Encounters with Jesus: Three last opportunities

Gospels

We’ve been looking at encounters with Jesus over this period of Lent. We started with the Widow of Nain whose dead son Jesus raised to life. We followed with John’s disciples who came to Jesus asking if he was the Messiah. Then came the paralytic whose four friends carried him to Jesus; Simon the Pharisee and the sinful woman who anointed Jesus’ feet with ointment; Mary and Martha; Peter walking on water. These are just a few of the many encounters people had with Jesus. As we are coming to a close in this series, I asked myself who were the last people to encounter Jesus before he was crucified. Who were the people who had contact with Jesus the night he was arrested and the day he was crucified? There were the chief priest and the selected members of the Sanhedrin he gathered in the middle of the night, Pilate and Herod, the soldiers who escorted Jesus and who mocked and abused Jesus, Simon who carried the cross, the centurion who oversaw the execution, and the thieves on either side of Jesus.

From these I picked three to talk about this morning. The first is:

Pilate – the missed opportunity.

Matthew 27:11–26
11 Now Jesus stood before the governor, and the governor asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus said, “You have said so.” 12 But when he was accused by the chief priests and elders, he gave no answer. 13 Then Pilate said to him, “Do you not hear how many things they testify against you?” 14 But he gave him no answer, not even to a single charge, so that the governor was greatly amazed.
15 Now at the feast the governor was accustomed to release for the crowd any one prisoner whom they wanted. 16 And they had then a notorious prisoner called Barabbas. 17 So when they had gathered, Pilate said to them, “Whom do you want me to release for you: Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?” 18 For he knew that it was out of envy that they had delivered him up. 19 Besides, while he was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent word to him, “Have nothing to do with that righteous man, for I have suffered much because of him today in a dream.” 20 Now the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus. 21 The governor again said to them, “Which of the two do you want me to release for you?” And they said, “Barabbas.” 22 Pilate said to them, “Then what shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?” They all said, “Let him be crucified!” 23 And he said, “Why, what evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Let him be crucified!”
24 So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.” 25 And all the people answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!” 26 Then he released for them Barabbas, and having scourged Jesus, delivered him to be crucified.

Let me read from Frederick Buechner’s description of Pilate in his book, Peculiar Treasures.

As the Roman governor, Pilate had the last word. He could have saved Jesus, if he’d wanted to, and all indications are that for various reasons that’s what he’s like to have done.

In the first place, after personally interrogating him, he decided that no wrong had been done and said so. “I find no crime in this man,” he told the chief priests. Period (Luke 24:4). Maybe the man had committed some religious faux pas in their eyes, but the religion of the Jews was nothing to him, and he couldn’t have cared less. In fact, as a sophisticated Roman, religion in general was not his cup of tea, and he’d been quite frank about it to Jesus himself during their interview. When Jesus told him he’d come to bear witness to the truth, Pilate’s reply was “What is truth?” (John 18:38). Truth was for people who had time to worry about truth. Pilate was a busy man. In the second place, on the basis of a troubling dream she’d had, Pilate’s wife begged him “to have nothing to do with that righteous man” (Matthew 27:19), and, sophisticated or not sophisticated, that gave him pause. A woman’s intuition was not something you sneezed at, especially if you happened to be married to her. In the third place, his main job as a colonial administrator was to keep peace in the colonies at any price, and the last thing he wanted to do was to stir up a hornet’s nest by making a martyr out of some local hero.

Nevertheless, when it became clear that he would stir up an even nastier hornet’s nest by setting the man free, and when, in addition to that, the Jews pointed out that no true friend of Caesar’s would ever be soft on a man who had set himself up as a king to rival Caesar, Pilate prudently gave in to the pressures and said to go ahead and crucify him if that’s what they had their hearts set on.

To make it perfectly clear that he wanted no part in the dirty business, however, he said, “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” and as a dramatic gesture that not even the dullest colonial clod among them could fail to understand, stepped out in front of the crowd and went through a ritual hand-washing in a basin of water he’d had them fill especially for that purpose (Matthew 27:24). And in a sense he was right. Insofar as he’d done all he reasonably could to save the man – even offering to let them crucify Barabbas instead if it was just a show they were after – he was, in a manner of speaking, innocent. The crucifixion took place against his advice and better judgment.

