Final Hours #3 - 4 Places
Message Description
Dr. Kurt Bjorklund continues the message series "Final Hours" teaching on the final hours of Jesus's life from the New Testament book of Matthew. Jesus visited four distinct locations during His final hours- each with special events taking place.
Message Transcript
As you probably are aware, Orchard Hill exists at three campuses and online through different avenues. Over the last couple of weeks, we had a few events that we called Mission Forward. And if you weren't able to be at one of those events, there's a video that was sent out to everybody by email. And if you didn't receive that, it's available on YouTube. If you go to YouTube, Orchard Hill Church Mission Forward, it tells what we're hoping to do in terms of maximizing our existing campuses and having new campuses start in different places.
There's also a little place of interest on our web page. So, if you just go to the home page of orchardhillchurch.com and you're interested in some places that could be, or you want to put a place on the radar of the church and say, this would be a great place for Orchard Hill. We believe that it's a great time for us as a church to take some of the resources that God has given us and say, how can we be even more pervasive in the community in which God has placed us? And so that's available for you.
Let's pray together, God, thanks for just the chance to gather this weekend. God, I ask as we do most weekends, that you would speak to all of us. God, I pray that my words reflect your word in content, tone, and emphasis. And we pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So, over the last few weeks, we have been looking at what we've called the Final Hours, the final hours of Jesus' life. And what we've done is we've looked at Matthew 24 and the two questions that were posed there. Then we looked at the three stories that Jesus told in Matthew 25, and today in Matthew 26, we're going to look at the four places that Jesus visited, and this is a long chapter. There are a lot of verses, so we didn't have it read as we often do. But the idea is, rather than looking at each of these places individually, is to look at them together and say, why did Jesus choose these places for His final days?
And what we see when we begin reading Chapter 26 is that Jesus knew that the Passover was coming, he had two days left, and Jesus knew that the plot was taking place to take his life. You can read about this in the first few verses of the chapter, and he made a choice to go to a couple of different places. And I want to just show you a map so you get an idea. Here's a map that's not super easy to see, but you can see Jerusalem here. And then just below it is Bethany, and that's about two miles outside of Jerusalem. Up and kind of over a mountain range. It took a bit to walk to it, but it's not super far. And then the next map here shows what comes next. So, after that, he goes to the Upper Room, and you can see where that is on the bottom left. And then he goes to the Garden of Gethsemane back outside the city looking back in, and then he goes to his trial, which is inside the city.
So, just to track the movements, he's in Jerusalem. He goes to what is a little town two miles outside then he goes to the Upper Room, which is where the whole idea of the commissioning of the Lord's Supper or communion takes place. Then he goes to what's known as the Garden of Gethsemane overlooking the city, and then he goes to his trial.
So, what I'd like to do is just look at each of these places in turn for a moment and see maybe what Jesus was about and how His disciples responded. The first is this little trip to Bethany, this is verses 6 through 13, and Jesus goes to Bethany. And what we're told was that when He went there, he spent time in the home of Simon the leper. And this is somebody who had been healed earlier by Jesus. We don't know a lot about the story, but this appears to be a place that Jesus had gone to several times in the Gospels for refreshment.
And I'm going to just simply say this was a place that Jesus went for refreshment with friends. And what he does when he has two days left before his crucifixion is he goes and he hangs with these friends. And at least for me, I found this somewhat instructive because I would have thought if he had two days left, he would have said, I need to go through Jerusalem and talk and tell everybody the message. But what he does instead is he goes out and he finds some time with friends before his most traumatic and dramatic hours. He spends time with friends.
Let me just ask you, who do you go to, to be refreshed, and who are you somebody else’s refreshment? Who do you refresh, just in your being in presence? Jesus elevates this by simply going to Bethany. But what happens in Bethany is also striking. This is what we read. A woman, this is verse seven, came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as he was reclining at the table.
We don't know entirely what this is, but it just says very expensive. Some commentators say it was probably the equivalent of a year’s salary. So, imagine a year's salary being poured over Jesus in just a moment. And it says this, verse 8, when the disciples saw this, they were indignant. Why this waste? They asked. This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor. So, just imagine this scene for a moment. The disciples are here. They're having a meal. They're hanging out with Jesus. And this woman comes in, and she's just identified as a woman, and she pours this expensive perfume over Jesus’ head. And what happens is, the disciples, we are told, got indignant. They had resentment.
