Through Many Tribulations

Acts 14:21-23

When they had preached the gospel to that city and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra and to Iconium and to Antioch, strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God. And when they had appointed elders for them in every church, with prayer and fasting they committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

The worrying thing, of course, is this: when Paul and Barnabas laid hands on the newly appointed elders, and then left them to it, that didn’t mean they were automatically “safe.” Indeed, it probably meant that that was when new times of testing would burst in on them. That is often how it works. But Paul meant what he said in verse 22: it is through much suffering that we shall enter God’s kingdom. And sometimes the suffering comes in the form of terrible, church-dividing controversy (36).

Aaron Orendorff

There’s nothing romantic about suffering in the moment. Many beautiful and profound words may be said in expectation and reflection, but the point of suffering is just that: suffering. No matter how prepared you are or how cross-centered your theology, suffering hurts (particularly in the first round). We may arm ourselves so as not to be blindsided nor sinfully provoked, but pain is still (nonetheless) pain. This, of course, is not by defect, but by design. Suffering is supposed to hurt.

So then, what makes suffering bearable in the short term and profitable in the long? Just this: it is in the suffering that Christ is known. Paul described the pattern like this: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead” (Phil. 3:10-11). Here in v. 22, Luke echoes Paul’s sentiments: “through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.”

The journey isn’t easy. But again: that’s the point. To have a crucified King means living a crucified life.

Jesus and Isaiah 53

Acts 8:32-35

Now the passage of the Scripture that he was reading was this:

“Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter and like a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he opens not his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.”

And the eunuch said to Philip, “About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

Isaiah . . . wasn’t simply looking through a long-range prophetic telescope, seeing Jesus a few hundred years away, and describing him in cryptic poetry. Rather, he was meditating deeply on the fate of Israel in exile, and on the promises and purposes of God which remained constant despite Israel’s failure to be the light to the nations, or even to walk in the light herself. Gradually a picture took shape in his praying, meditating mind: the figure of a Servant, one who would complete Israel’s task, who would come to where Israel was, to do for Israel and for the whole world what neither could do for themselves, to bear in his own body the shame and reproach of the nations and of God’s people, and to die under the weight of the world’s wickedness.

Jesus was the one through whom the slow and winding story of God’s people had reached its destination, and with it the moment of redemption for the whole world (134-5).

Vindicated

Acts 9:3-6

Now as he went on his way, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. And falling to the ground he heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” And he said, “Who are you, Lord?” And he said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.”

Acts 9:15-16

But the Lord said to [Ananias], “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.”

D. A. Carson, For the Love of God (Vol. 1)

For [Paul], the notion of a crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms. Messiahs rule, they triumph, they win. The Law insists that those who hang on a tree are cursed by God. . . . But now on the Damascus Road, Saul meets the resurrected, glorified Jesus. . . . If Jesus were alive and glorified, then somehow his death on the cross did not prove he was damned. Far from it: the claim of believers that God had raised him from the dead, and that they had seen him, must be true—and that could only mean that God had vindicated Jesus. Then what on earth did his death mean?

From that vantage point, everything looked different. If Jesus was under the curse of God when he died, yet was vindicated by God himself, he must have died for others. Somehow his death absorbed the righteous curse of God that was due other and canceled it out. . . . Grant that Jesus is alive and vindicated, and everything changes (July 22).

The Death of God’s Son

Matthew 27:45-46 & 50-54

Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” . . . And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many. When the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe and said, “Truly this was the Son of God!”

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

Part of the whole point of the cross is that there the weight of the world’s evil really did converge upon Jesus, blotting out the sunlight of God’s love as surely as the light of day was blotted out for three hours. . . . Jesus is “giving his life as a ransom for many” (20.28), and the sin of the “many,” which he is bearing, has for the first and only time in his experience caused a cloud to come between him and the father he loved and obeyed, the one who had been delighted in him. . . .

Of course, Psalm 22 [which Jesus is quoting, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”] goes on, after a long catalogue of suffering, to speak of God’s vindication of the sufferer, and of the establishment of God’s kingdom (Psalm 22.22-31). But that isn’t what Matthew wants us to think here. . . .

