God on the Cross (John 19:28-30; Psalm 69)
Rob Tennant, HillSong Church, Chapel Hill
Friday, April 18, 2014 (Good Friday)
“I am thirsty” Jesus croaked out, as he hung, dying. John says this fulfilled scripture. Which passage? What scripture was fulfilled when he said,
from the cross, “I am thirsty?” Psalm 69:21.
This
is a prayer originally lifted up to God by David. He tells the Lord his enemies “gave me poison
for food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.”
The
prayer begins as the Psalm opens “Save me, O God, from the waters that come up
to my neck” (v.1). Before he was the
king, young David stared down lions as he protected his flock. Then his moment came. He battled and defeated the Philistine giant
Goliath. As he rose to prominence, the
king of Israel, Saul, became jealous and repeatedly tried to kill David.
After
Saul’s death and David’s rise to the throne, problems continued. He fell into deadly conflict with his son
Absalom who accumulated a lot of power.
At times, Saul had armies hunting for David. Later, it was Absalom with armies on the
hunt. More than once, David felt himself
to be as good as dead, but God saved him.
Jesus
was raised by the carpenter from Nazareth, Joseph who was in the line of David. As a ‘son’ of David, Jesus met the
qualification needed to be the Messiah. However,
he lived differently than the great king.
Many of the Psalms are David’s prayers which God always answered by
saving him. David made it through countess
treacherous scrapes and, in the end, died of natural causes. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus likewise asked
God to take the cup of suffering from him (Luke 22:42). This time, God did not.
Both David and
Jesus had enemies intent on killing them. In Psalm 69, David asked God to
punish his foes.
Let their table be a trap for them, a snare for
their allies.
23 Let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see, and make their loins tremble continually.
23 Let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see, and make their loins tremble continually.
24 Pour out your indignation upon them, and let your burning anger overtake them.
25 May their camp be a desolation; let no one live in their tents.
26 For they persecute those whom you have struck down, and those whom you
have wounded, they attack still more.[b]
27 Add guilt to their guilt; may they have no acquittal from you.
28 Let them be blotted out of the book of the living; let them not be enrolled among the righteous.
How did Jesus react to those who
assaulted him? When the mob came to
arrest him, Peter chopped off the ear of one of the men. Maybe Peter was, in his own clumsy,
channeling the warrior spirit of David.
As David smit Goliath, he would vanquish this brigand who brazenly
attacked his master.
Jesus healed the religious leaders’ hired goon. He replaced the ear Peter had lopped off and rebuked
Peter for doing it (Luke 22:51; John 18:10-11).
When the soldiers whipped Jesus, crowned him with thorns, and nailed him
to a cross, he prayed. “Father, forgive
them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). Jesus did not ask for God’s wrath to fall on his
tormentors. He asked God to not hold
their sins against them.
In Psalm 69, David lamented that they
gave him vinegar. Jesus fulfilled that
line from David’s poem. On the cross he
said “I am thirsty.” A soldier gave a vinegar-soaked
rag. The threads of Israel’s scriptures come
to life and take on new meaning in Jesus’ story. In the darkness of his cruel death, we see
God in a new light.
David
was a man of his times, an era of visceral, up close violence. David’s prayer that God blot out his enemies
may not sound holy, but it was honest. The
Bible calls him the one after God’s own heart; but not the Savior.
That’s
Jesus. He fulfills scripture and makes
scripture new. The story changes. How we see God changes. People knew of God’s mercy and love prior to
Jesus but he brought God closer than ever before. Because of him, the path to God was opened to
all people.
“It
is finished,” he said. Then he
died. The old day was done. Will we step into the new reality, or stay
stuck in the old?
Sometimes, do we,
like David, want to call down curses on our enemies? Like the religious authorities who killed
Jesus as a matter of convenience, do we want to remove those who block our way
or foil our plans? Do we ever, like the
Pilate, knowingly turn a blind to truth?
Does the rage-filled violence of the Roman soldiers pump in our veins? Jesus hangs crucified because of sin –
because of my sins.
God flooded the earth
but protected Noah, split the Sea so Moses could pass through, stopped the sun
in the sky so Joshua had time to win the battle, and closed the lions’ mouths
for Daniel. God is the mighty God of the
whirlwind in the book of Job, the God praised by nature and the cosmos itself in
Psalm 148. We see this might of God in
the life of Jesus and are awed by it.
But we see another side too.
God
humbly washes the disciples’ feet, heals the guard sent to arrest him, shares
truth with the governor trying to intimidate him, and forgives the soldiers abusing
him. We are invited closer to the God on
Good Friday.
We
come to this God fully clothed in sin.
God takes our sins on himself as he hangs. Naked we stand before him. He drapes a robe of his divine light onto us. At the cross, we see God and understand how much
it costs him to love us.
AMEN
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