About this sermon
At noon darkness covered the land, the curtain of the temple was torn, and Jesus cried, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” The centurion saw how he died and praised God, saying, “Certainly this man was innocent.” Christ’s suffering teaches believers to trust the Father through their own suffering, to see his innocent death as a witness to the world, and to confess their own part in it with repentance.
Sermon transcript
You may be seated. This evening we are going to look at a passage from Luke chapter 23. It is a passage that we are invited to behold, and it is in fact a very serious and a somber one. It’s one of those passages that you almost feel as if you need to take off your shoes when you read. I’m not asking any of you to do that tonight, but I am suggesting that it is a passage that we ought to listen to. We ought to read and we ought to contemplate with a sense of reverence for what we see and we hear here. what the centurion originally saw and how the righteous one suffered. We are going to read Luke chapter 23 verses 44 to 49.
But first, let’s go to Lord in prayer. Would you pray with me? Heavenly Father, Lord, we thank you for your word. We thank you that you have preserved it and that it is your infallible and errant word that speaks to us not merely words of truth, but words of comfort, words of love, words of edification. Lord, we pray that this evening your word would be heard and that your spirit would be present. As we confessed earlier with effectual calling, the spirit and the word work together to accomplish your purposes. Lord, we pray that you would illumine this text and we pray that we would have greater understanding and greater love for you through it. And this we pray in the name of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Luke 23, verses 44-49 It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the sun’s light failed. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”
And having said this, he breathed his last. Now when the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God, saying, certainly this man was innocent. And all the crowds that had assembled for the spectacle, when they saw what had taken place, they returned home, beating their breasts. And all his acquaintances and the women who had followed him from Galilee stood at a distance, watching these things. Grass withers and the flower fades, but this is the word of our Lord, endorsed forever.
Amen. The sixth hour in Jewish reckoning of time is around noon and it is dark. Some amateur authors and theologians have tried to theorize about the timings of eclipses to see if they coincide with this. But when the recent solar eclipse happened, I actually went down to Nashville to witness it. It lasted about two minutes. And it was like dusk. It was not completely dark. Something else is happening here in this moment, in this blackout. not merely poetic language. In fact, we are told literally the sun’s light failed.
It brings to mind other times in the Old Testament, especially in Amos, when you hear words of judgment and descriptions of that, such as where it reads in 8 verse 9 to 10 in Amos. And on that day declares the Lord God, I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation. I will bring sackcloth on every waist and boldness on every head. I will make it like the morning for an only son and the end of it like a bitter day.
When you hear the description of the scene, it seems after witnessing all of this, everybody who came to see the spectacle, they realized this was different than what they came to see. Some of them came to see a comedy to mock, and instead they witnessed a tragedy. They thought it was entertainment. Instead, they saw horror. They watched an innocent man suffer. And what’s more, they watched grace in suffering, a grace directed toward people that knew that they did not deserve it. What did they see?
The whole scene, as you can see in the previous passage, a few verses earlier, began with, Father, forgive them. and then they hear another cry beginning with father in verse 46 Jesus called out with a loud voice father into your hands I commit my spirit and having said that this he breathed his last between the two fathers on the lips of Christ, we have the purpose and the intent of the cross. Jesus began with, Father, forgive them.
And we see that in the previous passage, but that cry, that request came with a cost. It was a request that cost something. Many times our request will cost something. We could request something from somebody, but we have to know that there’s a corresponding cost. Many of us will watch sports much like a spectator, kind of like these people were watching for entertainment. When you watch, you see the products of what people have spent much time on. And I think, especially when I watch college sports, at one point, this player came to the coach and said, make me a great player.
And what you don’t see is the cost of that request. It will be granted, but it’ll be granted in saying, now you must run these laps. Now you must do these drills. Now you must study these plays. Now you must memorize these things and practice these plays. Make Me a Great Player had a cost to it. It’s on a totally different level for us to understand. When Jesus said, Father, forgive them, there was a cost to his request. And Jesus asked for something fully knowing there was a cost.
There was the three hours on the cross in full reception of the curse of the law. Jesus asked for your forgiveness and was prepared to pay the cost of his request with himself becoming a propitiation, as we were told elsewhere in scripture, the object, a substitute for the wrath against sin that God had. In other words, Jesus on the cross was enduring the fires of hell for three hours. He suffered more than any sinner had known.
