By Scott Hagan

 

 

I recently uncovered the amazing mysteries of tranquility while excavating a lost sermon of Jesus. I’d been overlooking it in my gospel quarry for years. Once I knew where to dig, it became a simple discovery—one I invite you to make for yourself.

 

Take a few moments with your New Testament and look up every passage detailing the crucifixion. Once you’ve found them all, write out the statements recorded as coming from the lips of Jesus while He hung on the cross. Carefully script each phrase Christ uttered while fastened to the post and crossbeam—until a nervous Rome placed its stamp on His burial door.

 

Now, slowly repeat those statements aloud, one after the other. You’ll find they barely fill one minute of spoken conversation when strung together. Seven one-liners!

 

What on earth, literally, was Jesus saying during the rest of those six hours on the cross? Have you ever weighed your own possible confessions? What if suddenly you found yourself positioned on a similar crucible—dying without justice between two felons?

Jesus could have ended the opening argument of His extradition with an ear-splitting sermon or offered up a plateful of prophetic thunder as a parting shot for Pilate. He could have unloaded an earful at the elders or at least told Barabbas he was the luckiest parolee on earth. He could have requested a two-hour pass to go and preach Judas Iscariot’s funeral.

 

He could have undressed with righteous rhetoric the Roman cohorts who stripped His clothes, and then showered condemnation on those who spat upon Him. He could have transformed the reed they mockingly placed in His hand into a club and begun cracking a few skulls from the Place of the Skull. Those who “passed by” and “blasphemed Him, wagging their heads” (see Mark 15:29, NKJV) could have been mauled by a vicious Lion of Judah.

 

The antagonists who hung a joker’s signature over His scalp could have instantly had the mark of the beast tattooed on their heads. The one who rolled sixes for His clothes, along with the crown craftsmen, the sword salesman and the vinegar vendor, every last one of them, could have gotten an illustrated, 10-point sermon on hell.

 

Between hammer shots, Jesus could have bellowed out a few shots from Jeremiah’s prophesies to wayward Israel. Or between beatings, He could have ordered up a few hungry bears as Elijah did.

 

With His name and legacy being blasphemed, you wonder if Jesus squinted through the crimson veil masking His face to see if they were coming. Who? The mob.

 

Strewn across Galilee like wind-blown confetti were swarms of faceless and nameless individuals who had been rehabilitated by His touch of compassion. At any moment you would have expected those made physically and emotionally whole, along with all the recovered demoniacs, to rush upon Calvary with spears in hand.

 

A righteous riot was in order. It was time to shelve the teaching on meekness and take out a few Romans.

 

The prior deaf should have heard the pounding hammer and dashed without caution. The former blind should have seen the shimmering silver of sword-bearing centurions, or at the very least, the bright red river of agony coursing the brow of Jesus; they should have seen it all and demanded their shackled Captain be freed.

 

Someone should have been moved to do something. Even the donkey, who had taxied Jesus through the sounds of “Hosanna!” a week earlier, could have rushed in to untie Jesus with his teeth and then carry Him off into a safe sunset.

 

But the rescuers were as silent as His sermons: “When He was reviled, [He] did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten” (1 Pet. 2:23).

 

A Message Scrawled in Red

In the natural, Jesus’ actions made no sense. When taunted, He remained tight-lipped. When abused and pierced, His words of forgiveness flowed as quickly as His blood.

He didn’t require His wounds to dry, scab and scar before He forgave. There is no record that Jesus calculated His personal pain before discharging His pardon. Each bruise and blow was met with silent mercy.

 

Satan certainly did not expect the knee-jerk reaction of Christ to be such unconditional love. Looking back, the devil probably wished he had chosen a quick execution over a leisurely -crucifixion—because the longer Jesus hung there, the more foolish the devil began to look. The nonverbal Jesus was a powerful billboard of blessed assurance.

 

But Jesus was doing more than dying. He was communicating in red ink the timeless secrets of the kingdom. His disposition of silence became trust defined. He was openly showing His bride how to embrace the cross that awaited her.

 

The cross was a regular topic between Jesus and His disciples—though it must have seemed awkward when Jesus first told them “he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me” (Matt. 10:38). Sensible marching orders to anyone this side of Calvary, but what about to 12 head-scratching disciples? Jesus hadn’t yet died on the cross.

 

The disciples had known the cross only as a gruesome display of criminal sentencing—public death to shape a public conscience—not as the coming anchor to which man’s sins were attached and then cast into a bottomless and forgetful sea.

But as the year of His death arrived, details concerning the cross became more specific. Nine months before His death, Jesus “began to show to His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed” (Matt. 16:21).

