SERMON MANUSCRIPT
It’s typically true that people die as they’ve lived. Those who come to the end of their lives with bitterness and regret are usually those who lived with those same qualities. Alternatively, those that approach their final years and months with faith, humility, and gratitude have probably exhibited those virtues before.
John 19 describes the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s a scene littered with plotting, suffering, mocking, screaming, crying, and bleeding. But, beyond all the brutality and injustice, we can see our Saviour dying as he lived: full of contagious compassion and selfless love.
That doesn’t surprise anyone who knew him then or knows him now. Crucified Jesus is consistent with pre-crucified Jesus. “Seeing the people [of Israel], [Jesus] felt compassion for them, because they were … like sheep without a shepherd” (Matt. 9:36). “Looking at [the rich young ruler], Jesus felt a love for him’” (Mark 10:21). “When the Lord saw [the widow at Nain, burying her only son], he felt compassion for her” (Luke 7:13). “Now before the Feast of the Passover, Jesus knowing that his hour had come … having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (John 13:1). [John 3:16] For Jesus, it was love that motivated his birth, love that coloured his life, and love that’s seen at his death. He’s consistent.
And John highlights this by contrasting our Lord’s compassion while on the cross with the opportunistic soldiers around the cross. [19:23–25a] Do they show any sympathy for the man they just hung like a sheet of drywall? Do they notice those grieving around Golgotha? No, “the soldiers [simply] did these things” (19:25a). Dispassionate. Uncaring.
“But,” John begins the stark contrast: [19:25b]. One author comments: “While the soldiers carry out their barbaric task and coolly profit from the exercise, the women wait in faithful devotion to the one whose death they can still understand only as tragedy” (Carson, John, 615). In other words, the soldiers may not care but these women sure do.
And as hard as it may be to fathom, Jesus cares even more. [19:26–27] Jesus is dying as he lived, filled with compassion and love.
CARE GIVEN
And the care given by Jesus is accentuated by the anguish he’s enduring. When I’m tired, hungry, inconvenienced, stressed, or feeling under the weather, it’s way harder for me to show patience to my kids, love to my wife, thoughtfulness to my friends, and compassion to my neighbours. When I’m not at my best, others don’t get my best.
But look at Jesus! He’s hanging on a cross, dying at the hands of the people he came to save, and bearing the sins of the world. Yet, in spite of all that, he meets needs. His eyes, blurred by the blood falling from his thorn-pierced brow, find his mother in the crowd, she who carried him, raised him, and studied him, “treasuring all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:51) and is now weeping for him.
Only a mother can imagine Mary’s grief. While Jesus is rightly called the Man of Sorrows, Mary might be the Woman of Sorrows.
Long ago she’d been told by the prophet, Simeon, that this Son of hers was going to cause a bit of a stir. “Indeed, as a result of him the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul as well!” (Luke 2:34–35 net). “He’s going to reveal hearts, renew hearts, and save hearts. But he’s also going to break your heart, Mary.”
And Jesus now sees his mother impaled with that prophetic blade and, amazingly, is more concerned for her needs than his own. And the most glaring need that she has at that moment and in that culture is physical.
Mary seems to be a widow at this point, appearing without her husband throughout the gospel accounts. In fact, the last time Joseph showed-up was around Jesus’s birth. Now, if Mary is a first-century Jewish widow, her male children would have been expected to care for her. Well, her oldest son was dying on a cross and his siblings had left: “For not even his brothers were believing in him” (Luke 7:5).
In addition to her unfathomable grief, Mary’s alone, vulnerable, and at the mercy of the world. (Think of Ruth and Naomi, destitute and fearful.) This is how Scripture describes women like her, often grouped with the fatherless, the alien, and the orphan. [Deut. 24:20; Ps. 94:6]
Jesus, despite all of this own pain, sees Mary’s neediness and vulnerability and, exercising his authority as the first-born and now-patriarch of the family, he makes sure she’s taken care of: “Jesus then saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby” (cf. 13:23)—this is how John humbly refers to himself—“he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold your son!”
He’s not merely saying, “Here’s my replacement, one you can love in my stead and who can share your sorrow.” He’s also saying, “Here’s a trustworthy man—a new family member—who is legally and officially going to adopt you as his matriarch and make sure you are provided for and cared for.”
God’s been clear: we are to respect our parents. This expectation doesn’t expire at a certain age—it shifts from obeying to honouring. We can do that in how we speak to them and about them, how we care for them and provide for them financially, relationally, physically, prayerfully. Jesus modelled this as he met Mary’s physical needs.
He also meets her spiritual needs. Remember, this may be Jesus’s mom, but she’s also a sinner for whom he is currently dying. Yes, she needs protection from the world but she also needs forgiveness from God, and that can only come through what’s happening on that cross.
How Jesus addresses his mother may prick some of our sensitivities: “Woman, behold your son!” Read in a certain way, it can almost sound chauvinistic and dismissive. But it’s neither.
Consider John 8 and the woman caught in adultery. The Lord chases off her would-be executioners and, “Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” You think he’s being condescending at that moment? Or, how about John 20, when two angels address Mary at Jesus’s tomb: “Woman, why are you weeping?” Are they mocking her? No. And then Mary turns around and Jesus is standing there—though she doesn’t recognize him in his glory—and he asks her the same question: “Woman, why are you weeping?” This can be a title of care as much as anything else. “Woman, behold your son!”
