mattbraunlin
Member
No Matter What
Not even on the cross could Jesus escape mockery and harassment.Those passing by were hurling abuse at Him, wagging their heads, and saying, “Ha! You who are going to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save Yourself, and come down from the cross!” In the same way the chief priests also, along with the scribes, were mocking Him among themselves and saying, “He saved others; He cannot save Himself. Let this Christ, the King of Israel, now come down from the cross, so that we may see and believe!” Those who were crucified with Him were also insulting Him.
Mark 15:29-32
This sort of concentrated hatred is so destructive, so devastating to the souls at which it is aimed. As both the mocker and the mocked, I know this all too well.
But the mockery we read here is Satan's culinary masterpiece. His final desperate weapon against his ultimate defeat and disgrace which Jesus had almost finished.
This particular mockery was specifically designed to tempt Jesus to the fullest power Satan had. His attempt to win Jesus over with sweet-talk and material benefits in Matthew chapter 4 had failed miserably. Now, at the absolute climax of human history, Satan appealed to the only thing he could.
Through these sad and contemptible hecklers, Satan told Jesus one simple thing: Come down from the cross.
This adds a truly epic element to the storytelling of the Gospels. Just as Satan originally confronted Jesus with three temptations (food, testing God and power), I can now see three temptations involved here. Three appeals to Jesus' human nature to entice him to call the whole thing off.
Firstly, Satan appeals to Jesus' ego. He is telling Jesus, 'what fools you would make of these mockers if you do exactly what they are telling you to do! Come down from the cross, and you can smirk at your enemies as their jaws hit the floor!'
I would have done it. This sort of desire for petty vengeance runs deep in the human heart. There is nothing more gratifying to a human ego than to prove a point to your enemies.
How blessed we are that Jesus did not have an ego! He had no desire to make fools of the men who were mocking him; he loved those men. It was precisely for the hopeless darkness in their hearts that He was hanging on the cross.
The second temptation is more subtle and clever. And make no mistake: Satan is subtle and clever. He appeals to Jesus' independent nature.
Miraculously coming down from the cross would certainly have had positive elements to it. It would have silenced the Pharisees, and the random passers by might even have repented and believed and spread the news. Maybe they would even have followed Him. And for the sake of the Gospels, read throughout history, it would have been riveting storytelling. Much good could have come from Jesus coming down from the cross.
There is only one problem with this scenario: it falls infinitely short of the purpose for which God sent him. In coming down from the cross, Jesus would have condemned the entire world to an eternity of spiritual darkness. Prophecies would go unfulfilled, Satan's victory would be complete, and his mockery would echo through all of Creation forever.
A cataclysmic spiritual disaster would have occured had Jesus taken matters into his own hands and acted independently from God.
Finally, Satan was appealing to something very simple: Jesus' pain.
Brothers and sisters, there are no words. If you wrote the word 'agony' a trillion times in your own blood, it would be a pitiful representation of the nightmare Jesus experienced while hanging on that cross.
And I am not talking about what you see in The Passion of the Christ. That was nothing. I am talking about the blistering, scalding, abominable obscenity of your sins and mine, heaped on his shoulders and sending him into bottomless depths of suffering and despair. Quadrillions of eternal damnations, ravaging and consuming the only sinless being in human history until he literally became sin itself.
That is what Jesus had to endure so that we could be his friends, and that is what Jesus was tempted to escape that day.
And he didn't do it. He stayed on the cross. His infinite love overcame his infinite pain. Satan was humiliated, death was destroyed, and a victory beyond any human imagining was achieved.
Nothing could stop Jesus. God's only Son was determined to reconcile sinners like us with his Father, no matter what. And though we could never hope to reach his level, that must be the mindset of we who follow him. We must be bold, resilient and relentless. We must long to see sinners saved, no matter the risk, no matter the cost, no matter the mockery or enticement or even violence we may encounter. We must follow the path of a small-town Rabbi who would reveal himself as the perfect embodiment of all that is still good and true and strong and joyful in this world.
No matter what.