 

Peter panicked when he heard this. He had just been handed the “keys” moments earlier when Jesus said, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom” (v. 19).

 

Jesus had characterized both Peter’s life and his confession as a “rock” (v. 18). The fisherman and the carpenter were now undeniably joined at the hip. If they executed Jesus, Peter knew he would be next.

 

Peter loved the thought of being an orator for the kingdom but hadn’t a single desire to become its martyr. So he quickly tried to persuade Jesus down a different road. His effort pricked the deepest anger of Christ recorded in the Bible.

 

“Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me” (v. 23, NASB). Jesus told the Pharisees that they were “sons of the devil” and a “stumbling block to others.” But to Peter He said, “You are the devil...a stumbling block to Me personally!”

 

Peter had passed the oral quiz with flying colors—“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (v. 16, NKJV)—but failed horribly the final exam of the cross. How could Peter fall from a rock to a stumbling block so quickly?

 

Simple. The coming cross accelerated the testing of his spiritual genuineness: “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” (vv. 24-25).

 

The cross revealed that Peter’s confessions were nothing but cheap dime-store words of promise. From his statements alone, Peter’s potential ministry sounded a mile wide. But the introduction of the cross proved his commitment was actually about an inch deep and evaporating fast.

 

Peter ultimately did embrace the cross. The day of Pentecost empowered him to see that the 360 minutes of Calvary mirrored much of what lay in store for the church.

 

A Diluted Symbol

The cross, however, has tragically become the most diluted symbol of the modern church. Today it’s sported as cheap jewelry or displayed as expensive architecture.

 

For Peter and John—or anyone else from the early church for that matter—to casually wear a crucifix earring would be as maniacal as someone today flashing a new electric chair necklace or donning a 14-carat gold gas-chamber pendant. Or imagine the absurdity of seeing a larger-than-life hangman’s noose constructed on a church roof—one that is well-lit and visible from the freeway!

I’m not suggesting that the emblem of the cross be purged. Only that its truth be told. It stands for a very deep sacrifice. It was the greatest lesson of Jesus, and He died teaching it.

 

Nothing can tutor you through life like the moments of the cross. Jesus was the master teacher; the cross was His classroom. In one sense, the cross represents what a certain portion of the world felt for Jesus: hate. But the cross also represents what the whole of Jesus feels for humanity: love.

 

Jesus knew that without a living portrayal of endurance and trust,
His disciples wouldn’t last 10 steps outside the upper room. Like Peter, they possessed righteous vocabulary; but also like Peter, they possessed hypocritical attitudes.

 

The church needed a moment the Holy Spirit could reference for all of eternity.

So the Son whom the Father had given chose to give a gift as well.

 

The cross that Jesus gave forged a new accountability between word and deed. No longer could a phony Pharisee or a lukewarm disciple live by confessions alone.

 

Like their Savior, the disciples would soon be called to carry their daily cross. Christ paid a debt no human can comprehend—and thankfully, a debt no mere human being has been asked to pay.

 

So what is the cross we are called to carry?

 

Jesus did not require His followers to physically perish on a wooden tree, but He did call them to the many peripheral pressures He had felt throughout that day of His death. The first church quickly learned the severity of Jeru-salem’s continued overreaction to anything associated with Christ.

 

For them, to “carry the cross” meant they would experience grave injustice at the hands of others. They were gawked at by a cold-hearted public for being Spirit-filled, bitterly scourged by pious bigots for helping the poor, jailed by government agencies for effecting miracles in the marketplace. Some were even slain as martyrs by demonically aggravated puppets masquerading as religious purists.

 

Sounds a lot like the journey of Jesus, doesn’t it?

 

God even employed spiritually corrupt people to bring ongoing direction to His body. But look at Jesus. He wasn’t crucified by the hand of the Father at the urging of the Holy Spirit.

 

It was sinful Roman soldiers who crucified Him, men who themselves deserved death. Like filthy scalpels in the hand of a surgeon, the Roman soldiers were God’s instruments to fulfill His desire. Calvary was a crude operating table staffed by novices.

Yet Jesus bore it all without uttering one syllable of bitterness. This was the hope of the church, because every pressure brought against the early church could be directly wedded to the experiences of Jesus at His death.

 

Endless Grace

When it comes to the daily cross, both patients and instruments are grace-desperate. No true disciple can escape the anvil known as the cross.

 

It can be discouraging to see another Christian who appears to be prancing around trouble-free. You wonder why his cross looks like styrofoam while yours feels like cast iron.