And so, what happened at this moment was it went from a moment of refreshment to a moment of what I'm going to call the better than game. And I believe that this is still one of the games that people of faith love to play. The better than game is whenever you look around at somebody else and how they practice their faith, and you say, I wouldn't do it like that. I could do better than that. God likes the way I do it better than the way they do it. And what the disciples did at that moment is they said that it would have been better used for the poor.
Now, they had a point, to be fair, that's a lot of money. A year's wage could feed a lot of people. And if you read on, what you see is Jesus basically says, leave her alone. She was doing a good thing. She was preparing me for burial. And he, in essence, says, don't take the approach that says I'm better than because I have a better idea. And when I say that this is still a game that people tend to play, we can do this in all kinds of ways. God likes my sense of mission better than your sense of mission. I care for the poor. I care for the people of the world who need the gospel, not just the people who've already heard it. I care about education. I care about bringing the mission of God to the whole of the community, not just in the proclamation of the gospel. I care that we have our theology right. And these people don't. God likes how we experience God with our worship style better than how they do it with their style.
Do you hear the ways that we do this? And what we tend to do is we tend to play the better than game, just like the disciples, and become indignant with how other people worship Jesus. And the result of it is that we in many ways become proud because we develop a list and we say, God likes how I do things. Now, that doesn't mean that there's not a need to discern and think and study and try to say what is the best way to express ourselves or to follow Jesus Christ. But what it means is not everyone will come to the same conclusions. And sometimes there's not even a best conclusion. That's what Jesus is doing here is he’s saying she took what you thought could have been used for the poor, and she used it in worship. Leave her alone. So, the indignance of the disciples reveals a pride that says God likes us and how we do it better than how you do it.
So, that's his first stop, Bethany, spends a couple of days there, and then he moves to the Upper Room. And this is in verses 17 through 35. And this is by far the most familiar part of this account. This is what we often read or think about when we come to the communion table. It says this, verse 17, “On the first day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Where do you want us to make preparations for you to eat the Passover?” He replied, “Go into the city to a certain man and tell him, ‘The Teacher says: My appointed time is near. I am going to celebrate the Passover with my disciples at your house.’”
And the disciples do it, and then Jesus goes, and as he's having the meal, he says, and one of you here will betray me, and he's talking about Judas at this moment. And all the disciples say, oh, who's going to betray you? I would never betray you. So, what you have here, I believe, is you have Jesus worshiping with friends. The Passover was a moment of worship for the Jewish population, and the disciples at this moment are in a sense, eating with Jesus at their most sacred festival feasts celebration. This would be sort of like this. Imagine for a moment, whoever you think is the premier spiritual Christian leader in the country today, and that person invited you to do Easter with them and at their house. That's where the disciples were with Jesus on this day.
And so, they're having this moment of saying, this is great and while they're there, you see the bond that can develop. In verse 17 they had served together, they were eating together, and they had a sense of astonishment at what Jesus said about Judas. And then in verse 26, they sang, they worshiped together. And so, what you have here is you have them all worshiping together, but at the same moment that they're worshiping and having this sweet spiritual moment, you have again, what I'm going to say is spiritual pride from the disciples saying, we will not be the ones who deny you.
I don't know if you saw this whole deal last week when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock. I didn't actually see it, but I saw it after the fact because it was everywhere. And evidently, after this whole thing happened, Denzel Washington said to Will Smith, he said, you know, it's when you're on top that the devil is going to come for you. And what he was saying to Will Smith is, it’s when you think everything's going your way, that you're actually going to be tempted.
And what the disciples have at this moment is we're celebrating Passover with Jesus, he's going to usher in this new kingdom, and we will never be like whoever he's talking about that will betray him. And what you see is not just a sense of pride, but delusional self-sufficiency that says, I'm faithful, I'm good, I will be enough. Let me just ask you a question. What if your worst sin is still in front of you? What if your biggest mistake, the thing that will bring the most reproach on you, isn't in your past but it's in your future? These disciples couldn't fathom this. And what we'll see when we come to the end of the chapter is all of them ran away and all of them ultimately denied Jesus on that night, even though here they're full of self-sufficiency and pride.
