Christ's Passion

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This is Day 39 of my 40 day Lenten Blog.

As Jesus and His disciples prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, a mob sent by the High Priest came to arrest Him. The mob was led by Judas who had been paid thirty pieces of silver to betray Jesus. Judas walked up to his old master and kissed Him on the cheek. "You would betray the Son of Man with a kiss?" Jesus asked his treacherous disciple.

As the men arrested Jesus, His disciples fled. None of them stayed as they were all too scared. Jesus was carried off to the High Priest and the Sanhedrin to face charges of blasphemy for claiming to be the Son of God. His disciples, John and Peter, followed at a distance. John's family was friendly with the High Priest, so he was able to get inside the priest's house along with Peter.

It was cold and while Peter was waiting outside he warmed himself with some others by a fire. A servant girl accused him of being one of Jesus' disciples. But Peter, fearing for his life, denied that he even knew Jesus, just as Jesus had told him he would. Twice more Peter was accused of being Jesus' disciple and twice more Peter denied that he even knew him. And just as he denied Jesus for the third time, Peter heard a rooster crow and he remembered that Jesus had told him that Peter would deny Him three times before the rooster crowed. Peter ran away weeping.

Meanwhile, Jesus was inside being questioned by the High Priest and the Sanhedrin, though the meeting was called in secret and those members of the Sanhedrin that supported Jesus were not present. Jesus refused to answer the High Priest, and witnesses were brought in to testify against Him, but their testimony was weak at best. Finally, the High Priest asked Him point blank, "Are you the Christ?"

Jesus answered, "If I tell you, you will not believe, and if I ask you, you will not answer, but you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the power of God."

"Are you the Son of Man?" the High Priest demanded.

Jesus answered, "I AM," which, as we discussed earlier, is the name God gave for Himself to Moses.

The Sanhedrin tore their clothes at this blasphemy, hit Him and spit on Him. They took Jesus away to Pilate, the Roman governor of Palestine, for only he could crucify Jesus. But Pilate didn't want anything to do with this squabble amongst the Jews. So when he found out that Jesus was a Galilean, Pilate sent Jesus to Herod who was the king of Galilee and visiting Jerusalem that day. But Herod found no cause to kill Jesus and sent Him back to Pilate.

Pilate questioned Jesus, but also could find no cause to crucify Him. So Pilate told the Jewish leaders this and said he was going to flog Jesus and then release Him. But the Jews started to shout that if Pilate did not execute Jesus then he was no friend of Caesar's. Pilate was scared of a riot. He sought to clean his hands of anything that might happen, hoping to keep the Jews from rioting. So he offered to release a prisoner for them in celebration of the Passover. He offered a choice between the murderer Barabbas, and Jesus. His thinking was that they surely would chose Jesus over the murderer and then the Jewish leaders could not blame him and whip up the mob to riot. But to Pilate's shock and dismay the crowd chose Barabbas the murderer.

And when Pilate asked what should be done with Jesus, the crowd shouted, "Crucify him!" And like so many other politicians, Pilate gave in to the mob at the expense of justice. Pilate did a ceremonial washing of his hands as a way of saying that he would not be guilty of this man's death, but then ordered his men to crucify Jesus.

Before He was crucified, Jesus was severally scourged. He was beaten with a whip that tore and bruised His skin. Then He was mocked as the soldiers pressed a crown of thorns into His head and knelt before Him sarcastically praising Him as king. Then they beat Him more and spat on Him. Jesus was then taken to be crucified.

Jesus had to carry His own cross up the hill to The Place of the Skull, known in Aramaic as Golgotha and in Latin as Calvary. He was extremely weak from the beatings and kept falling as He carried the extremely heavy cross. On His way He saw His mother Mary. And surely the sword that Simeon had predicted would pierce her own soul did so then as she watched her son, beaten and bloodied, being marched off to be crucified.

After a while, Jesus could no longer lift His cross and so the Roman soldiers forced a man known as Simon of Cyrene to follow behind Jesus carrying it. Simon became the first person to carry a cross and follow Jesus.

Once at the top of the hill, Jesus was nailed to the cross with long metal spikes through His hands and feet. And the people continued to mock Him. His enemies stood nearby taunting Jesus, "If you come down from that cross we will believe." But they would not believe, even if He had. He had already performed many signs and wonders for them, but they never believed.

In His never ending mercy, Jesus said, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." He saw His mother standing with the other women and John His beloved disciple at the foot of the cross and said to her and John, "Woman behold your son. Son behold your mother." In other words, Mary would go into John's house and he would take care of her as a son would a mother.

Feeling alone and abandoned by everyone, Jesus cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" But soon the time for His death arrived. He gave up His spirit and said, "It is finished."

No one could believe He had died so quickly. Most men hang on the cross for days before they die, but Jesus died in just a few hours. And when He did, the sky darkened and there was a great earthquake which opened up some of the tombs and the dead began to walk out of them. And the veil in the Temple which separated man from god tore in two.

To ensure that He was dead a Roman soldier pierced Jesus' side with a lance and blood and water poured out. Then Joseph of Arimathea, a disciple of Christ who was a member of the Sanhedrin, had Him taken down from the cross and buried Him in a tomb nearby.

The Jewish leaders went to Pilate and asked that soldiers be placed by the tomb to make sure that Jesus' body wasn't stolen by His disciples so that they could claim that He rose from the dead. And Pilate did so and they rolled a heavy stone over the front and stood guard there.

And the devil danced, for he thought he had won. Little did he know that this had always been God's plan. Jesus was the true Passover Lamb. You'll recall the Passover lamb was killed and its blood spread on the doorposts over the homes of the Israelites in Egypt. Anyone covered by the blood of the lamb was saved from the wrath of God on Egypt, just as anyone covered by Christ's blood is saved from eternal damnation.

You will also recall that God had made a covenant with Abraham, but God took it upon Himself to pay the price should Abraham or His descendents fail in their covenant. Abraham's descendents did fail by turning from God again and again. And we continue to fail every day. That is why God died for us. He promised to Abraham that He would. He would take the punishment we all deserve for breaking the covenant.

And of course, you recall that God demanded Abraham sacrifice his one and only son. He did not make Abraham go through with it, for it was really God that was going to sacrifice HIS one and only Son, Jesus. And He did. He did it for all of us. He did it to wipe our sins away through His own blood. For it is by that blood that we are saved.

Next: He is Risen

R.C. VanLandingham is a Catholic homeschool dad just trying to make it through this life and into the next! He has written a Christian children's fantasy series about a boy named Peter Puckett!