by Beth Moore
Have you ever seen someone you consider to be a rock in unabashed anguish, virtually inconsolable, and overwhelmed with sorrow? If so, think how you felt. Then multiply that feeling by the total dependency on Jesus these men had learned.
I believe the disciples experienced many emotions as they watched their Strong Tower fall to His knees with His face to the ground. Luke 22:45 tells us that the three disciples finally fell asleep from the exhaustion of their own sorrow.
The disciples may not have realized that Jesus was no less God that moment than He was on the Mount of Transfiguration or when He raised the dead. Their Rock and their Strong Tower was not falling apart. He was falling on His knees. That takes strength. I always wonder how the mountain kept from splitting in two when the weight of the Word made flesh fell with knees upon it. Oh, how creation must have groaned!
There in the garden, the Son of God bore His private cross. Very soon He would bear it publicly, but when He rose from knees bruised with anguish, His face, dusted with earth, was set like flint. I want you to see one last point that I find critical to our understanding about the heart of God. Christ knew what He was going to have to do when He came to earth. Remember? He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. He was as good as dead from the beginning. Jesus lived for one purpose alone: to do the will of His Father. Yet He still felt.
Jesus is the precise image of His Father, who also feels. God is holy. God is righteous. Our salvation necessitates a cross. Our poor decisions necessitate chastisement. The refusal of the lost to believe necessitates judgment. But God still feels. Beloved, God still feels.
And so will we. Sometimes obeying God in a matter will be the hardest thing we've ever done in our lives. We are not wrong to feel. We are wrong to disobey. Hash it out with God. Ask for the cup to be removed. But resolve to do His will. No matter what. Glory is at stake. That's why He drew the three close enough to see. To teach them to pray ... not sleep ... in their anguish. This time they slept. They had little power to do otherwise. But a time would come when each would rise from his own Gethsemane and bear his cross.
Part 3
DEFINING
MOMENTS
Are you keeping up with our pace? Catching up with the youngest disciple is rather like catching up with any adolescent boy. He practically has us out of breath. At least we're not likely to get bored! The Word of God is alive, and God wants to ignite a fresh passion in us through perhaps the most familiar accounts in the life of Christ.
In the latter half of our study, we'll consider many truths that are far less familiar to us, but we can only get there by way of the cross. Before this study I had never looked at the events surrounding the cross and glorious resurrection over the shoulder of one of the disciples. It profoundly affected me. I hope you gain an entirely new perspective as well. Ask God to free you from any bondage that familiarity can breed, then completely immerse yourself in every scene.
Chapter 11
STANDING NEARBY
When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby he said to his mother, `Dear woman, here is your son, "and to the disciple, Were is your mother." (John 19:26-27)
Have you ever looked around you at circumstances you could never have imagined experiencing and thought, How did we get here? I remember feeling that way when I sat with Keith's family in the ICU waiting room while his beautiful twenty-three-year-old sister lay dying with an aneurysm. Just a few nights earlier we all had been laughing until our sides split. Just that morning Keith, Amanda (a toddler at the time), and I had been to church and shared a pizza for lunch. Suddenly in a string of events that happened with staggering velocity, our entire lives changed. No Broadway stage could have captured the raw, gaping emotions of real-life drama. Those times when you want to scream, "No! This isn't really happening! This can't be happening!" Days that you desperately wish you could drop off the calendar so you can just go back to life as it was.
I believe that such experiences give us some concept of the way John must have felt in the scene depicted by John 19:17-27. Jesus hung on the cross. Pilate placed a sign over Jesus' head. The soldiers gambled for His clothing.
Can you imagine how John's head must have been spinning? Don't you know he wished someone would wake him up from his nightmare? Then came a profoundly tender and emotional interchange between Jesus, John, and Mary. Jesus assigned John to care for Mary, but take care that you don't tag it a warm and fuzzy moment and try to snuggle up to it. The events John observed were horrific. We can only appreciate the depth of the tenderness against the backdrop of the horror. Most of us have studied the cross of Christ many times, but let's attempt to capture it from the exact angle where the apostle John's sandals flattened the dirt.
Let's rewind the events to place John accurately in the scenes. We know without a doubt that John was an eyewitness to the arrest.
Mentally recapture what we studied in our previous chapter as John, James, and Peter most closely witnessed Christ's agony in the garden of Gethsemane. Their witness dissolved into sorrow, then sleep. They were awakened by the voice of their Leader saying, 'Are you still sleeping and resting? Look, the hour is near, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us go! Here comes my betrayer!" (Matt. 26:45-46).
You've been jolted from sleep. Like me, you've probably also fallen asleep at a time when you should have been awake and alert. Imagine John trying to shake off the numbing weariness and feeling guilty that he hadn't stayed awake. Then picture his young face as he panned the mountainside and saw an entire detachment of soldiers ascend the hill carrying torches, lanterns, and weapons.
