In the morning after Jesus was betrayed, the religious leaders decided that they didn’t want to be held responsible for killing Jesus, so they brought Him before Pilate.
Judas is quickly dispatched as he is overcome by the guilt and shame from betraying Christ. He had counted the pieces of silver, but he had not counted the cost of his actions.
Pilate cannot find anything wrong with Jesus, but the Pharisees press his hand, so he gives Jesus over to the Roman guards who mock Him and take Him to be crucified. The ridicule continues by the religious leaders, “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” So they were listening to Jesus’ teaching after all. They hadn’t missed His point. They had been given every opportunity to believe, but they had rejected Jesus as the Messiah.
As Jesus hung from the cross, He would have had to pull up from the nails in His hands just to get enough air to breathe. The only words Matthew records from Jesus on the cross are, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” These are the opening lines of Psalm 22. Jesus was silently reciting the entire psalm as He hung on the cross. It is a profound statement as Jesus reveals the greater suffering of the Savior which couldn’t be seen on the surface. Jesus had become forsaken by the Father so that we could be forgiven. This unique psalm of David reflects a common grief we often share, but as one pastor so delicately put it, David only felt forsaken by God. Jesus was truly forsaken. This was an agony that no mortal could ever understand. The eternal bond of the Trinity was broken so that we might be made acceptable before God.
As Jesus cried out and yielded up the spirit, the curtain in the temple was torn in two, the earth shook, rocks were split, and graves were opened to see many come back to life with His eventual resurrection. The centurion, watching over the execution, declares, “Truly this was the Son of God!”
Jesus was laid in a tomb, but that wasn’t the end of the story.
We call this day “Good Friday.” It is through His sacrifice that we are forgiven and set free from the tyranny of sin. Today is a day of rejoicing as we reflect on what Christ accomplished for us on the cross. Read Psalm 22 and discover the greater weight of Jesus’ suffering that is much deeper than the physical abuse He endured.