In this connection, you can’t help thinking about that other famous hand-washer, Lady Macbeth. Unlike Pilate, Lady Macbeth had committed murder herself, and what she kept trying to wash away in her sleep, long after her hands themselves were clean as a whistle, was her tormenting sense of guilt over the terrible thing she had done. She never succeeded, of course, but God is merciful, and one can hope that in the long run he did the job for her.

Pilate’s case is different and worse. For him, it was not so much the terrible thing he’d done as the wonderful thing he’d proved incapable of doing. He could have stuck to his guns and resisted the pressure and told the chief priests to go to Hell, where they were obviously heading anyway. He could have spared the man’s life. Or if that is asking to much, he could have spared him at least the scourging and catcalls and the appalling way he died. Or if that is still asking too much, he could have spoken some word of comfort when there was nobody else in the world with either the chance or the courage to speak it. He could have shaken his hand. He could have said goodbye. He could have made some two-bit gesture which, even though it would have made no ultimate difference, to him would have made all the difference.

But he didn’t do it, he didn’t do it, and on that basis alone you can almost believe the sad old legend is true that again and again his body rises to the surface of a mountain lake and goes through the motion of washing its hands as he tries to cleanse himself not of something he’d done, for which God could forgive him, but of something he might have done but hadn’t, for which he could never forgive himself.

Simeon Niger – the accidental convert

Mark 15:16–22
And the soldiers led him away inside the palace (that is, the governor’s headquarters), and they called together the whole battalion. 17 And they clothed him in a purple cloak, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on him. 18 And they began to salute him, “Hail, King of the Jews!” 19 And they were striking his head with a reed and spitting on him and kneeling down in homage to him. 20 And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him. And they led him out to crucify him.
21 And they compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross.

Let me read from Paul a Novel by Walter Wangerin.

(Paul is in Antioch where there was a man named Simeon Niger, identified with the Simon who carried the cross of Jesus to Golgotha. Barnabas narrates the scene.)

Simeon said: “Brother Saul asks about the tree. And what of the tree? Saul says to me, and I say, What tree do you mean? And our brother says, The tree on which they hanged the Lord. The tree of cursing. What do you know of the tree?

Simeon paused, looking in our direction.

The man has midnight eyes. Rufus his son is reddish, but Simeon Niger is African, as black as the name we call him by. It’s a wonderful puzzle, isn’t it? Well, and here’s the answer: The mother of Rufus and Alexander – the wife of her husband Simeon – is a pale Jew from Bethany. The milk of her face milked the faces of her children, and a drop of the blood of the ruddy King David must have dribbled through her into baby Rufus.

Simeon was gazing at Saul, who nodded acknowledgment: Yes, he had asked about the tree – some years ago, in fact, but this is how Simeon always began the story when Saul was present. He thought of Saul as a son.

“Someone must have told our brother,” Simeon said, “that I am the one who carried that tree, who carried a limb of it out of the city to Golgotha.

“I wish it had been my wisdom, my will, my choice,” Simeon said. “I wish I had known enough and loved enough to beg to suffer the weight of that tree. But I knew nothing, and I did not choose.

“Let me tell you the depth of my ignorance: When I was chosen, I thought it was a Roman that had chosen me.

“My sons and I were in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. We had purchased the lamb. We were taking it to the Temple for slaughter and the butchering. We had just entered the city southward, through the Garden Gate. We were pushing through crowds of people when a Roman soldier grabbed my shoulder and said, Here! Take the beam. Carry the criminal’s beam!

“Patibulum is what he called it in Latin. The crosspiece of a cross, the beam from which to hang a man. The greatest limb of the tree.

“I looked and saw the criminal lying on the ground. The crowd had backed away from him. He lay in an island of emptiness. His back and shoulders had been ripped to ribbons, a thickish, glistening blood congealing. Of course he couldn’t carry the rough wood there. It lay beside him.

“But I lifted the lamb in my arms and said, I’m sorry sir. My sons and I are going to the Temple –

“The soldier snatched the lamb and tossed it into the crowd. We lost it. The lamb was gone. He yanked me forward and growled, Barbarian! You got no pity for the dying? He put his hands under the arms of the criminal and raised him to his feet.