Not because of the nails, not because of the shame, but because to pay the price of sin is to receive the wages of sin. And the wages of sin is hell, what we call the final death. He did not descend into hell after the cross. That’s not what I’m saying.
In fact, what he endured there on the cross, in fact was held. After the cross we know from the thief said he would be with him in paradise. Now there are sparse details here on the crucifixion physically because of what was happening in a different realm. of what he was experiencing there. Isn’t it fascinating that Luke, the physician, doesn’t have all of these gory details about what happened on the cross.
In fact, he describes the physical part in just three words. They crucified him. That’s really it. You don’t get a description of what’s happening with the nails. You don’t get a description of what’s happening with his suffocating. None of that is on display there, although we sometimes focus on those things. No, because there’s something different that’s happening here. The suffering is different. It’s not mere physical. We are told in 1 John 2.
Christ was a propitiation for our sins. We’re told in 2 Corinthians 5 that Christ became sin on our behalf. It’s described by hearing the words, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? In other words, the sufferings of Christ cannot be displayed on a picture. They cannot be displayed on the big screen because the cross was the location, but not the cause of the greatest suffering of Christ, our substitute.
That is what is so amazing. is the fact that this suffering occurs in between two calls to his father. That’s what’s amazing about verse 46. When we think of Jesus enduring the wrath of God for our sins, we’re tempted, as some theologians have today, to charge divine child abuse. It’s been a popular charge in recent years. And it’s completely destroyed by what we see here in Luke. It’s completely destroyed by this verse. What do we consistently see throughout Scripture? Philippians 2 says that Christ emptied himself. In other words, became a servant is what it is talking about. In other words, he chose to do this. He chose to save us. Jesus was not picked as the best person on the earth, and then this was thrust upon him. No. Instead, he had chosen this.
In the garden, Jesus picked up the cup, the cup of the wrath of God. of wrath of his own nature as fully God against what had happened in the first Adam. These This is happening in one person, Jesus Christ, who is fully God and fully man. There’s a deep mystery in the fact that one person ever had been the God-man, and in one person, the price for the enmity between God and man is being paid, and then God and man are being reconciled. It is pictured there in the curtain, torn in two. And these two that were separated now are united in Christ, His person, and after the sacrifice.
The willingness is what we see here. The love of God mutually between father and son and son and father bound together by the Holy Spirit that begins with father forgive them and ends with father into your hands I commit my spirit. This entire time is happening in love and submission to his father. He begins in the love of his father in a request. a request that has a cost, and he ends this time of suffering, calling out to his Father one more time. What does that tell us? It tells us the entire time Christ was in control. He freely chose to pay for our sins on the cross. He freely chose to pay for the requests. Father, forgive them.
Jesus commits his soul to the Father, and then the text actually puts it, as he breathed his last, using active verbs. showing us Christ was in control even when he departed. It was enough. He laid down his life just as John 10 had said when he said, I have authority to lay down my life and I have authority to pick it back up again. The language that Jesus uses here when he says, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit, you probably have heard at modern committal services. The statement at the graveside is not a prayer for the dead or a meritorious offering for the dead. It is a confession.
We trust our Heavenly Father. That is what Jesus did the entire time on the cross. He trusted His Heavenly Father even during and after the suffering of the cross. He believed His Father was good. His Father was in control and worthy of that trust. That is how the righteous one suffered. What a model that is for us. After the greatest suffering that you could imagine, even in our hour of death, He is still worthy of our trust. He is still good. He is still sovereign. Christ begins and ends His time on the cross in conversation with His Father.
May the same be said for us, because how often we don’t, right? When we go through times of suffering, how often we are found avoiding prayer. How often we are found avoiding God’s people and worship. How often we’re avoiding reading scripture, being in conversation with our Father.
But Jesus began His suffering and ended it with the name Father on His lips. He is, in a sense, the perfection of Job’s suffering. Job suffered well, but not perfectly. But Christ suffered perfectly. Job is commended for his suffering, though. And I don’t know if you ever struggled with that. How is Job speaking rightly when many times Job is saying things where he’s questioning God. He’s saying, what is going on here? I don’t feel that I deserve this. Answer me. Give me an answer.
But the one thing that you’ll find of Job, over and against his friends is this. His friends talk to Job and his friends talk about God, but Job is the only one who will be found addressing God. talking to God. He doesn’t just complain about God to his friends, he laments to God. Job directs his speech multiple times to God.
