Read the transcript
Scripture Reading
John 19:1-16
Our first reading this morning is taken from the Gospel of John, chapter 19, reading verses 1 to 16.
Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. The soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head. They clothed him in a purple robe and went up to him again and again saying, Hail, King of the Jews, and they slapped him in the face.
Once more, Pilate came out and said to the Jews gathered there, Look, I'm bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no basis for a charge against him. When Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, Pilate said to them, Here is the man. As soon as the chief priests and their officials saw him, they shouted, Crucify, crucify. But Pilate answered, You take him and crucify him. As for me, I find no basis for a charge against him. The Jewish leaders insisted, We have a law. According to that law, he must die because he claimed to be the son of God.
When Pilate heard this, he was even more afraid and he went back inside to the palace. Where do you come from, he asked Jesus, but Jesus gave him no answer. Do you refuse to speak to me, Pilate said. Don't you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you? Jesus answered, You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above. For the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.
From then on, Pilate tried to set Jesus free, but the Jewish leaders kept shouting, If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar. Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar. When Pilate heard this, he brought Jesus out and sat him down on the judge's seat at a place known as the Stone Pavement, which in Aramaic is known as Gabbatha. It was the day of the preparation of the Passover. It was about noon.
Here is your king, Pilate said to the Jews, but they shouted, Take him away. Take him away. Crucify him. Shall I crucify your king, Pilate asked. We have no king but Caesar, the chief priests answered. Finally, Pilate handed him over to them to be crucified.
John 19:17-42
Continuing at verse 17.
Carrying his own cross, he went out to the place of the skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. Here they crucified him and with him two others, one on each side and Jesus in the middle.
Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened to the cross. It read, Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews. Many of the Jews read this sign, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and the sign was written in Aramaic, Latin, and Greek. The chief priests of the Jews protested to Pilate, Do not write king of the Jews, but that this man claimed to be king of the Jews. Pilate answered, What I have written, I have written.
When the soldiers crucified Jesus, they took his clothes, dividing them into four shares, one for each of them, and with the undergarment remaining. This garment was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom. Let's not tear it, they said to one another. Let's decide by a lot who will get it. This happened that the scripture might be fulfilled, which said, They divided my garments among them, and cast lots for my clothing. So this is what the soldiers did.
Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved, standing nearby, he said to his mother, Dear woman, here is your son. And to the disciple, Here is your mother. From that time on, the disciple took her into his home.
Later, knowing that everything had now been finished, and so that scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, I am thirsty. A jar of wine vinegar was there. So they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on the stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus' lips. When he had received the drink, Jesus said, It is finished. With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
Now it was the day of the preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jewish leaders did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first men who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other. But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus' side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water. The man who saw it has given testimony, and his testimony is true. He knows that he tells the truth, and he testifies so that you also may believe. These things happened so that the scripture would be fulfilled. Not one of his bones will be broken, and as another scripture says, they will look on the one they have pierced.
Later, Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body of Jesus. Now Joseph was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly because he feared the Jewish leaders. With Pilate's permission, he came and took the body away. He was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds. Taking Jesus' body, the two of them wrapped it with the spices in the strips of linen. This was in accordance with the Jewish burial customs. At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid. Because it was the Jewish day of preparation, and since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.
The Tension of Good Friday
Good morning, everyone. Thank you, kids, and thanks, Vanessa. My name's Megan. I'm the senior minister here at Deep Creek. If you're visiting today, just a super, super big welcome to you. It's really special to share this, to mark this moment together.
Well, Aesop's fables are funny, and that story we've heard is a particularly ambivalent one in my mind. It does leave me uncomfortable either way you finish it. If the ant is not generous, then the grasshopper realizes the consequences of his actions. If the ant is generous and the grasshopper is welcomed, it feels beautiful. A little bit unfair.
I think of group projects at school, and when you know you've been the one to do all the work, and everybody in the group gets the same result, a good one, if you've been working hard. But then, as I was thinking of that example, I remembered that I was actually the recipient of other people's very hard work when I was in second or third year uni, and wherever they are now, Pete and James, they carried me. I remember going home from their house, and they kept going. They said, it's all right. We'll finish it. I was like, yes, this is the greatest moment of my life. I've never experienced this before, and I was grateful, and I did feel guilty.
