of Galilee. That’s four times! Then the officer in charge of the execution party, who saw him die, said, “Surely this man was innocent!” That’s five! Actually, he said more than that. He said that Jesus was a righteous man. The word can mean innocent, but here it means much more. A righteous person in Scripture means a person who is right with God. And that is really the question: did God own him in the end, or was he cursed, as the authorities said. This is the climax of Luke’s account. This Gentile officer saw how he died and gave the judgement that he was a righteous man.
A great deal hangs on this. Seven hundred years before Jesus the prophet Isaiah wrote about a servant of the Lord, who would be God’s instrument in saving his people. According to Isaiah 53 he would be a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief: one whose appearance would cause people to turn away. God would lay on him the guilt of all mankind; he would be a “guilt offering”; that is a sacrifice to take away sins. Could he have been talking about Jesus? Isaiah also calls him God’s righteous servant. So if Jesus was not righteous, that would immediately rule him out. But if he was, then his claim to be the promised king could be true – even though he died a disgusting death and God allowed it – maybe this was what it meant that God laid on him the sins of us all.
I hope you can see now that just because Luke does not explain the cross in theological language like St Paul, does not mean he had a different view of it to the rest of the New Testament. He is giving us the facts of how it happened, which are the foundation of anything we say about its meaning. And if Jesus is the righteous servant as the early Christians proclaimed, then he died for our sins – yours and mine. He carried the penalty deserved by us, so we can go free.
I hope you can also see that this affects you. As you read Luke 23 you will find other things which point in the same direction of Jesus’ righteousness. If you count the darkness that came over everything as Jesus hung dying, which certainly signaled a miscarriage of justice to the centurion, then we are up to six. And the terrorist who died beside him, who said, “This man has done nothing wrong.” That’s seven not guilty verdicts! And this last is not academic: we too will have to die one day, and what happens then depends on whether we think Jesus was genuine or not. “Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingdom!” That is what the man crucified with him said. In one way or another that is what you must say if you want to ever see the new resurrection world Jesus promised. “Truly, today you will be with me in Paradise,” was Jesus reply. If Jesus was truly a righteous man, then he came from God and he spoke the truth of God. He is the promised king of God’s kingdom. He is the one person who can open the door – for you and for me. God was not into cosmic child-abuse; he rather became a man himself and went all the way to the cross, becoming sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5)