And Jesus does this perfectly in his suffering, in conversation with his father, lamenting his feelings of being abandoned, directing his pains and requests to his father who heard him. Imagine seeing that, witnessing this display of the righteous one who suffered and how he suffered. Because that is what we’re told. In the midst of that suffering, who was watching? A Roman soldier. Not any Roman soldier. Not just somebody who happened to be there. A centurion. A commander of about a hundred men. at that time. And he was in charge of this execution.
Do you know what that tells us? To become in charge of something, typically, you have to have done it and been under somebody else’s command for a while to work your way up to being in charge. In other words, he had seen this done before. Romans did executions a lot It was, of course, a hundred years earlier that the only time you really get a mention, anytime it kind of makes a blip on our history books, is when the Romans executed 6,000 slaves at one time. That’s when it made a blip on our radar. But what that tells us is it was fairly commonplace, except for there was a big number at that time. So what does that mean?
There was a trickle all the time of people who were being executed, people who were on the cross. And this centurion had been there. He’d been in charge of many of them. He’d seen them year after year. He was an expert in their effective ends. But when he saw Jesus suffered, he said, this man was innocent. Indeed he was. He was the only innocent man who was completely innocent who ever suffered.
In fact, we’re told in Matthew, he records one other sentence this centurion uttered. In Matthew 27, 54, it says, when the centurion and those who were with him, seeing, keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe and said, truly, this was the son of God. Truly, this was a son who was calling out the whole time to his father. He suffered and entrusted himself even in death to his father.
He fell asleep in the arms of his father. That’s how we speak of death. That’s how we talk about the sting being gone. Even Paul will use this language of many have fallen asleep. It’s almost the image of one of my favorite things about having small children is how they fall asleep in the car when you’re driving somewhere. And sometimes when you get home, you go to your children that have fallen asleep, and you pick them up still asleep, and you take them and carry them into the home, into their room, lay them down for them to keep sleeping. That I think is perhaps one of the best pictures we have of when a believer passes away. The father comes, picks them up in his arms, takes them to the room that their elder brother Jesus has prepared for them.
The centurion couldn’t help but notice the suffering of this man was unique. It was unique in that he suffered as a propitiation and how he was suffering was unique. It was a holy suffering. It was a suffering with grace to those even that were causing it. Holy suffering can be amazing testimony to an unbelieving world.
Think of the story of Johnny Erickson Tada. You probably have heard her story before of someone who was paralyzed in a diving accident. She’s written many books on faith, on suffering, even given talks about suffering to share her faith in her good father. I was struck by the story of, as many Christians sometimes will like to do, going to Israel and seeing the pool of Bethesda. seeing where somebody was physically healed and hear her tell the story of how she looked there and realized that God had already healed her soul and she trusted him despite the fact that she was not healed of her paralysis.
It’s enough to make you say, what sort of suffering is this? What sort of reaction is this to being crushed in the world? It is the unique and supernatural suffering of someone that trusts that they are carried in the arms of their father. Surely that is a son or daughter of God.
Everyone watching this, then we are given this reaction in verse 48. And this is all the crowds that assembled for this spectacle, when they had saw what had taken place, returned home, beating their breasts. And all his acquaintances and the women who had followed him from Galilee stood at a distance watching these things.” If you read through the entire Gospel of Luke, the last time that you see somebody beating their chest, do you know when that is? back in the story of the tax collector and the Pharisee. The tax collector was beating his breast, saying, have mercy on me, a sinner.
It was a sign in that time of repentance and of confession and of sorrow. And this was a common, this seemed to be a common reaction, that the man who had breathed his last here did not deserve what he received. This was a mourning by those who were realizing something. This is a morning to show that they’ve come to mock. They participated in this, and now they’re realizing exactly what had happened. I find it interesting, too, that in the text it mentions the women. In the end, there are the women watching these things, as most of the disciples are cowering in their hiding places. How brave Peter said that he was. Now, where is he?
No, it’ll be women like Joanna and the Marys at the tomb. Magdalene, Coppice, and Salome. The women will be standing there ready to pick up the pieces, to do the work after everyone goes home, the collecting of the body. In fact, these were the coroners, watching and waiting until everything was done. And as the passage ends, there’s a sense of finality. He breathed his last. The people went home. The coroners are there. He is really and truly dead. These are the women that are there when the man ran away.
