Thoughts on Matthew 27

Today’s reading: Jeremiah 23; Matthew 27

The words of the Jewish leaders, as Jesus is hanging on the cross, exemplify just how self-deceptive our hearts can be.

As Jesus is on the cross, Matthew tells us that people were walking by, deriding Him for His claims and teachings. The one he records that stands out the most to me though is this:

So also the chief priests, with the scribes and elders, mocked him, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him. For he  said, ‘I am the Son of God.’”

While they are deriding him, these men also show us what they know, understand, and believe about Jesus. Namely, they declare that he saved others, and they know he claimed to be doing that in the name of, and by the power of, God Himself.

I don’t think we have any real sense of the scope of Jesus’ miraculous ministry. The gospel accounts record Him healing the sick, cleansing lepers, casting out demons, giving sight to the blind, making the lame walk, raising the dead, etc., but there are also so many places where the authors make comments like, “And He healed many more people there,” or “He healed all who came to Him.” John even says, in John 21, “Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” So as we think about talk about Jesus’ miraculous ministry, we are necessarily thinking of a very narrow sliver of what He actually did. More than that, we can try to imagine it, but how much more visceral an experience would it have been to be watching atrophied muscles grow before your eyes, watching demons fighting and fleeing, watching someone see for the first time, watching as a leper’s skin clears up, and so many others?

When they say, “He saved others,” they mean it! They have been eyewitnesses to an absolute flood of undeniable miracles for the past three years, and all of it has been done in the name of God.

Shouldn’t that be giving them pause? They mean it as an insult here at the foot of the cross, but really it is a direct admission of their having witnessed the hand of God powerfully at work through Jesus. They are so self-deceived that they don’t even realize that the only thing they can think of to deride and insult Him with is how powerfully He lived His life for others.

They say too, that if He can come down off the cross, they will believe Him then, but based on the rest of their “insult,” it’s pretty clear even that wouldn’t be enough. When they saw Him casting out demons and healing the sick, they claimed it was by the power of Satan that He was working. Would that really change now? Would one more miracle really change their minds? Of course not! They had all the evidence they could possibly have, and they rejected it and excused it away because it wasn’t what they wanted. Jesus coming down off the cross would simply be more of the same.

God gives us plenty of evidence of who He is and what He’s doing, but so many respond to Him like these Jewish leaders. Rather than considering the evidence with integrity, they look at it, excuse it, and write it off, always saying they would need something more to be convinced. But God is not our puppet. He has done everything to save us from our own sin and self-destruction, and He reveals Himself to us and calls us to Himself, but if we look at it all and refuse to receive it, what more should we expect from Him?

The Jewish leaders had watched Jesus “save others” for three years and it wasn’t enough; the Roman centurion watched Jesus on the cross for a few hours and declared, “Surely this was the Son of God.” What was the difference? The Jewish leaders had decided beforehand that they would not believe, so no evidence would ever be enough, while the Roman centurion had a soft heart to truly consider what he was seeing.

Lord, give us hearts like this Roman soldier. Give us soft and humble hearts that are not so convinced of our own understandings and views that we would deny clear truth for the sake of our pride. Give us clear eyes to see you, open ears to hear you, and renewed hearts to respond to you.