And what they're doing is they're saying, it's my faithfulness God that will never be shaken. But what we need to consistently understand is that Christianity, the message of the Bible, is not about our faithfulness. It's not about the promises that we make to God, but it's about the promises that God has made to us through Jesus Christ. It's about the faithfulness of Jesus Christ on our behalf, not about our faithfulness.
And one of the things that I think we're seeing as we start to work through these places that Jesus was, is that ultimately Jesus was for His disciples, even though they failed in these key moments. Sometimes people conceptualize faith in Christianity as moving from one victory to another victory, one success to another success. And there's certainly a sense in which if you follow Jesus, you will become strengthened. You will maybe have a heightened awareness of your sinfulness. But what will also happen is you'll become more and more aware of how prone you are to faithlessness. You'll just have a heightened sensitivity to it.
So, Jesus goes from Jerusalem to Bethany now back to Jerusalem to the Upper Room, and then he goes out to Gethsemane, which is a garden that overlooks the city. And this is in verses 36 through 56 and this is a beautiful garden. I had a chance to go a few years ago to this garden on a trip to Israel. And by the way, as a church, we had a trip going to Israel this year that we pulled out of because of the restrictions and uncertain travel plans. But that's still happening. And if you're interested, John Delancey, Dr. John, who's a part of the church here, does this as his vocation, is still offering the trip in November. If you go to, I think it's biblicalisraeltours.com, John Delancey, you can find a trip, but it was really cool. I had a chance, and I'd never been to Israel to sit in this garden and it looks out over this city and you can sense if you're there what it may have been like for Jesus to look out at the city where he's about to be crucified in this garden.
And I'm just going to say that this was a moment of what I'm going to say is prayer with friends. So, he had refreshment with friends, he had worship with friends. Now he has prayer with friends because he goes into the garden and he asks his disciples to pray. It says this, verse 36, “Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled.”
And that word troubled is a word that we tend to think just means a little perplexed. Here's how J.B. Lightfoot defines it. And he says this, he was a Greek scholar, he says, “It describes the confused, restless, half distracted state, which is produced by a physical derangement or by mental distress as grief, shame, and disappointment.” And here's why that struck me when I read that. And that is when Jesus is said to be troubled, he was really troubled. And He takes friends and he goes to a quiet place and he says, let's pray together. And then what happens? The friends, if you remember this story, fall asleep. Have you ever fallen asleep when you're trying to pray? Yeah, I think anybody has had that experience. And so, they don't have a moment of strength, but again, a moment of weakness now.
Now, I want you just to see a couple of things. One is, that Jesus, in his hour of need, prayed with friends. One of the things that a lot of people experience when it comes to their faith journey is extreme isolation because we want to appear as if we're strong, as if we don't need people. And so, we don't invite people to pray with us when we're troubled. Even if we're in small groups, what we tend to do is we tend to say, I'm not going to share and burden people. I don't want people to think of me as weak. But if you notice, these disciples were weak, and even Jesus wanted the prayer and the moment of community around this. And the disciples, what they show here is not strength, but weakness.
And certainly, as you read through the text, this is when Judas shows up, and he turns Jesus over to the soldiers, and they march him back into Jerusalem. And in the moments just leading up to it, those who are closest to Jesus slept, and here's what you see. Judas has a big betrayal. But again, all the disciples have a smaller betrayal. And then the scene moves from the Garden of Gethsemane to Jerusalem.
And now we're in verses 57 through 75. And this is where Jesus goes between Caiaphas, his house, and a few other places. And I'm just going to say that this is his trial without friends. So, he had refreshment with friends, he had worship with friends, prayer with friends, and now he doesn't have any friends. His friends all disappear.
And again, my point in this is that when we look at this, what we see is that the disciples, despite their insistence that they had the right way to follow Jesus and could look down their noses on a woman who did it differently. In spite of their insistence on their faithfulness, in spite of their belief that they were strong, what happened instead is they were weak, and they were incapable of strength. And now they all disappear.
And you may hear this and say, well, doesn't following Christ make us strong? Doesn't exalting Christ make us strong? But actually, what is true is that acknowledging our shortcomings actually leads us to worship and leads us to a true depth of spirituality that cannot be replicated through the assertion of our strength.
