(Text and Audio)
Title: Sorrow to Joy
This is the second time in the Gospel of Matthew that the author records Jesus predicting the suffering and resurrection of the Messiah. The first time is back in chapter 16, right after Peter correctly identifies Jesus as the Messiah.
So this is an element of Jesus’s ministry that he has kept from the apostles until the latter stages of approaching Jerusalem. Now, Jesus doesn’t actually enter Jerusalem until the beginning of chapter 21, so we still have 3 more chapters from Matthew of Jesus’s teaching, miracles, and parables, but all of these are are now building toward the inevitable confrontation with the cross in Jerusalem.
We can’t underestimate how hard it must have been for the disciples to wrap their minds around the thought that the Messiah was going to die. For the Jews, the coming Messiah was supposed to be a conquering King, reclaiming the long lost land of Israel, driving out the Roman oppressors. The the thought that the Messiah was to die was unfathomable.
Yet, here they are, in the presence of a man that is no doubt sent from God, no doubt a prophet, and he has already praised Peter when Peter correctly identified him as the Messiah.
So the disciples are left with a conundrum on their hands: They profess Jesus is the Christ, but the Christ can’t die…so what do we make of this?
Well, the first thing that comes to our minds (and let’s be honest, we have the advantage of knowing how the story ends) is that the disciples seem fixated on the wrong part of what Jesus says.
For anyone who’s seen the movie Jerry Maguire, there is that great climactic scene at the end of the film when Tom Cruise returns home after a long business trip and he confronts his wife whom he’s had marital struggles with.
He walks in the living room and says hello, and then launches into a brilliant monologue about the cynical nature of the world we live in and the fact that he’s not ready to give up on their marriage, and it’s quite a brilliant speech, and very well delivered by Tom Cruise, but right in the middle of it, his wife, played by Renee Zellwiger, says, “Shut up…just…shut up…(Can anyone finish this?) You had me at ‘hello.’”
Everything that Tom Cruise had said in that brilliant speech to his wife didn’t matter, because she couldn’t get past the “hello.” The fact that he had shown up to reconcile was enough for her, and everything else was just noise.
Well, the same thing seems to happen in a negative way to the apostles here. They are completely hung up on Jesus’s words, “and they will kill him” and, because of that, they miss the best part, “and the third day he will be raised up.”
For a moment, let’s go chase one of those infamous rabbits we talked about a couple weeks ago…
For about three years during out Wednesday night prayer meeting and Bible study downstairs here at the church we worked through a great book by J.I. Packer (and man you have all heard me quote often) titled “A Concise Theology.”
In that book we learned many things about the nature of God, the nature of man, and the way the world works around us, all according to Scripture. I remember one of the more powerful lessons we had was when we were studying the nature of the resurrection.
Packer was very keen to point out what, exactly, brought Jesus out of the grave. We see here that Jesus says he will be raised up, meaning that something outside of himself will raise him from the grave.
Does anyone know why it’s essential that Jesus didn’t raise himself from the grave? (Take answers)
So the key here is that the father showed the ultimate approval to the son in that he looked down at his dead son, approved of the work that had been done, and by HIS power, resurrected the son to life.
As we draw to a close this morning, I want to focus on this phrase that describes the disciples feelings when Jesus shares this news with them for a second time. My translation (NKJV) reads they were “exceedingly sorrowful” or “exceedingly sorry” That wording is also shared by the KJV and the ASV.
The NIV and NASB render it as “filled with grief” or “deeply grieved.”
The ESV and RSV have it as “greatly distressed”
So all of the major translations are catching the essence of how the disciples are reacting. The Greek here is “sphora lypeo” (sphore-rah lew-pay-oh) and the essence of lypeo is to make someone sorry, to cause grief, to offend someone.
Lypeo is by no means a rare word in the New Testament, it occours 30 times in the New Testament, mostly used by Matthew and Paul. But the verse I want to reference using this word is from the Gospel of John 16:20 where Jesus says, “Most assuredly, I say to you that you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; and you will be sorrowful, but you sorrow will be turned to joy.”
For the apostles, this is sad news; their leader, their Lord, their Messiah, their friend is telling them he will die. But the whole story is one of joy. The truth behind this is that for mankind to have any joy, Jesus must die. If mankind is to have any hope, Jesus must be broken. If we are to be without sin, Jesus must be made sin on the cross to bear what we are unable to bear.
As parents, and friends, we sometimes have to do painful things for what we know is the greater good. As disciples of Christ, we often have to weather the difficulty of life, and the sacrificial nature of our calling, because we are pursuing a greater good, something bigger, greater than the here and now.
Not everyone around us will understand that, sometimes our spouses and children will struggle when we make decisions that we know are right, because the right decision is quite often the hard decision, with hard consequences.
When we are faced with such times, we need to remember the whole story, how we know the way it ends.
“Consider him, who endured such opposition form sinners, that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” (Heb. 12:3)
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