But it also may be a subtle hint to the true need being met at this moment. Jesus, doesn’t call Mary “mother,” a term of endearment that we might assume would come easily to a dying son looking at this grieving mom. Why doesn’t he? Could it be because, at that moment, he is becoming what he was born to become? Could it be because, in those final hours, their relationship is changing forever?
“Here Jesus is seen actually breaking the human relationship. At Calvary all human, natural ties were severed. From this point on, Christ will no longer be Mary’s son but her Saviour. He is no longer the son of any human; He is the world’s Saviour. … Mary as a sinner did not need the Incarnate Christ, but she did need the crucified, resurrected Christ. His Incarnation, apart from his vicarious death, never could have saved Mary, nor us. From Calvary on, believers would be united to Christ by a closer bond than the mere human, physical tie; it was to be for all the redeemed a spiritual relationship” (Straus, Listen!, 59–60).
Jesus is here seen dying as he lived: showing compassion and love. For Mary, his broken-hearted mother, he meets her physical needs and her spiritual needs.
Perhaps you’re here today and you’re like Mary, a helpless spectator to injustice, a recipient of a heart so broken you’re not sure it can be repaired. Maybe you’re like the disciple whom Jesus loved, confused and doubting, wrestling with feelings of abandonment and loneliness. Maybe you don’t know how you’re going to pay your bills, repair a relationship, repent of habitual sin, or find purpose in life. Maybe you don’t know if you have the energy to keep going. I could go on and on because we’re all so needy—physically and spiritually.
While the Lord Jesus is no longer hanging on a Roman cross, he still sees those needs, cares for those needs, loves us in spite of those needs, and can meet those needs in divine love and compassion. Not only did he die as he lived, but he now ministers in the same way. “Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you at the proper time, casting all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you” (1 Pet. 5:6–7).
Go to him with your needs, cares, worries, grief, and troubles. He knows them already, as a sympathetic high priest. Call out to him in faith, know that your greatest need has already been met! If you’re in Christ, you’ve been forgiven, washed, transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of God.
It’s sometimes helpful to triage our needs, viewing the smaller ones in light of the bigger ones. [forgiveness vs. quiz]
Our Lord was, is, and always will be a loving, compassionate, need-seeing and need-meeting God. And, as believers in Jesus Christ, our greatest needs have been eternally met. Do we have others? Yes. But let’s view them in proportion, and then run to him again, run to him with evidence fresh in our minds that he can do far more than we think or know or understand.
Here I raise my Ebenezer / Here by Thy great help I’ve come / And I hope by Thy good pleasure / Safely to arrive at home / Jesus sought me when a stranger / Wandering from the fold of God / He to rescue me from danger / Bought me with His precious blood. That’s care given. We’ve received it. Let’s remember it, and go to him for more.
CARE ASSIGNED: Love in Jesus’s Stead!
And then what? As Spiderman was famously told by his loving uncle, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Well, so too, it seems, with great love. With the reception of great love comes the great responsibility to share it. We’ve seen already in this passage the care given by Christ, but now we turn to the care assigned by Christ.
[19:27] Not only did Jesus tell Mary that he was meeting her needs—“Behold, your son!”—but here he tells John, the beloved disciple, that he’s now responsible for caring for Mary in Jesus’s absence. This is an assignment that John immediately and unhesitatingly accepts, “from that hour.” He takes her in, treats her like his family—protects her, loves her, provides for her, grieves with her, prays with her.
Jesus cares about human needs and human relationships and in this precious scene he prepares and admonishes one of his trusted and empowered followers to pick up his work when he’s gone.
And he’s done the same thing for you and me. We are to love in Jesus’s stead! The Lord loves the world, he loves the people of the world even though the people of the world did not love him first. He sees our sin-wrought needs, the greatest of which is salvation and he came to need that need.
And to his followers, to those who have acknowledged our great need and accepted his gracious care, we have an assignment. We are to extend his care, share his care, proclaim his care, model his care to a church family that still needs it and a world that is ignorant to it.
In the context of explaining his soon departure, Jesus told his disciplines: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34–35).
That’s our assignment. To care for one another, to meet the needs of one another, to encourage and serve one another in the body of Christ and preserve the unity we already have by the power of the Spirit of God.
Do we do so because we deserve it? Because we feel like it? Because it’s easy? No, no, no. We love one another because we’ve received love greater than anything we can reproduce. We care because we’ve received care. We show compassion because we’ve been shown compassion. It’s an act of obedience and worship to a God who, in Christ, has been gracious to undeserving people like us.
And we are to make disciples of all nations, we are to be witnesses for Jesus to the people of the whole world, to share the love of Christ and the eternal life he offers. Why? Because that’s the care we’ve been assigned in our Lord’s “absence.” He left us with that task, we who received that same care. We don’t evangelize out of guilt or fear, but joy and gratitude.
We are to be a people of compassion, grace, love, and sympathy because that’s how God has been to us. We are to love in Jesus’s stead. Jesus died as he lived. Will we?
Josiah has served the Oakridge Bible Chapel family as one of its elders and one of its pastoral staff members since September 2018, before which he ministered as an associate pastor to a local congregation in the Canadian prairies. Josiah's desire is to be used by God to help equip the church for ministry, both while gathered (edification) and while scattered (evangelization). He is married to Patricia, and together they have five children—Jonah, Henry, Nathaniel, Josephine, and Benjamin.