 

But God is not mocked. There are no anesthetics which allow God to perform His surgical ways at the subconscious level for anyone.

 

It may be tough at times to maintain a pure -perspective through strenuous seasons of cross-shaping. My only hope of success comes when my eyes remain fixed on the body language of Calvary’s quiet Lamb, when I carefully listen to the words He didn’t say. For when my eyes and ears tune out the cross, I fast become exasperated with people and plummet into spiritual defeat.

 

There will always be people who make big things out of small things in my life. But then, I remember the cross...and how Jesus went through it first.

 

I can always count on uninvited guests who enjoy watching my heavenly Father discipline me—and that can be terribly embarrassing. But again, I remember... Jesus went through that, too.

 

Even if God sends spiritually immature Christians into my life as part of His mysterious blueprint to grow me—to school me in silence—I must not forget that Jesus felt that too. All of this was the cross! At least it’s the one Jesus knew.

 

But for all the strains you and I face as followers, no one will ever pay a toll like Jesus. His death is filled with endless grace and boundless perplexity.

 

For it was I, not Jesus, who should have died for violating my Creator’s commands. And it was I who deserved the burden of transporting heavy timbers barefoot over jagged hillsides for my iniquity. It was I who merited loud public laughter and the agony of pointy thorns stabbing through my forehead.

 

And it was I who should have felt my ribs being pierced as pagan spittle dripped from my face. Yes, it was I who should have hung incapacitated for six millennia, not six hours.

Yet it was Jesus, not I, who -violently died in silent -payment.

 

So this Easter, I encourage you to rise early, don the bonnets and polish the shoes. It’s the day when God’s people around the world colorfully rejoice in His resurrection!

But while you’re enjoying your Easter brunch, pause to remember the greatest silent sermon ever preached. The one that took place the Friday before. The one that lasted for six hours. The one that’s easy to memorize but difficult to emulate. The one that was lived, not spoken, by a silent Lamb.

 

Scott Hagan is senior pastor of the Harvest Church in Elk Grove, California. He and his wife, Karen, have four children.

 

Sidebar: Read about the physical death of Jesus Christ, here. Below should link to Charismamag.com/silentsermon/physicaldeath

 

The Pain of The Crucifixion

 

The Romans did not invent crucifixion as a form of capital punishment, but they perfected its cruelty so as to produce a tortuous death with intense agony. It was preceded by “scourging,” a legal preliminary. For this, a short whip with braided leather thongs was used on which small iron balls or sharp pieces of sheep bones were tied at intervals.

 

A customary Roman scourging meant Jesus was stripped and His hands tied to an upright post. His back, buttocks and legs were flogged either by two soldiers or by one who alternated positions. At first, the thongs and bone shards cut into the skin and subcutaneous tissues. As the flogging continued, the lacerations tore into the underlying skeletal muscles and produced quivering ribbons of bleeding flesh.

 

The Gospels indicate Jesus’ scourging was uniquely harsh. After being flogged, the Roman soldiers mocked Him, put a robe on His wounds, thrust a crown of thorns into His head, spit on Him and beat Him on the head with a scepter. The robe probably reopened His back wounds.

 

At the site of His execution, with His arms outstretched but not taut, Jesus’ wrists were nailed to the crossbar. It has been shown that the ligaments and bones of the wrist can support the weight of the body, but the palms cannot. Ancient descriptions included the wrist as part of the hand, which is in keeping with the location of Jesus’ wounds.

 

The nails driven through the wrists crushed or severed sensorimotor median nerves, producing excruciating bolts of fiery pain in both arms. Jesus’ feet likely were placed one atop the other and fastened with one iron spike driven through both, in typical Roman fashion.

 

Crucifixion greatly interfered with normal breathing, especially exhaling. Adequate exhalation required lifting the body by pushing up on the feet by flexing the elbows. This put all the weight of the body on the foot wounds, causing excruciating pain. Also, the wrists rotated around the iron nails, and the scourged back scraped along the wood.

Each breath became agonizing. This continued until Jesus died. Because speech occurs during exhalation, Jesus’ brief utterances from the cross probably were very difficult and deeply painful.

 

When Jesus died, He cried out in a loud voice. This suggests a possible catastrophic event such as cardiac rupture. Another explanation is that His death was hastened by His exhaustion—due to His arrest, illegal trials and deprivation of sleep—and the severity of His scourging, which caused shock, exhaustion asphyxia and perhaps acute heart failure.

 

Source: “On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ” by William D. Edwards, M.D., Journal of the American Medical Association, 1986.

 

“The cross stands for a deep -sacrifice. It was the greatest lesson of Jesus, and He died teaching it.”