“I had no choice.

“I bent beneath the wood. Rufus and Alexander, terrified, dashed out of Jerusalem, home to Bethany. I followed the soldiers and bleeding man. Then I noticed that there were women all around me wailing and groaning and crying. Why, it was a funeral procession!

“Soon the dead man stopped and turned. Everyone stopped. He said to me – I thought he was speaking to me – Don’t weep for yourselves and your children – for Rufus? For Alexander? They were just boys! The dying man said, The days are coming when people will say, Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore, the breasts that never gave suck! And everyone will cry to the mountains, Fall on us! And to the hills, Cover us!

“The dead man looked at me and sighed. As he turned away again he said, For if they do this when the wood is green, what will they do when the wood is dry?

“At Golgotha the soldier commanded me to drop the beam.

“You can go, he said. But I didn’t go.

“I watched them lay the poor man down on the wood and stretch his arms from end to end. I watched them drive the spikes through his flesh and bone into the wood. He didn’t cry out. He didn’t complain. He was not unconscious. His eyes were open. He knew everything, everything that was happening to him, everything, but he didn’t scream, he didn’t curse, and they put ropes around the patibulum that I had carried, then pulled it up the front of a tall, strong post in the ground. They dropped it on a firm peg at the top. Nailed to that crosspiece his body went swinging up from me, hanging from the arms, and his whole body snapped when the beam was dropped into place, and all the skin shivered with the pain, the teeth began to chatter with the pain, and that was the tree, brother Saul. I watched a man hang wide awake and aware on the Tree of Cursing, but even then he didn’t cry out, and then they were driving a new spike through his feet, and while they were doing that I heard the man say, Father, forgive them. He said, Forgive them, for they know not what they do, and now I was shivering too, and next I learned the name of the man, because a soldier set a ladder at the back of the cross and climbed up to the top of it, and there he nailed a shingle with words on it, and I read the words in Aramaic, and they said, JESUS OF NAZARETH, KING OF THE JEWS, so then his name was JESUS OF NAZARETH, yes, yes: JESUS was his name, and some of the women that had been crying in his funeral procession were still there, standing near me, watching, too, and JESUS looked down to one of them, and I heard him say, Woman, behold your son, so then that’s what she was doing, looking up at the man on the cross and crying, and that must have been her son, but her knees began to buckle and another man caught her and held her tenderly, and JESUS said to that man, Behold your mother, and they were both crying, and now so was I, I was crying too, so now I could not leave, how could I leave? – I stayed even when a storm bore down on the earth and darkened it, I stayed when everyone else had left except the women and the soldier in charge, I stayed until he died, I was there when he died, and this is the astounding nature of his dying, that finally he did cry out, he threw back his head and forced his body forward, he drove his chest away from the cross like Winged Victory, and the veins in his neck stood out, and when he uttered his voice under the black firmament, it was a phõné megalè that he made, a soldier’s cry of triumph!

“He died in triumph.

“And the first one to teach me the meaning of these things was that Roman soldier himself, for he gazed at the dead man, at that poor broken figure on the tree, and whispered, This man really was the Son of God.

“But my second teacher was Simon Peter, because from him I heard the impossible thing that happened next and I knew why I had been walking around for weeks after that death without a heart in my breast, and I learned where my heart had gone: It was with JESUS OF NAZARETH, KING OF THE JEWS.

“On Pentecost Simon Peter talked straight to me and in my language while I stood in the middle of another crowd. He said, This Jesus whom you crucified, and that was me, because I had carried the wood that cursed him. Simon Peter said, This Jesus whom you crucified by the hands of outlaws, God raised up!

“That’s the thing that happened next, and I hadn’t known about it: Jesus was raised from the dead! The curse was overcome. The tree was nothing any more. Simon Peter said to me, Repent, and for the forgiveness of your sins be baptized in the name of Jesus, whom God has made both Lord and Christ.