They filled the gaps they covered for me, and I really hadn't deserved the outcome. And I think that's the tension with a story like Aesop's Fable, that we know sometimes we're the ant. We work hard, particularly if you're sitting in church on Good Friday. You've tried to earn your place. You think of yourself as reasonably good, but then sometimes we're the grasshopper. Sometimes we really haven't brought our best. Sometimes things happen. Sometimes we purposefully say, I'm out. Sometimes we just can't keep up. Sometimes we're actually just not the person that we want to be.
When we come to Good Friday, we find the same tension of feelings, I think. The cross, this gift of Jesus, seems unfair. It's not earned. It's not balanced, and it says something to us about whether we're good enough, whether we're not, who gets to receive and who doesn't, where are the consequences, and what does it mean for God's justice? We haven't prepared for the winter, and yet we get welcomed inside.
The Giver and the Gift
In John's Gospel, we see some very significant symbols in the telling of the event that teach us about how to interpret the events of Good Friday so that that tension is both deep but also moves us to understand our place in God. So, we see the questions answered. Who gives? To whom is something given? How is it given? And what is given?
So we start with who is the giver? And it's the king. So we saw in the narrative that the first thing that John shows us is that Jesus is clothed in a purple robe with a crown of thorns upon his head. He's mocked with the words, "'Hail, King of the Jews.'" And it looks like humiliation. It looks like this man is the lowest of the low, that they are teasing him in the most horrific way. But John's gospel is full of this sort of symbolic irony.
The moments where people are doing something that they think is devastatingly clever and humiliating, they are actually speaking the truth. They're showing us exactly who Jesus is. The crown is real. The royal robe is real. When Pilate says, here is the man, this is a declaration, a presentation of the king at his coronation, at his enthronement. Throughout John's gospel, Jesus has spoken about an hour that is coming, the hour when he will be glorified. And this moment is that hour, the cross. It is an enthronement of the king.
Jesus being lifted up on the cross, yes, it is humiliation, but it is also exaltation. The irony is purposeful. The crown of thorns is a coronation. The purple robe is the royal garment. And the mockery is actually the proclamation of the king. Now, the crown, of course, isn't made of gold. It's made of thorns. And if you and I were steeped in the Old Testament, particularly in the first few chapters of the whole Bible, we will have encountered thorns when rebellion and sin and death entered the world.
God made a garden, beautiful, amazing, full of fruit, full of vegetables. Sorry, beautiful and amazing, full of wonderful things. And yet when humans decide to go their own way, the garden starts to grow thorns. And God, in his son Jesus, says this is the sort of king I'm going to be. I'm gonna deal with that moment where the garden turned into thorns, into pain, and into death. This is how I will rule. I am a king who doesn't avoid suffering, who doesn't avoid the sin and death in the world, but I enter it. I am king through the cross. I am king through death.
The Universal Gift
And unlike the fable of the ant, Jesus' generosity is not waiting for us to knock on the door. Actually, we had been busy during the summer doing whatever we liked. And we didn't even know that winter was coming. And we were not storing up the things that we would need. We were storing up all kinds of things for ourselves, status, affirmation, and love, relationships, goodies, we were storing up for ourselves power, security. And we thought they would get us through the winter.
When we came face to face with reality, we didn't knock on the door. But actually, this king decided to give before we even asked. He knew that we would be in need because when we faced reality and came to the end of our own lives, we would have nothing, nothing left, and we wouldn't make it. The king, who has everything in his storehouse, who could ask actually all his subjects to give to him, decided that he would be the one to take the initiative to give.
This is how the universe is supposed to work. Leaders and rulers are not actually supposed to get for themselves or for their family or for their cronies or even for their nation. They are supposed to lead by giving. They are supposed to reflect the heart of our God. Perhaps we'd be in a very different Easter today in 2026. If this reality entered the hearts of those making the decisions around our world, this is how the universe is supposed to work. This is the nature of God.
Well, the second thing John shows us is who Jesus gives to. Who does the king give to? He gives to the world. Now, you might think, no, no, no. They said throughout, he gives to the Jewish people. Is Jesus the king of the Jews? It's written on the sign, and they said it a lot. But actually, the fact that Pilate ensured that there were three languages here, and John wants us to see that, tells us that this is a message, that this is a king who rules far wider than just a tribe, just a nation, just a language group.
