Sermon Tone Analysis

*Intro*

Have you ever been asked what your most embarrassing moment is?

I used to have a story which my mother used to tell me about me when I was five years old, when I took off all my clothes on the first day of school.

Thankfully, I do not really remember it and I will spare you the gory details.

However, I was pretty embarrassed the other day and I think this tops all other embarrassing moments.

I was going to go check the mail.

Our mailbox is about a block away, bunched together with other mailboxes.

As I was walking along the sidewalk, I noticed our neighbor’s garage door open.

Those of you who have come to our townhouse know we share our driveway with two other people.

We are on one end and this neighbor was on the other.

As I walked past, I noticed their little dog standing there wagging its tail…and without a leash.

Now you have to know something about me.

No offense to any dog lovers here, but I am deathly afraid of dogs.

I don’t like them and they don’t like me.

They will never be my best friend.

So on this day, I smiled, looked away and proceeded to walk faster when the dog noticed me and started to fix its gaze upon me.

But as I walked to the mailbox, a dilemma arose: How am I going to get back?

I figured I would be brave and walk back like I walked to the mailbox.

However, as I headed towards my house, I think the dog could smell the fear on me, as he started furiously barking at me and I still had a half a block left to walk!

I gulped.

My heart skipped a beat.

Then I made a move.

I decided I was going to cross the street and walk on the other side of the sidewalk.

I started to think of lawsuits (isn’t your dog supposed to be on a leash?) and images of me in a cast with my leg up in a hospital bed (as you all visit me with flowers), started to flash before my eyes.

So I am basically jogging now on the other side of the street as this dog is barking away at me.

My plan was to cross the street like half a block away past my house and then hide behind this pine tree, jump over the railing and run up the steps into the house.

I mapped it out in my head as though I was planning on an elaborate prison escape or like I was in a /Mission Impossible/ movie.

However as soon as I crossed the street, the dog came running out into the driveway barking like…well, a mad dog!

It was over.

Abbie was going to grow up to be fatherless.

Jenny will be a single mom.

It’s over.

I stood there behind the pine tree paralyzed, clutching the mail in my hands with dear life.

Just then, the neighbor comes out looking for his dog and sees me like almost like Zacchaeus.

I was so embarrassed!

“Looks like you’re on his territory,“ he smiled.

“Yeah,” I smiled back nervously as I rushed through my front door.

That was an embarrassing moment!

We are going to look at the thief on the cross today, whose day started as the most embarrassing day of his life, but which turned out to be the best day ever!

We are winding down our series called “Encounters.”

After today, we will have one more encounter to close our series, Lord willing.

We have been almost following Jesus these weeks starting with His first miracle changing water into wine (John 2:1-11) and now with an encounter with Him on the cross here today.

This is Encounter 8 and the title of the message is “An Encounter with the Crucified King” and our text is found in Luke 23:39-43.

This will be fitting for us as we approach Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday this week.

I want to look at three questions regarding the miracle of salvation.

Here is the first question, “How can you miss it?”

*I.

Willful Arrogance (Luke 23:39).*

It is a Friday in Spring 30 AD. I’m going to read Luke 23:32-38 so we can set the scene of what is happening here.

Here, our Lord is hung between two thieves and being executed here like a lawbreaker and criminal, fulfilling the prophecy that He would be “numbered with the transgressors” (Is.

53:12; Luke 22:37).

He was crucified around 9am and died around 3pm.

It was God’s providence that He was crucified /between/ both robbers (Luke 23:33), giving them each equal access to the Savior.

Both could see the inscription over his head which read, “This is the King of the Jews” (Luke 23:38) and both can witness the death of the Messiah for a lost, dying people.

But here He hangs there with outstretched arms, longing for the return of a lost, prodigal world.

\\ Let me give you a brief description on crucifixion taken from William Barclay’s commentary:

“When a criminal reached the place of crucifixion, his cross was laid flat upon the ground.

Usually it was a cross shaped like a T with no top piece against which the head could rest.

It was quite low, so that the criminal’s feet were only two or three feet above the ground.

There was a company of pious women in Jerusalem who made it their practice always to go to crucifixions and to give the victim a drink of drugged wine which would deaden the terrible pain.

That drink was offered to Jesus and he refused it (Matt.

27:34).

He was determined to face death at its worst, with a clear mind and senses unclouded.

The victim’s arms were stretched out upon the cross bar, and the nails were driven through his hands.

The feet were not nailed, but only loosely bound to the cross.

Half way up the cross there was a projecting piece of wood, called the saddle, which took the weight of the criminal, for otherwise the nails would have torn through his hands.

Then the cross was lifted and set upright in its socket.

The terror of crucifixion was this—the pain of that process was terrible but it was not enough to kill, and the victim was left to die of hunger and thirst beneath the blazing noontide sun and the frosts of the night.

Many a criminal was known to have hung for a week upon his cross until he died raving mad.”[1]

I think an article in the /Journal of the American Medical Association /in 1986 as well as the recent film, /The Passion of the Christ/, but have helped to show the brutality of crucifixion.

Pastor Kent Hughes has noted that in the journal article,[2] “The authors detailed the pain of the /flagellum/ as it tore into Christ’s skeletal muscles, the pain produced by the weight of the body hanging from spikes that penetrated the medial nerves and tore at the tarsals, the gruesome respiratory agony, the cramping, the ensuing plural effusions, concluding that “Death by crucifixion was in every sense of the word excruciating, literally, ‘out of the cross.’

”[3]

 May we never fall into the trap of thinking that what Jesus went through on the cross was not hard because He was God.

He went through it as a man among men, totally depending on the Father without anything as a human to alleviate the pain.

But let us not forget that greater than the physical pain was the spiritual pain that accompanied carrying our sins and facing all of God’s wrath poured out on Him.

The story we are about to read is only found here in Luke and not found in Matthew, Mark or John.

As we walk toward Calvary, we sense a lot of comedy and mockery going on.

Turn for a moment to Matthew’s account in Matthew 27:38-44.

There we see the people walking by mocking Christ as well as the religious establishment and the soldiers.

But in Matthew 27:44, both the robbers or thieves on both sides were also mocking Him.

Not one, but both!

The point being that the cross is a total mockery.

EVERYONE scorned Jesus, even the thieves who were hanging right with him.

You could almost hear them sneer: “Life is pretty tough on Messiahs these days, eh?

How about a little miracle, Galilean?

Some king of the Jews you are.”

I understand if the soldiers, the religious leaders and the people doing this, but sarcasm also from someone who is in the same situation as you?

Crucified men taunting a crucified man?

Amazingly Jesus was not like to the thieves, “You are one to talk!

Take a look at where you are!”

But Jesus took it all because He took our shame.

We were the ones who deserved mockery and shame for all of our sins.

He died in our place.

Back to Luke 23:39.

We do not know anything about these criminals.

We do not know how much they stole or how often.

We do not know who they stole from or why.

We only know they are criminals here in Luke, while Matthew and Mark tell us they were “robbers” (Matt.

27:38; Mark 15:27).

Warren Wiersbe notes that “criminal” here is a “…Greek word [that] means ‘one who uses violence to rob openly,’ in contrast to the thief who secretly enters a house and steals.

These two men may have been guilty of armed robbery involving murder.”[4]

But it does not matter what they did, but what they became because of their encounter with Jesus.