“And when I was baptized, and when I came up out of the water, and when the Holy Spirit moved inside of me, I, Simeon, a man from Cyrene, realized for the first time who had chosen me. Brother Saul, I did not choose. I had been chosen. But it was no Roman who chose me to carry the tree. It was Jesus! Jesus had chosen me. Jesus picked me. Jesus raised me and made me his own, and when I came up out of the water, I shouted my own cry of triumph in the voice of the shout of Jesus: I shouted, Jesus! At the top of my lungs, I cried, Jesus! Jesus! Lord of my life, I belong to you!”

Thief on the cross – the last convert

Luke 23:39–43
One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” 40 But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42 And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” 43 And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Who was this man on the cross next to Jesus? The Bible tells us nothing about him except that he was a robber. We know he was not a Roman citizen. Roman citizens were not crucified, they were beheaded. We see this in the execution of Paul and Peter during the persecution of Nero. Peter, not a Roman citizen, was crucified. Paul, a Roman citizen, was beheaded.

Crucifixion was used to send a message. It was a humiliating and torturous way to die and the bodies were left on the cross for a long time to make sure the message was sent.

An ordinary thief would not be crucified. In fact the Greek word used in Luke means lawbreaker. Perhaps he had stolen things. Perhaps he had murdered. Perhaps he had acted against a Roman citizen. Whatever this man had done was viewed by the Romans as bad enough that he had to be made an example of.

In the beginning, it seems that both criminals, one on either side of Jesus, joined in the mocking of Jesus. This seems a bit strange to me. I would think that these three men, being crucified side-by-side would form some sort of a bond. But it is indicative of the rough life they lived that they joined the Romans in mocking Jesus.

As time went on and the criminals had the opportunity to observe Jesus, they saw something in him that was different. He did not swear. He did not curse. They knew better than anyone else the pain he was experiencing and yet he showed compassion for his mother. He prayed that his Father in heaven would forgive those who were crucifying him. One thief continued to mock Jesus but the second heard the words of Jesus, saw the actions of Jesus, saw who Jesus was and said,  “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

And [Jesus] said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

The last convert of this chapter of Jesus’ life.

We can learn from the stories of these three men. From the story of Pilate we learn that it is possible to be so close to salvation and still miss the opportunity. Pilate and Herod had been at odds with each other but their encounters with Jesus drew them together and after Jesus died they became friends. I don’t know if Pilate was aware of how close he had been, but certainly, after he died, the moment of his awareness of what he had done and what he had not done must have been horrible. He had been so close and yet had let the opportunity pass him by.

If you have heard of Jesus and even had Christians beat you over the head with your need to give your life to Jesus, you need to be aware of how close you are to the opportunity of a lifetime. Don’t let it pass you by. Don’t let your life be filled with regrets.

Simeon’s encounter with Jesus was an accidental encounter. He just happened to be walking by and the Roman soldier just happened to pick him and make him carry the cross. But with God there are no accidents. Simeon could have had the same experience as Pilate. He could have carried the cross and then hightailed it out of there when the Roman soldier released him. But he did not. He stayed. He watched. And Jesus took his heart. He belonged to Jesus before he really understood who Jesus was. Accidental convert? There is no such person. We are all chosen. We are all sought after. We are all accepted and welcomed into his eternal kingdom.

The criminal on the cross was the last to become a follower of Jesus before Jesus died. What had he done to deserve this death? Whatever it was, it was bad enough that he knew he deserved the punishment and what we learn from him is that it is never too late to surrender to Jesus. What we have done is not an obstacle. No matter how terribly we feel about what we have done; no matter how angry people are with us for what we have done, Jesus loves us enough that he willingly died for us. Our sinful actions are not an obstacle in coming to Jesus. What matters is how God views us and with God there is not an end to another chance to repent and come to Jesus.

These were three of the last encounters Jesus had with people before he died. Next week, on Easter Sunday, we will look at three of the first people to hear the good news from the resurrected Jesus.

But today, this is your opportunity to hear and respond to the good news of Jesus. In our singing, in our praise to God, in the reading of the Scriptures and in this message I hope you have heard the truth, the good news of Jesus.

I hope and pray that you are at a point that you are willing to surrender to Jesus. You may never have prayed to surrender your life to Jesus or you may have prayed this many times. You may have backtracked or you may be pressing on. None of this matters now. What matters now is that wherever you are in your journey, you surrender to Jesus who loves you so wonderfully and so completely.