Mark 15:16-41

We think of the nails. When we hear this description of Jesus’ suffering, His crucifixion, His death, we think of the nails. Of course, Jesus suffered in other ways, with the crown of thorns slicing, puncturing His scalp, the soldiers beating Him with a their fists and with sticks, the spitting, the mocking, the whipping.

But those nails. Big, rough, spikes, sharp enough to go in, dull enough to cause excruciating pain. Nails that went in through skin, between bones, through His hands, through His feet. Nails that pinned Him to the wood of the cross like a butterfly pinned to cardboard. If we sit still long enough, we can imagine the hammer hitting those nails, the thunk of each blow as the nails went through our Lord into the wood. Those nails, those awful nails that held Jesus to the cross.

Except, look again. It wasn’t those nails that held Jesus on that cross. It only looks that way. Look closely. Do you see what is keeping Jesus hanging there? Yeah. It’s grace. His body hung on that wood out of sheer will power, Jesus forcing Himself to stay up there, bleeding, suffocating, dying. And what drove Him to do this was His love. Not a love that was earned, or a love that was deserved, but a love that was given to the very people who put Him on that cross. Loving soldiers and cowardly disciples. Loving people just like you and me. And loving you and me.

This is why we’ve spent the time of lent hearing God’s grace. Hearing that He doesn’t treat us like our sins deserve and His love is bigger than the sky is above the earth and His eyes are locked on us with a beaming love. Because if we don’t know these things, if they’re not first in our minds, then we don’t understand what we’re seeing here in Mark 15. We don’t understand Good Friday.

But if we can hold His astounding grace and see Mark 15 from the standpoint of grace, Jesus’ crucifixion will amaze us. Every step will be walked out of loving determination. And the strength of restraint that Jesus shows will make us just shake our heads. Just look. Verse 16:

The soldiers led Jesus away. Listen. Nobody leads Jesus anywhere. Jesus goes where He wants to go. And every step He takes, with the rough, cruel hands grabbing His arms, tugging Him along, is a step closer to unimaginable pain. But step by step, He walks. Every step is an intentional choice as He gets closer to the cross. Every step He decides to take is chosen out of love.

As He arrives, verse 17:

And now, Jesus does nothing. And that nothing is done out of grace. Because look at what He could have done. How dare they mock Him with a purple robe? How dare they push those thorns into His head? And when they began to call out, "Hail, King of the Jews", what Jesus could have done, even what He should have done, was risen up in His power and His glory, His vengeance, His righteous anger, and showed them that, yes. He is the King of the Jews. He’s the King of the Swiss, the King of the Chinese, the King of the Dutch and the Norwegian and the African and the Mexican. There will come a day when His true royalty is seen, when everyone will Jesus for who He is, and when that day comes, those who don’t love Jesus will beg for boulders to fall on them and crush them, they’ll be that afraid.

That should have been that day, when Jesus was mocked and ridiculed. And instead, He stayed put. Jesus did amazing things, miracles that showed His power. But now He shows His power in even a more amazing way. He shows His power of restraint. He holds back. Why? Because of grace. If He stops this mocking, if He shows who He really is, He won’t die. And He has to die, if He wants to save His people. So He keeps His mouth closed, and He takes it.

And it’s about to get worse. Verse 19:

Imagine getting hit in the head with a bat. Just once. It would put you down on the ground and your head would be ringing. And when your head began to clear again, you would be furious. Scared, yes, but furious, too, that someone hit you in the head with a bat.

And the soldiers in verse 19, hit Jesus again and again. They spit on Him as they circled, taking whacks at His head. And the pain, the excruciating pain He felt. And if we can see this happening here in verse 19, we just want Jesus, as the bat is coming down again on His head, we want Jesus to reach up and catch it. And the look of surprise that soldiers face would be worth it. And we want Jesus to stand up and end this, to show who He really is.

And again, He doesn’t. Again, incredibly restrained, Jesus continues to let them hit Him on the head and mock Him with their worship. All because He loved us. All through grace.