To me one of the most amazing moments in the final hours of Christ's life happened when He answered the soldiers' demand for Jesus of Nazareth by saying, "I am he," and the crowd drew back and fell to the ground. In the most literal rendering of His response, the word he doesn't appear in the original Greek. I believe they experienced a compulsory buckling of the knees because the Son of God announced the name by which God said He'd be remembered throughout all generations: "I Am!" (Exod. 3:14). John himself recorded this scene. You can bet he knew it by heart. John also saw a sword take the ear off the high priest's servant and was the only Gospel writer who divulged Peter as the swordsman.
We are told another important detail in John 18:15: "Simon Peter was following Jesus, and so was another disciple. Now that disciple was known to the high priest, and entered with Jesus into the court of the high priest" (NASB). Many scholars believe the description of another disciple refers to John.
If we're accurate in what seems an obvious assumption, while several of the disciples followed from a distance, John appeared to have been the closest eyewitness of the Twelve as the final hours unfolded. Whether or not he saw the trial before Pilate, he very likely stood close enough to hear.
Camp on 19:16. "Finally Pilate handed him over to them to be crucified." Finally??? Hadn't these events happened so quickly that John's mind could hardly fathom what he had seen? Hadn't they just accompanied Christ down the Mount of Olives a few days earlier as the masses waved palm branches and proclaimed Jesus as Messiah? Obviously the wording means that Pilate finally handed Christ over after they had tossed Him back and forth from court to court like a tennis ball in a fixed match. I'd like to interject, however, an additional kind of finally. Read each Scripture below and meditate on the word finally after each.
I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel. (Gen. 3:15) FINALLY.
I will make you into a great nation
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you. (Gen. 12:2-3) FINALLY.
Go down and bring Aaron up with you. But
the priests and the people must not force their way through to come up to the LORD, or he will break out against them. (Exod. 19:24) FINALLY.
King Solomon and the entire assembly of Israel that had gathered about him were before the ark, sacrificing so many sheep and cattle that they could not be recorded or counted. (2 Chron. 5:6) FINALLY.
Then came the day of Unleavened Bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. (Luke 22:7) FINALLY.
Finally a public road was about to be paved from the Holy Place, through the Holy of Holies, out into the courts of the Jewish men, the Jewish women, and finally to the courts of the Gentiles-right up to your door and mine. Finally a perfect, unblemished Lamb would be sacrificed to fulfill the righteous requirements of the temple's blazing altar. Finally something would happen to reconcile believing man to God once and for all. After thousands of years of man's folly, someone in a cloak of flesh did it right. Finally! Glory to God!
Retrospect and the recorded Word make us much smarter than the disciples had the privilege of being several thousand years ago. In the immediacy of the moment reflected in John 19:16, finally simply meant that Pilate made a definitive decision after a long, excruciating night; but to us it represents the best of good news. We don't know how distant John was forced to remain, but can you imagine the verdict filtering through the ranks? "Jesus is going to be crucified!" "The verdict is in: crucifixion!"
Mind you, the verdict was illegal. But it was certainly lethal. They all knew too well what crucifixion entailed. It was the worst nightmare of anyone alive in that part of the world. John could not possibly have assimilated the information calmly. Imagine the hot knife of shock searing through his stomach. Try to imagine what kinds of things must have gone through his mind as he heard the verdict.
After beating Jesus within inches of His life, they held His hands and feet against the crude wood and fastened Him there with a hammer and three long nails. Whether or not John saw the pounding of the hammer, heaven could hear the pounding of his heart. At a time when any thinking man would want to run for his life, the youngest of all the disciples stayed.
Near the cross. That's what the Gospel of John says. Above the young man hung his world. His hero. His attachment. His future. His leader. Love of his life. Three years earlier he had been minding his own business trying to gain his daddy's approval with a boat and a net. He hadn't asked for Jesus. Jesus had asked for him. And here he stood. Isaiah's startling prophecy tells us that by the time the foes of Jesus had finished with Him, His appearance was disfigured beyond that of any man, and His form marred beyond human likeness (Isa. 52:14).
"When Jesus therefore saw his mother and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son!" (John 19:26 KJV). Don't take it lightly. Hear it. Not the way the passion plays do it. Hear the real thing. Hear a voice erupting from labored outburst as Jesus tried to lift Himself up and draw breath to speak. Every word He said from the cross is critical by virtue of the fact that Jesus' condition made speaking harder than dying. Chronic pain is jealous like few other things. It doesn't like to share. If a man is in pain, he can hardly think of anything else, and yet Jesus did. I think perhaps because the pain of His heart, if at all possible, exceeded the pain of His shredded frame. The look of His mother's face. Her horror. Her suffering.
Jesus gazed straight upon the young face of the one standing nearby. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, this face had nestled against His chest in innocent affection. John, like our Melissa, was the baby of the family ... and he knew it. He no doubt reveled in its privilege. If anyone had an excuse to run from the cross, perhaps it was John, and yet he didn't.
Jesus saw the disciple whom He loved standing nearby. I believe indescribable love and compassion hemorrhaged from His heart. "Then saith he to the disciple, Behold thy mother! And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home" (19:27 KJV).
