Before Pilate (chap. 15), He only witnesses a good confession, a testimony
to the truth where the glory of God required it, and where this testimony
stood opposed to the power of the adversary. To all the rest He answers
nothing. He lets them go on; and the evangelist enters into no details. To
render this testimony was the last service and duty He had to perform. It
is rendered. The Jews make choice of the seditious murderer Barabbas; and
Pilate, hearkening to the voice of the multitude, won over by the chief
priests, delivers Jesus to be crucified. The Lord submits to the insults of
the soldiers, who mingle the pride and insolence of their class with the
hard-heartedness of the executioner whose function they performed. Sad
specimens of our nature! The Christ who came to save them was, for the
moment, under their power. He used His own power, not to save Himself, but
to deliver others from that of the enemy. At length they lead Him away to
Golgotha to crucify Him. There they offer Him a soporific mixture, which He
refuses; and they crucify Him with two thieves, one on His right hand and
the other on His left, thus accomplishing (for it was all they did or could
do) everything that was written concerning the Lord. It was now the Jews'
and the priests' hour; they had, alas for them! the desire of their heart.
And they make manifest, without knowing it, the glory and perfection of
Jesus. The temple could not rise again without being thus cast down; and,
as instruments, they established the fact which He had then announced.
Farther, He saved others and not Himself. These are the two parts of the
perfection of the death of Christ with reference to man.
But, whatever might be the thoughts of Christ and His sufferings with
regard to men (those dogs, those bulls of Bashan), the work which He had to
accomplish contained depths far beyond those outward things. Darkness
covered the earth-divine and sympathetic testimony of that which, with far
deeper gloom, covered the soul of Jesus, forsaken of God for sin, but thus
displaying incomparably more than at any other time, His absolute
perfection; while the darkness marked, in an external sign, His entire
separation from outward things, the whole work being between Him and God
alone, according to the perfectness of both. All passed between Him and His
God. Little understood by others, all is between Himself and God: and
crying again with a loud voice, He gives up the ghost. His service was
completed. What more had He to do in a world wherein He only lived to
accomplish the will of God? All was finished, and He necessarily departs. I
do not speak of physical necessity, for He still retained His strength;
but, morally rejected by the world, there was no longer room in it for His
mercy towards it: the will of God was by Himself entirely fulfilled. He had
drunk in His soul the cup of death and of judgment for sin. There was
nothing left Him but the act of dying; and He expires, obedient to the end,
in order to commence in another world (whether for His soul separate from
the body, or in glory) a life where evil could never enter, and where the
new man will be perfectly happy in the presence of God.
His service was completed. His obedience had its term in death-His
obedience, and therefore His life, as carried on in the midst of sinners.
What would a life have meant in which there was no more obedience to be
fulfilled? In dying now His obedience was perfected, and He dies. The way
into the holiest is now opened-the veil is rent from top to bottom. The
Gentile centurion confesses, in the death of Jesus, the Person of the Son
of God. Until then, the Messiah and Judaism went together. In His death
Judaism rejects Him, and He is the Saviour of the world. The veil no longer
conceals God. In this respect it was all Judaism could do. The
manifestation of perfect grace is there for the Gentile, who
acknowledged-because Jesus gave up His life with a cry that proved the
existence of so much strength-that the Prince of life, the Son of God, was
there. Pilate also is astonished that He is already dead. He only believes
it when certified of its truth by the centurion. As to faith-far from
grace, and even from human justice-he did not trouble himself at all on
that point.
The death of Jesus did not tear Him from the hearts of those feeble ones
who loved Him (who perhaps had not been in the conflict, but whom grace had
now brought out from their retreat): those pious women who had followed Him
and had often ministered to His wants, and Joseph, who, although touched in
conscience, had not followed Him, until now, strengthened at the last by
the testimony of the grace and perfection of Jesus (the integrity of the
counsellor finding in the circumstances, not an occasion of fear, but that
which induced him to declare himself)-these women and Joseph are alike
occupied about the body of Jesus. This tabernacle of the Son of God is not
left without those services which were due from man to Him who had just
quitted it. Moreover the providence of God, as well as His operation in
their hearts, had prepared for all this. The body of Jesus is laid in the
tomb, and they all wait for the end of the sabbath to perform their service
to it. The women had taken knowledge of the place.