And then they led Jesus out to Golgotha to crucify Him. He’d been beaten so many times, He’d lost so much blood, He couldn’t carry the cross. So Simon, a bystander, carried it for Jesus. They arrived at the Place of the Skull and, verse 23:

And again, this is grace. The wine, mixed with myrrh, was actually an anesthesia. It was pain killer. But it also functioned like a drug, a narcotic, and while it made the suffering more bearable for Jesus, it also clouded His mind. He wouldn’t be thinking clearly, and He might do something that He didn’t mean to do. In other words, He might just end the suffering before He died. He might forget, come down off the cross before He died. He might not remember that He had to die in order to save us, and instead call those 72,000 angels just itching to get in there.

And so, in His grace, so that He would stay focused and die, He refused the pain killer. He would feel the pain of the crucifixion in it’s raw form. Because He loved us so much.

And so, verse 24:

Four short words. How can four words describe this horrendous torture? Stripping off His clothes, laying Him down on the cross, His skin against the rough splintering wood. His right arm stretched out, a foot holding it down. That nail, there’s that nail again, the point placed in His wrist, right below His hand, and then the hammer coming down. And his right hand is pinned. And then they repeat it with His left hand, and then His feet, one foot on top of the other. Then a bunch of guys lift the cross up, and slide the post into the hole in the ground, and it lands with the thunk and Jesus’ whole body, His full weight, pulls against the nails, holding Him on the cross.

But again, it wasn’t the nails that held Him. With every swing of the hammer, He made a decision to stay on that wood. With every spasm of pain, He chose to keep going. Even when, verse 29:

Don’t you think He wanted to? Don’t you think He couldn’t? Everything in Him was screaming to get down from that cross and save Himself.

And it wasn’t just the people who were shouting this. Verse 31:

And the whole time, Jesus stayed up there. Every time He put His weight on His feet and pushed Himself up to gulp a gasp of air and scream out "My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?" Every time He dropped back onto the weight of the nails in His hands, His lungs collapsing, suffocating Him, every time was done intentionally, with purpose.

He hung on that cross, willfully staying up on that cross, for six hours. At any time He could have ended it. And He didn’t. For one reason. One reason only. Because He…loves…you. As He suffered, waiting to die, He had His eyes on you, and on you, and on you. And keeping His eyes on you kept Him on the cross.

Until it was time to die. And, verse 37:

His grace, His love, His loving eyes watching you, loving you, kept Him on the cross. And because of His death, look what happened. Verse 38:

It was the curtain that kept people away from God, that kept us out of His presence because He was so holy we were so not. But the grace of Jesus that kept Him on the cross allowed us to come into the presence of God again. The grace that caused Jesus to shed His blood is what makes us clean and pure again. It’s His grace that puts the broken pieces of our lives back together again. His fierce, determined grace that kept Him on that cross.

And it’s His fierce, determined grace that is still at work. The work of salvation that Jesus did through His death on the cross broke the power of sin. But His work of salvation continues today. He keeps mopping up the effects of sin. Sin and death may have been put to death on the cross, but it’s a long slow death and the effects continue. When marriages fall apart and when someone gets cancer and when someone we love so much dies, those are still the effects of death.

But Jesus is still at work, cleaning up the mess of sin. And He’s working with the same fierce determined grace as He had on the cross. He kept going through the beating. He kept working through the mocking. He kept going through the spitting. He kept Himself up on the cross through every second of the horrible day. He kept going.

And with that same determination, He is fixing. He’s restoring relationships, and if He’s not doing that, He’s healing hearts. He’s healing bodies, and if He’s not doing that He’s giving a peace that only He can give. He’s providing financial resources, and if He’s not doing that, He’s giving the assurance that everything will be okay. He’s revealing sin in our lives, and not just to point it out and criticize, but to identify and remove. The temptations we find so powerful, He’s taking away their power until they’re not tempting at all.

He didn’t quit on the cross. He kept deciding to heal and to fight and to beat sin. And He’ll never quit. He’ll never stop healing. He’ll never stop cleansing. He’ll never stop reversing the effects of sin. It’s His grace and love that keeps Him going, and He won’t stop, He can’t stop, until He’s finished, until we’re clean, until we’re home.