Here's how a couple of different writers have put it over time. Martin Lloyd-Jones put it this way. He said, “The ultimate test of our spirituality is our amazement at the grace of God.” Think about that. My guess is very few of us would agree with that. If we're really honest, we would say the ultimate test of my spirituality is how well I follow Jesus. It's how faithful I am, how strong I am, how much better than somebody else I am. But Martin Lloyd-Jones says the ultimate test of our spirituality is our amazement at the grace of God. And what you see here is, the grace of God being shown in an incredible way. Because, again, those who had been closest to him, who were there to celebrate with him, all abandoned him.
John Newton put it this way. And John Newton is the man who wrote Amazing Grace, who is a man who traded slaves. And as he came to faith he wrote the song Amazing Grace. How sweet the sound. That saved a wretch like me, somebody who could trade slaves. That was what he was writing. Here's what he wrote, it says, “The reason God allows us to struggle with sin throughout this life is so that we can be even more amazed at His Grace.” And toward the end of his life, he wrote this. He said, “By this point, I thought I'd be different. I thought I'd always love to pray, not be jealous, or controlled by money. I thought I would have a love for God that would never grow cold.” And as he reflected on his life, he looks back and he says, “Why does God let us continue to struggle with weakness, with pride, with spiritual ineptitude? Because it makes us even more amazed at the grace of God.”
But here's how Christianity is experienced by people inside, outside the church in our day. And that is it's seen as a list of should statements. And the better we do it, keeping our should statements, and we may have different should statements than somebody else, the better we do it, keeping our should statements, the more we think God likes us. And the less well we do it, keeping our should statements, the more we think maybe God isn’t pleased with us. But there's a little piece of us that likes feeling like God isn't pleased with us because then at least we can try to do better the next time and say, now I know that God likes that I at least put in some good effort.
But this passage just rips away the should statements. She shouldn't worship God like that. She should worship God like we do. We get God because we care for the poor. We won't deny Jesus no matter what happens, because we should be faithful and we are the faithful. We should be strong enough to pray through the night. And all we do is we change our should statements. And the truth is, we're not that charitable, but we tend to be judgmental and self-justifying. We're not that faithful, but we tend to be prideful and self-promoting. We're not that strong, but we tend to be weak and self-deluded. And Jesus’ grace in going to the cross is for those of us who don't get it right.
I love this phrase that we find in Matthew 11 verse 19, it says this, “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’” Who is Jesus? A friend to those who don't have it together. And the word friend that's used here in the original language is the word philosopher. And it's the word that kind of has a connotation of brotherly love. And in Matthew 26, verse 50, the word friend is used again. But it's a different friend. This is when Jesus was talking to Judas in the garden, and he says, do what you came for. And then he says, Friend. And the word that's used here for friend is different than the word that Jesus used to describe himself in Matthew 11, words said about him in Matthew 11. And this is the word heteros, and it means a little bit more like buddy. So why do I point this out? Because Jesus is a true friend to those of us who can't be true friends to Him. And that is amazing Grace.
And if you and I get that as we approach Good Friday, Easter, then we will have a new awakening of the hour of the goodness of Jesus Christ. And what that will do is it will cause us to say it is the goodness and the grace of God that amazes me, not my goodness. And that has a couple of applications for some of us. Maybe we've always thought that it was our goodness that commended us to God that we're better than some others. And this chapter just shatters that and says, your goodness will never be enough. You need Jesus’ work on the cross as your Savior.
And even for those of us who've entered into that relationship with God through what Jesus Christ has done, what we can tend to do is say, yes, I believe that now I'm a Christian. But the reason God really likes me is I keep the shoulds instead of saying God has purposed to love me because of Jesus and what Jesus has done. Now, clearly, that doesn't mean that there are no shoulds or that we don't strive for something. But what it means is we don't get our sense of rightness because of how well we do. We get it because of what Jesus has done and nothing else. If that doesn't bring some awe to your heart or to mind, then there's a sense in which we are being prideful and self-justifying in our approach to God Himself.
God, I pray that we would be amazed by Your Grace. That we would be people who, instead of being filled with our own sense of what we do, what we could do, what we could be, that somehow makes us something that we would be filled with what Jesus has done. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.