It almost looks like the modern American church, doesn’t it? When you see the numbers, it’s something like 60-40 of women in the church or 70-30 today. It seems the case there with only John being told to be present there. And even though these women are there, they don’t seem to fully get it. They think this is the end. They think that they are just as surprised as anyone on Sunday morning.
In fact, that there is another chapter to the life of Christ after chapter 23 and 24 that is going to tell the resurrection of Christ. When you look at this passage, it almost seems something of a downer to end at verse 49, but there’s so much to glean from this passage. I’d just like to conclude with three things that I think we should take away from this passage. Three things that we should take away first. what we see here in the trust in the Father, even as Christ is going through the pains that are likened to hell.
There’s an old saying that’s attributed to Winston Churchill. He probably didn’t say it, but it’s a good saying still. The saying was, if you find yourself going through hell, keep going. There’s a sense in which when we find ourselves suffering, we don’t stop. We don’t wallow in it. Instead, when we find ourselves suffering in our lives, we keep calling out to our father.
Christ began and ended his suffering with the father’s name on his lips. Isn’t it appropriate that when the disciples said, teach us to pray, teach us how it is that we are to speak to God in the midst of this suffering world, what were the first words out of his mouth? He says, pray like this, our father. We, our children, and our fathers know more than us. Like when they take us to doctors to get shots, when we have to practice and then to show up for soccer games, to trust in God as our father is to trust him, even lacking all the information, trusting his goodness and knowing that he is looking out for our good too, even in the midst of our suffering. The first thing we learn from this is to trust our father in between the beginning and end of suffering.
Secondly, something we should take away from this passage is to glean the innocent suffering of Christ as a witness to the world. Grace in suffering is one of the most powerful witnesses to the gospel that the church provides the world. Think about it. It was this innocent, this graceful suffering that the thief on the cross saw, that the centurion saw. Though they were pagans, they came to embrace the work of the suffering one because it was supernatural. in its origin. We learn here that grace and suffering is a powerful witness to the world. And thirdly, we see the proper response to the cross is to see our part in it.
The centurion realized he had killed an innocent man. The people who came for spectacle and mocking, and they came because they’d cried out, crucified, realized their part in the guilt And so they were beating their chests. They repented. They saw what they had done. When the apostles in the book of Acts will start preaching the good news, it begins with this Christ, you killed him. Repentance, confession of sin has to be the first step in the message of the cross.
Not everyone there literally had pounded the nails. But the only reason that Christ was on the cross was because of their varied and diverse sins. They may not have literally been Herod, who had just looked to Christ for entertainment when he got bored with him and sent him away, but they were like him in their sins. They may not have literally been like the Sanhedrin in their self-righteousness, but they had self-righteousness of their own. They were literally Pilate, all of them, saying that they were innocent while they were guilty, but they had done so up till that point.
It makes us ask the question, have we seen our parts in why Christ had to go to the cross? Is your sin so bad in your theology that it would take the second person of the Trinity paying for them in order for you to be right with God? Do we see it as that bad when we cry out, have mercy on me, sinner? Only if you were there as a guilty one whose sin put Christ on the cross will you be there on Sunday. when Christ rose in resurrection. As Romans 6, 5 says, for if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall surely be united with him in a resurrection like his. But to be united to his death requires, as 1 Peter 2, 24 says, he himself bore our sins in his body on the tree. Makes us ask the question, were we there like the centurion realizing his innocence and our guilt? Were you there like the people beating their chest, confessing that their sin had put him there. And were you there to sing praise to the one who purposely and willingly laid down his life and had the power to pick it back up again, as well as our lives, as well as a result.
Let us pray. Father, in seeing the suffering of Christ, Lord, may we take him both as an example of how to suffer well, but also confess that his suffering was unique, that his suffering is what our sins deserved and he took our place. Lord, grant us faith. Grant us faith to have your name on our lips in the midst of suffering and grant us faith in the one who took our place, who suffered the curse of the law on our behalf. Lord, we pray that as we see how the righteous one suffered, that would cause us to sing, that would cause us to love and to be changed people as a result, that we would go away beating our chests, but then soon to be rejoicing at the risen Lord. And so this we pray in Jesus name. Amen. Our final hymn then together would be confessing that in fact, what we witnessed in the death of Christ is him paying all of it. Number 276 in your hymnals.
The sermon text provided above is derived from the sermon audio recording making use of generative tools. It has not been manually edited. While transcription tools have a high degree of accuracy, the output may include generative textual, punctuation, and/or formatting errors.