If the cross is about anything, it is about reconciliation. "For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility" (Eph. 2:14). The unbelief of Christ's brothers had raised a wall of hostility between them and His disciples. As Christ gazed upon His beloved mother and His beloved disciple, He saw His own two worlds desperately in need of reconciliation and a woman who no doubt was torn between the two. Simeon's prophecy to Mary was fulfilled before Jesus' very eyes: "A sword will pierce even your own soul" (Luke 2:35 NASB). How like Jesus to start stitching a heart back together even as the knife was tearing it apart. One day soon His family and His disciples would be united, but the firstfruit of that harvest waved beneath the cross of Christ. "From that time on, this disciple took her into his home."
How perfectly appropriate! Right at the foot of the cross we're about to discover the very quality that set the apostle John apart from all the rest. I am a huge fan of the apostle Peter and can relate to him far more readily than John, but the inspired words the Holy Spirit later entrusted to the Son of Thunder suggest a profound uniqueness. I am reminded of an Old Testament saint about whom God said, "But my servant Caleb has a different spirit and follows me wholeheartedly." God didn't mean a different Holy Spirit. All we who are redeemed have the same Holy Spirit. God referred to something wonderful about Caleb's own human spirit that made him unique. I believe John had something similar. These were fallible men prone to the dictates of their own flesh just like the rest of us, but they had something in them that was almost incomparable when overtaken by the Holy Spirit. They were simply different.
You and I have arrived at a red-letter moment on which much of the remainder of our journey hinges. I am convinced we've stumbled on the thing that set John apart and made him the fertile soil into which God could sow the seeds of such a Gospel ... such epistles ... and such a revelation. John remained nearby Jesus whether his leader was on the Mount of Transfiguration or in the deep of Gethsemane's suffering. John leaned affectionately upon Him during the feast but also followed Him into the courts for the trials. John clung to Jesus when He raised the dead, and he clung to Jesus when He became the dead.
John was found nearby when human reasoning implied his faithful Leader's mission had failed. He could not have comprehended that the plan of the ages was going perfectly. Yet he remained. He who looked upon a face that had shone like the sun (Matt. 17:2) was willing to look upon a face bloody and spit upon. He stayed nearby during both Christ's brightest and darkest hours. The young disciple knew Jesus in the extremities. John was willing to look when others would have covered their eyes, and he beheld Him. How can we behold what we are unwilling to see?
We cannot claim to know anyone intimately whom we've not known in the intensity of both agony and elation. Anyone with eyes willing to truly behold Jesus will at times be confused and shocked by what he sees. You see, if we're willing to be taken to the extremes of His glory where intimate knowledge is gained, we will undoubtedly see things of Him we cannot explain and that sometimes disturb.
Then comes the question: Will we walk away from Jesus when from human understanding He looks weak and defeated? Do you know what I mean by that question?
What do we do when we can't explain what Jesus is doing?
Will we remain nearby when He hasn't stopped a tragedy?
When based on earthly evidence, human reasoning is left to one of two harrowing conclusions: He is either mean or weak. Think, beloved, about what I'm saying. Will we cling when our human reasoning implies evil has defeated Him? Or that evil seems to be found in Him? Will we stand by faith when human logic says to run?
That's what will make us different.
Chapter 12
A RACE TO THE TOMB
So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. (John 20:3-4)
After this, Jesus, knowing that all things had already been accomplished, to fulfill the Scripture, said, `I am thirsty.' . . . Therefore when Je
sus had received the sour wine, He said, `It is finished!' And He bowed His head, and gave up His spirit" (John 19:28, 30 NASB).
Sometimes violent circumstances shake the earth beneath our feet. We feel as if a canyon has suddenly appeared and we've been hurled into it. Our emotions swing wildly, and we think we'll be torn in two. Those like Mary and John who loved Jesus most must have felt such a dichotomy of emotions at the finality of His death. They must have almost shut down like a breaker on an overloaded circuit. Reflecting on the events of the previous three years for John and thirty-three years for Mary, hear the echo of those words again: "It is finished." Imagine the feelings they must have experienced.
Watching someone suffer violent pain causes most loved ones to feel relief when it ends, even if death bid it cease. Then true to our self-destructive, self-condemning natures, relief often gives way to guilt. To add to the heap, the finality of the death ushers in feelings of hopelessness. Why? Because humanity has bone-deep indoctrination in the following statement: Where there is life, there is hope.
Not in God's strange economy. That day of all days, where there was death, there was hope. What mind could have fathomed it? And strangely, even now for those of us in Christ, our greatest hope is in what lies beyond our deaths. We stand on the edge of our cliff-like emotions looking into the deep cavern of our grief, and we're sure that the jump will kill us. For those of us who entrust our feeble selves to our faithful Creator, in ways I can neither explain nor describe, it doesn't. In Jesus, when death of some kind comes and we are willing to take it to the cross, remain nearby, and suffer its grief, we will also experience the resurrection.
We say, "But part of me has died with it." And indeed it has. Hear the words of Christ echo from the grave: "I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds" (John 12:24). As a child bearing the name of Christ, if a part of you has died, in time it was meant to produce many seeds. Has it? Have we lived long enough and cooperated thoroughly enough to see tender shoots come forth from the barren ground? Oh, Beloved, don't give up!