Jesus’ death—described by Matthew as “breathing his last” or “giving up his spirit”—is the point towards which the gospel has been moving all along. . . . [Jesus] takes with him, into the darkness of death, the sin of the world: my sin, your sin, the sin of countless millions, the weight that has hung around the world’s neck and dragged it down to destruction. . . .

The disciples, including the women watching from a distance, see only darkness, gloom and death. But Matthew’s reader already knows what they will discover three days later: that this death was not the failure of Jesus to show himself as the son of God, but the way in which his identity, vocation and mission were confirmed and accomplished. As we join our voice with the centurion and others, in declaring that Jesus was indeed God’s son, so we commit ourselves to living by that faith, and to learning every day, by looking at the son, more about the love of the father (190-3).

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.”)

How the Kingdom Came . . . and Comes . . . and Will Come

Matthew 27:27-31 & 35-38

Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor’s headquarters, and they gathered the whole battalion before him. And they stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on his head and put a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him, they mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And they spit on him and took the reed and struck him on the head. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the robe and put his own clothes on him and led him away to crucify him. . . .

And when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots. Then they sat down and kept watch over him there. And over his head they put the charge against him, which read, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.” Then two robbers were crucified with him, one on the right and one on the left.

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

What for Pilate and the soldiers was Jesus’ “crime”—his claim to be Israel’s true king—was for Matthew the sober truth. And the crucifixion was the means by which his kingdom would be established. . . .

Why? Because the kingdom Jesus had spoken of, from the Sermon on the Mount onwards, was never a kingdom to be established and maintained by military force. If it was to be God’s kingdom, it would come about by God’s means; and the means that the true God chooses to use are the means of self-giving love. . . .

The point of it all is this: Jesus is leading the way he had spoken of from the beginning, the way of being God’s true Israel, the light of the world. He himself is set on a hill, unable now to remain hidden (5.14). This is how he is shinning the light of God’s love into the dark corners of the world: by taking the evil of the world, the hatred and cruelty and unthinking mockery of the world, the gratuitous violence, bullying and torture that still defaces the world, and letting it do its worst to him. Never let it be said that the Christian faith is an airy-fairy thing, all about having wonderful inner, spiritual experiences, and not about the real world. This story takes us to the very heart of what Christianity is all about; and here we meet, close up and raw, the anger and bitterness of the world, doing its worst against one who embodies and represents the love of the creator God himself (182-3).

Aaron Orendorff

What does it mean to serve a king enthroned on a cross? What does it mean to live as the citizen of a kingdom that comes not by taking power but by surrendering it, not by enacting violence but by suffering it?

The point certainly isn’t masochism—pain for the sake of pleasure. Knowing why we suffer doesn’t make suffering any less awful.

No, the point is found by recognizing that God’s pattern—the way His kingdom comes—is through the cross. God’s kingdom does not erase evil; it subverts and redeems it. As Dorothy Sayers wrote, “[On the cross] God did not abolish the fact of evil: He transformed it. He did not stop the Crucifixion: He rose from the dead.”

For Jesus’ followers then this means that the kingdom must advance not in victory and triumph—or at least not by what the world would call victory and triumph—but by reenacting and reembodying (much like celebrating communion) the death and resurrection of God’s Son. The kingdom came and comes and will come through paradoxical cycle of death and resurrection.

“From now on you will see . . .”

Matthew 26:62-66

And the high priest stood up and said, “Have you no answer to make? What is it that these men testify against you?”

But Jesus remained silent.

And the high priest said to him, “I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.”

Jesus said to him, “You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

Then the high priest tore his robes and said, “He has uttered blasphemy. What further witnesses do we need? You have now heard his blasphemy. What is your judgment?”

They answered, “He deserves death.”

Daniel 7:13-14

I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.

Psalm 110:1

The LORD says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”

Aaron Orendorff

The question circling Jesus and his revolutionary, “temple-destroying,” kingdom-of-God movement was a relatively simple one: “How will the kingdom come? How will God’s Messiah—the king and rightful Son—usher in his reign?”

Jesus answer to Caiaphas’ charges and the narrative that follows reveals the answer: “From now on you will see . . .”

What will they see?

For Caiaphas, the Council, the crowds and Roman soldiers, what they will see is a man crushed—utterly decimated—by the world’s most terrifying symbol of imperial and religious power—the cross. And yet, what Jesus says they will see is God’s king enthroned, ascending on the clouds of heaven, ruling and reigning over a kingdom that will never end, never perish and never be destroyed.

