Just as Luke chapter 2 is a go-to passage around Christmastime, so the Gospels’ accounts of the days surrounding Jesus’ death and resurrection tend to get a little more exposure during Easter week. Pastors preach on the Last Supper, on Pilate’s trial of Jesus, on the crucifixion, and on the victorious rising of our Savior. But throughout Jesus’ final days there’s a thread that doesn’t get emphasized a lot yet is well worth our attention. It’s a thread that has always stuck out to me because it is such a blatant reminder of the vast chasm that exists between God’s perfection and my lack thereof.
You see, I’m the kind of person who scores really high marks
in the “C” (“Correct”) category of the “DISC” personality test. (For those who
know about DISC, I score equally high in S, so that’s fun! [insert “zany face”
emoji here]) Anyway, that basically means I care about being accurate, about
finding not just any answers but the correct answers, and about pushing
back against ignorance in myself and in others. Want to make me really
frustrated? Put me in a situation where I overhear someone asking a question I
know the answer to—or worse, answering a question incorrectly—but where I can’t
give the correct answer. It’s pretty much the worst. Especially if it
involves people acting on said incorrect information to their detriment, such
as missing the bus because they thought it ran at 1:30 instead of at 1:00.
Don’t get me wrong, this personality bent is the one God
gave me, so it’s not what makes me imperfect—my inborn sin nature does
that!—but because of that sinful nature, this aspect of my personality can be
twisted into producing ungodliness. It can feed my pride when I care more about
being correct than about anything else. It can make me defensive when others
think I’ve done something wrong (both when I haven’t and when I have). It can
make it difficult for me to display the fruit of the Spirit, particularly that
part called self-control.
And that’s where I see the perfection of Jesus shine so
brightly in the time surrounding His death. We get the first glimpse of His
self-control during this period when He is arrested in the garden of
Gethsemane. He rebuked one of His disciples (probably Peter) for cutting off a
man’s ear while trying to defend Him, and He asked the rhetorical question, “Do
you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more
than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:53, ESV). Knowing who Jesus was,
Peter knew the answer was that of course He could call on God to rescue Him
from what was about to happen. But Jesus made a point to tell Peter that such a
course of action was not the Plan. He had the self-control to submit to the
Father’s will rather than exercise His own power in self-defense.
Once Jesus was arrested and brought before the high priest
and the rest of the Jewish council, He was accused by false witnesses of
blasphemy. “And the high priest stood up and said, ‘Have you no answer to make?
What is it that these men testify against you?’ But Jesus remained silent” (Matthew
26:62-63a, ESV). Don’t breeze past that statement. He remained silent. He
wasn’t just being accused; He was being falsely accused. And it wasn’t an
accusation of some “small” sin like theft or lying; He was being accused of
blasphemy. God Himself was being accused of sacrilege against God.
Talk about something being incorrect! That would be like me
actively honoring my parents and then having people accuse me of not loving
them, of not even belonging to them, of hating them. You better believe I would
tell those accusers how wrong they were! And I’d probably point to all the
evidence that proved they were wrong and show how their conclusion was
completely illogical. But Jesus didn’t do that. And what makes His silence even
more astounding is that He would have been completely justified in speaking up.
He’s God for cryin’ out loud. He’s completely holy,
completely perfect. There was absolutely no basis for the accusations being
made against Him. It’s not like He was a guilty party trying to make excuses
and defend His behavior to those who saw through it. No, He was completely
innocent and was so far removed from the sin they were accusing Him of that His
life actually displayed the exact opposite of it. And yet He remained silent.
He did not defend Himself. What self-control!
But the high priest wasn’t having it. He finally insisted,
“I adjure you by the living God [oh the irony!], tell us if you are the Christ,
the Son of God” (Matthew 26:63b). After all these false accusations had been
made, now Jesus was presented with a wide-open door to set the record straight.
He was given an opportunity on a silver platter to provide everyone with the
correct information. And still, He didn’t defend Himself. Instead, He gave a
somewhat cryptic response that was at least enough for the high priest to
understand that Jesus was claiming to be something the priests obviously didn’t
believe Him to be. So then the priests joined the false witnesses in
accusing Him of blasphemy, and the spitting and beating began.
But the physical abuse wasn’t all Jesus had to endure. He was taunted, made fun of for claiming to be God. “And some slapped him, saying, ‘Prophecy to us, you Christ! Who is it that struck you?’” (Matthew 26:67b-68, ESV). I’m reading this, and everything in me wants Him to say, “Okay, you wanna know who struck me? I’ll tell you. It was Josiah the mason, son of Levi and Elizabeth, from the village just north of Jerusalem” and then go on to tell everything the guy ever did to show them just how wrong they were and prove to them that He was God. But He had more self-control than that.
Instead, He took all the beating and the taunting and then went through the whole thing again before Pilate, the Roman governor. More accusations. More beating. More taunting. And still He gave no defense and made His way to the hill where He would be crucified. As if He hadn’t suffered enough, the people continued to taunt Him while He hung on the cross: “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross” (Matthew 27:40b, ESV). He totally could have. He could have ended it all any moment He chose. And He would have been 100% justified in doing so. He was suffering the greatest injustice in the history of the universe—the only completely innocent, completely perfect Person being treated like the worst of criminals.
But instead of coming down from the cross, instead of
defending His Name, instead of obliterating the ignorance that was swirling around
him and leaving every person there without a shadow of a doubt Who He was, He
had the self-control to endure to the end so that the Plan He had set in motion
since the beginning of time would unfold just as it was supposed to. All the
physical pain, all the emotional pain, all the spiritual pain, the utter
anguish that would leave any of the rest of us at our wit’s end and desperate
to have everything corrected—none of it was a match for His self-control.
But we shouldn’t be surprised at that, really. After all,
the fruit of the Spirit comes from the Spirit (a.k.a. God), from the very
essence of His nature. We think of that connection often when it comes to love
and peace and goodness, but not so much when it comes to self-control. Yet here
in this period of Jesus’ life, we see on full display the self-control element
of God’s nature. And in displaying such remarkable self-control, Jesus once
again gives us the picture of what a Christ-like life should be.
He didn’t just tell us to turn the other cheek without
showing us what it looks like. He didn’t just tell us to persevere when others
hate us and insult us because we follow Him. He showed us how to do it. And by
having such self-control to stick to the Plan, He ultimately made it possible
for us to become more like Him. Because without His death on our behalf, we
would still be stuck in our ungodly, dishonorable lives with no hope of ever
passing muster to stand before God. But thanks to our self-controlled Savior,
we can be free from those shackles of nastiness that keep us separated from
God.
If you’ve never recognized the hopelessness of your
naturally sinful state and the strong and steady hope that is yours in Jesus
through His perfect life, substitutional death, and victorious resurrection, I
pray that you take some time to read one of the Gospels in the Bible (Matthew,
Mark, Luke, or John). And if you have questions, I’d be more than happy to talk
with you about them. I may not have all the answers, but I will seek them with
you.
And if you’ve already forsaken your sin and are depending on
Jesus for the abundant life with God that He provides, I pray you take some
time to ponder His sacrificial self-control for you and praise Him for
it—because goodness knows He deserves all the praise.
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