Matthew 27:11-34
The events from the time Jesus was arrested, those trials on Thursday and Friday before Caiaphas and Pilate, left his disciples crushed, scared, empty, and defeated. They had believed Jesus was the one that would liberate them from their bondage and enslavement to the Romans. The disciples had run away from Jesus when he was arrested. They went into hiding, hoping to escape with their lives. The hopes and dreams that the disciples had shared with Jesus now were lost. Their lives now were filled with fear and anxiety.
Most of us have experienced times when our lives looked bleak and empty because of events in our lives: loss of a great career when the company tells you that you are no longer needed, loss of a family member dying suddenly, the one that the family had looked to for guidance, help, and support, etc. I have counseled persons when the husband or wife tells their spouse that they want a divorce. I told one lady that she would recover and find joy again in her life after her husband divorced her and married one of her best friends. It is in times like these that we need assurance that the sun will rise again tomorrow as always.
As Jesus stood before Pilate he had been abandoned by his disciples.
“Now Jesus was standing before Pilot, the Roman governor. ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’ the governor asked him.
Jesus replied, ‘You have said it.’
But when the leading priests and the elders made their accusations against him, Jesus remained silent. ‘Don’t you hear all these charges they are bringing against you?’, Pilate demanded, but Jesus made no response to any of the charges, much to the governor’s surprise.
Now it was the governor’s custom each year during the Passover celebrations to release one prisoner to the crowd – anyone they wanted. This year there was a notorious prisoner, a man named Barabbas. As the crowds gathered before Pilate’s house that morning, he asked them, ‘Which one do you want me to release to you – Barabbas or Jesus who is called the Messiah?’
(He knew very well that religious leaders had arrested Jesus out of envy.)
Just then as Pilate was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent him this message, ‘Leave that innocent man alone. I suffered through a terrible nightmare about him last night.’
Meanwhile, the leading priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas to be released and for Jesus to be put to death. So the governor asked again, ‘Which of these two do you want me to release to you?’
The crowd shouted back, ‘Barabbas.’
Pilate responded, ‘Then what should I do with Jesus who is called the Messiah?’
They shouted back, ‘Crucify him!’
‘Why?’ Pilate demanded, ‘What crime has he committed?’
But the mob roared even louder, ‘Crucify him.’
Pilate saw that he wasn’t getting anywhere and that a riot was developing, so he sent for a bowl of water and washed his hands before the crows saying, ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood. The responsibility is yours!’
And all the people yelled, ‘We will take responsibility for his death, we and our children.’
So Pilate released Barabbas to them. He ordered Jesus flogged with a lead-tipped whip, then turned him over to the Roman soldiers to be crucified.’ “
This action by Pilate would send Jesus to his death on the cross. It would look like evil religious leaders, weak Roman political leaders and human mobs following wicked leaders had defeated God’s plan to form a community of faith that would restore God’s family. When Pilate turned down the opportunity to do the right thing and free Jesus — the hope died for his disciples, Mary, his mother, the rest of his family and friends.
How can we recover when evil overwhelms us? How can we believe that God’s plan can give us the assurance that His goodness defeats evil? It comes to us when we look beyond the death of Jesus on the cross. Faith is a gift from the living resurrected Christ to us. Faith in Christ gives us the assurance that wicked religious leaders, weak political leaders, and mobs fueled by anger and hate did not defeat God, our Maker, with their cross of death.
Fanny Crosby, blind from childhood, wrote the words to more than eight thousand hymns in her lifetime of ninety-five years. In the hymn “Blessed Assurance,” her personal relationship with Jesus Christ is revealed. On November 20, 1850, at a camp meeting, Fanny experienced a profound deepening of her faith.
“’I felt my very soul was flooded with celestial light. For the first time I realized that I had been trying to hold the world in one hand and the Lord in the other.’ From that moment on, she said, ‘the words were a song of the heart addressed to God. Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! What a foretaste of glory divine! Heir of salvation, purchase of God, born of His spirit, washed in his blood. This is my story, this is my song, praising my Savior all the day long. This is my story. This is my song. Praising my Savior all the day long.’”
By faith in the living, Jesus beyond the cross produced in the band of brothers the assurance that they served a living Christ. They took the message of God’s salvation plan to sinners and saw God’s transforming power change lives that produced the community of faith: the church. These disciples recovered this assurance by the cross. When you have made shambles out of your life, only by the way of the cross can you recover.
In Hebrews 10:21-22 we read:
“And since we have a great High Priest who rules over God’s house, let us go right into the presence of God with sincere hearts fully trusting him. For our guilty consciences have been sprinkled with Christ’s blood to make us clean and our bodies have been washed with pure water.”
Have you been trying to hold the world in one hand and the Lord in the other? In the year of the Lord 2021, we can have the assurance we need to face all the things that are happening in our lives. It is the assurance of a living Christ beyond His cross that gives us this beautiful gift called life.
