The Irony of the Cross

Matthew 27:39-43

And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”

So also the chief priests, with the scribes and elders, mocked him, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him. For he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’”

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

Now, in almost the exactly the same tone of voice [as tempter in Matthew 4], we find the mockers challenging him: If you really are God’s son, why don’t you do what you said—destroy the Temple and rebuild it? If you really are God’s son, why don’t you come down from the cross? If you really are God’s son, why doesn’t God deliver you? Surely he can’t want you to be hanging there in agony? Surely he doesn’t want you to . . . die?

Now . . . we see where it was all leading. Opposition and rejection from his own people combined with the hared and anger of the non-Jewish world put Jesus on the cross, and this was in fact the hidden secret of his world public career. Jesus didn’t, as it were, have an early period of success followed by a later period of failure and defeat. . . .

From his baptism onwards he had know what lay ahead: a path that went down into the deep water, like Israel going into the Red Sea. He had trusted, not that God would deliver him by taking him back again to the dry land from which he’d come, but that God would take him through the water and up the other side, leading him of to the promised land that lay ahead. This was the true-Israel path, the Exodus path, the path that led through death itself to a new world, a new life, the other side. He wasn’t simply going to defeat the Romans, or for that matter the chief priests. He was going to defeat death itself (186-8).

Aaron Orendorff

The “irony of the cross” (as D. A. Carson and others have called it) rests like a thick, blanketing fog over the words of Jesus’ mockers.

V. 40: “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself!”

Of course, what we, as Matthew’s readers know from the perspective of Easter morning, is that on the cross God’s true temple—the body of His son, the meeting place of God and man—was utterly destroyed and through the resurrection eschatologically “rebuilt.”

V. 42: “He saved others; he cannot save himself.”

Again, from the perspective behind the curtain, it was only by not saving himself that Jesus could ultimately save others.

V. 43: “He trusts in God; let God deliver him now . . .”

Jesus’ trust in God (as Gesemene reveals) is precisely why his Father did not deliver him.

Finally, vv. 40 and 42 identify Jesus as “the Son of God” and the “King of Israel,” which the cross, the crowds assume, nullifies and disproves.

Yet the mystery of cross is that it is because Jesus is God’s Son and Israel’s true King that he cannot (or perhaps better, will not) come down. (Later, in v. 54, a Roman centurion—the last person who should have understood—will be the first to recognize and confess: “Truly this was the Son of God.”)