Three languages, Aramaic, Latin, and Greek, the language of the Jewish people, the language of imperial Rome, and the language of the wider Mediterranean world. Jesus is the king that is being announced to all people, and he is actually the king for all people. This is not a local execution. It's a universal announcement. The sign is readable by everyone standing there. The Roman soldier reads it. The Jewish leader reads it. The Greek visitor reads it. The Jewish diaspora who spoke Greek could read it. The rulers could read it. The poor and the rich alike could read it. The message is the same. This king is for you.
Isaiah 53, which D read for us early in the service, tells us that he is a king given for the world. He was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was on him. The repeated phrase for us was not just about a king being given for the Jewish nation, because the mission of the Jewish people was to be a light to the whole world. God's chosen people was to actually extend the beauty and the flourishing of the garden out everywhere, across the whole globe, for every race, tribe, and tongue. And so the promise of the Messiah who would die for the people is for all the people. John's gospel tells us God so loved the world.
The Gift Through Death
Not just the deserving, not just those that spoke the right language or wore the right clothes or belonged to the right ethnic group, not just the righteous, not the prepared, the world. The grasshoppers and the ants, the unprepared, the undeserving, those who thought they were great and those who knew they were not. The king gives life to the whole world. Well, the third thing the king gives to the world, we learn, is he gives through his death.
You might think it's a funny detail to include the sponge for the drink and the spear to the side. And actually, when Ivan was reading about the legs being broken, I found that very confronting today. This is a very human, fragile, mortal man. This is a real death. So a person who is dying is thirsty. A person who is dead is pierced. This is not symbolic suffering that ends when Jesus says, enough, can I hop off? No, this goes to the real end. This is like if the ant said, you come in and I'll swap you, I'll give you all the food because that's all I've got, enough for one person. And I'll go out into the winter. This is real, this is the end. John wants us to know that Jesus truly died. The king gives life by giving all.
It's not generosity from surplus. Ah, I got enough, you can have a little. You can have the baked beans, I don't really like them. No, the king has given all, he has given himself. Jesus' life is poured out, and the king gives life by losing his own. When we get to the end of the narrative, we see that there are spices and burial wrappings and a tomb. The king is giving life to the world through his death, and it is true death, ending in a tomb. And yet the promise in John, I think, 12, is that he gives eternal life, that the gift that he is to give is from the life that the father gives him. He gives up his own so that others might have it.
Eternal Life Through the King
His full death leads to this final point. Jesus, the king, gives life to the world through his death, eternal, unbreakable life. When Jesus says, it is finished, this is what he means. Not just that his death is coming, but that the gift is done. The king gives life to the world. In him, we have life. He gives up his own so that we might live. Why? Because we did not deserve life forever with God. We went our own way. We brought upon the earth the thorns. We didn't care that God was the one who called us to live for him and for others.
We brought about the darkness that descended. We shared in that. And even when we became victims of others hurt to us, we ultimately were sharing in what humankind had brought about through its negligence and its rebellion, through its selfishness and coldness toward the king. But Jesus says, I don't want that for you. I want the garden to grow again. I want you to know light. I want you to know life. I want you to come back in to the family. I don't want you to experience what you deserve. And so in his dying, he gives us his life.
And his life as the king is life that is unbreakable, eternal, full of every kind of goodness and richness that you can imagine. And when he says it is finished, he says the door is wide open. When you turn up, if you receive my life, you go straight in. I am never closing this door on you. When winter is coming, just turn up, come to me. The welcome is secured. If you feel unprepared and undeserving good, come to him, come to the king, the king who wears the crown of thorns, the purple robe, the king enthroned in suffering, the king who gives his life for the whole world, for all of us, the king who dies so that we might live. It is finished, eternal, unbreakable life stands open before us.
I want to encourage you this Good Friday that as we sing together now and as we share in Holy Communion, as we pray and as we turn our eyes upon this cross, perhaps you will be able to see that on this cross, perhaps you would turn up at that door, that you would find it open and that you would allow the king to welcome you in.
