Amy C Walters

The Crucifixion | Luke 23:26-43

Even though Luke is a doctor, he includes very few details on Jesus’ physical suffering. He does emphasize, however, the insults that many different groups of people threw at him. They all had a similar message: If you are the Messiah, save yourself. Instead, Jesus chose to save us.

Luke, who writes this account of Jesus, was a physician (Colossians 4:14). And yet surprisingly, Dr. Luke mentions very little about Jesus’ physical suffering in his crucifixion story. Nothing about him being whipped, nothing about him being nailed to the cross, nothing about the long, slow, painful death of crucifixion. 

He does say a lot, however, about the mocking Jesus endured. Now at first glance, the mental anguish of mocking seems like nothing compared to the physical agony Jesus faced. What’s the old saying? “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” But Luke keeps drawing our attention to it throughout this story. So our job is to understand why. 

First, let’s talk about who participated in mocking Jesus. There were the rulers who “sneered at Jesus.” “Rulers” refers to the religious leaders, the ones who insisted on crucifying Jesus. 

We also have the Roman soldiers participating. Luke even hints that the wine and vinegar offered by the soldiers was part of the mocking. 

And finally, we have one of the criminals. “One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him.” Luke seems to emphasize the audacity of a condemned man participating. He was also hanging on his own cross, and yet he was mocking Jesus. 

So the mocking is done by a Pharisee, a soldier, and a criminal. This sounds like a setup to a bad joke. These are three groups of people who don’t associate with one another and have never agreed on anything ever, except for their ridicule of Jesus. 

What about the content of their insults? The rulers say, “He saved others, let him save himself, if he is God’s Messiah, the chosen one.” These rulers are clearly feeling triumphant. Their plan to get rid of Jesus has worked. They probably feel justified, like they have decisively proven that Jesus is not the Messiah. 

Because if he was the Messiah, he would save himself. That’s what they would do. That’s what they did do. They sacrificed him to save themselves, their positions, their power. We tend to project onto others what we ourselves would do.

The soldier’s message was similar. “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.” The assumption is that a king wouldn’t die like this, in shame, in agony.

Even the criminal’s insults have the same flavor. “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us too.” 

So not only is this vastly diverse group united in their mocking of Jesus, but their message is the same. If you are the Messiah, save yourself. 

In one sense, this is an attack on Jesus’ identity. You can’t be who you say you are. 

Who else attacked Jesus in this way? Satan did, when he tempted Jesus in the wilderness back in Luke 4. Two out of the three temptations challenge Jesus’ identity. If you are the son of God, prove it. Turn this stone into bread, or throw yourself down from the pinnacle of the temple. Satan’s trying to call the shots, trying to tell Jesus what the Messiah would really do, what he would really be like. 

This must be an otherwise effective strategy for Satan to keep going back to it, to keep trying again and again with Jesus. I think Satan uses this strategy a lot with us. He makes us doubt that we are loved by God, or we think we have to earn God’s favor, or we worry that we are too deep in sin to crawl back out. For lots of people, Satan just has to tell them that they’re a good person. That keeps them as far away from salvation as the most atrocious criminal who doesn’t repent.

So, they all call into question who Jesus is. And, according to them, what would prove that he was the Messiah? Saving himself. We will know that you are God’s chosen one if you save yourself. 

This is a baffling assumption from these religious leaders. The very purpose of the Messiah was to save his people from their sin. This reveals how much they have missed the point. How much they have twisted the idea of the Messiah to look like them. 

But it also shows how they define salvation, what they think it means. To them, salvation means come down from the cross so that you don’t have to suffer and die. It’s about self-preservation, saving your own skin. It’s immediate, from this situation right now. And it’s an escape from death. 

This is actually the central tension of this story: will Jesus save himself? And it’s a huge problem. Absolutely everything forever hangs on it. If Jesus saves himself, then we cannot be saved. We have no hope.

The criminal told Jesus, “Save yourself and us,” but those are mutually exclusive. 

This must have been a huge temptation to Jesus. He had the power to escape this situation. But he chose instead to endure. And because of that, we can be saved. 

Hebrews 9:26b says, “But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.”

1 Peter 3:18, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit.”

Matthew 20:29, “The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” 

This is our key truth for today. Jesus saved us instead of himself.

Everyone forever is impacted by this. We all now have the chance to be saved. And it’s because Jesus refused to listen to the rulers or the Romans or the criminal.

It wasn’t salvation from death, but through death. He didn’t prove his identity through self-preservation, but through self-sacrifice. By his wounds, we are healed.