Gethsemane is where to go.

Matthew 26:26-29

Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, “Sit here, while I go over there and pray.”

And taking with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, he began to be sorrowful and troubled.

Then he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with me.”

And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.”

And he came to the disciples and found them sleeping. And he said to Peter, “So, could you not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

Again, for the second time, he went away and prayed, “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.”

And again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. So, leaving them again, he went away and prayed for the third time, saying the same words again.

Then he came to the disciples and said to them, “Sleep and take your rest later on. See, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us be going; see, my betrayer is at hand.”

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

Jesus had been sad at various times. He’d been frustrated with [the disciples] for not understanding what he was talking about. He’d been cross with the people who were attacking him, misunderstanding him, accusing him of all sorts of ridiculous things. There had even been tension with his own family. But basically he’d always been the strong one. Always ready with another story, another sharp one-liner to turn the tables on some probing questioner, another soaring vision of God and his kingdom. It was always they who had the problems, he who had the answers.

And now this.

Jesus was like a man in a waking nightmare. He could see, as though it was before his very eyes, the cup. . . . The cup of God’s wrath.

He didn’t want to drink it. He badly didn’t want to. Jesus at this point was no hero-figure, marching boldly towards his oncoming fate. . . . He was a man, as we might say, in melt-down mode. He had looked into the darkness and seen the grinning faces of all the demons in the world looking back at him. And he begged and begged his father not to bring him to the point of going through with it.

And the answer was No.

Actually, we can see the answer being given, more subtly than that implies, as the first frantic and panicky prayer turns into the second and then the third. . . . if it has to be, “may your will be done.”

[W]hen we find the ground giving way beneath our feet, as sooner or later we shall, Gethsemane is where to go. That is where we find that the Lord of the world, the one to whom is not committed all authority, has been there before us (159-61).

“because of our sins”

Matthew 26:21-25

And as they were eating, he said, “Truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.” And they were very sorrowful and began to say to him one after another, “Is it I, Lord?” He answered, “He who has dipped his hand in the dish with me will betray me. The Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.” Judas, who would betray him, answered, “Is it I, Rabbi?” He said to him, “You have said so.”

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

[I]n the middle of the picture once more, almost serene though deeply sad, is Jesus himself, arranging a secret Passover celebration with an unnamed supporter in the city itself, sitting with the Twelve and telling them what was about to happen. The sorrow of his approaching ordeal was overlaid with the sorrow of betrayal. And in that moment we glimpse one element of the meaning of the cross.

Jesus was going to his death wounded by the wounds common to humanity. Greed, lust, ambition: all kinds of natural drives and desires turned in on themselves rather than doing the outward-looking work the creator intended them to. When we say that Jesus died “because of our sins,” we don’t just mean that in some high-flown, abstract sense. We mean that what put him on the cross was precisely the sins that we all not only commit but wallow in (152).

The Cup and the Ransom

Matthew 20:17-19, 22 & 25-28 (cf. vv. 17-28)

And as Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the twelve disciples aside, and on the way he said to them, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem. And the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified, and he will be raised on the third day.”

Jesus answered, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?” They said to him, “We are able.”

But Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

Jesus’ curious answer to [John and James] opens a very different window: on the biblical roots of the calling which he was following. The Old Testament prophets speak darkly about the “cup of YHWH’s wrath” (Isaiah 51.17, 22; Jeremiah 25.15-29; and several other passages). These passages talk of what happens when the one God, grieving over the awful wickedness of the world, steps in at last to give the violent and bloodthirsty, the arrogant and oppressors, the reward for their ways and deeds. It’s as though God’s holy anger against such people is turned into wine: dark, sour wine which will make them drunk and helpless. They will be forced to “drink the cup,” to drain to the dregs the wrath of the God who loves and vindicates the weak and helpless.

The shock of this passage—and it becomes more shocking as we go forward from here—is that Jesus speaks of drinking this cup himself. . . . Jesus saw his approaching fate as the payment [i.e., the “ransom”] that would that would set free those who were enslaved in sin and wickedness, not least those who were in the grips of the lust for power and position—yes, people like James and John (60-61).

Carrying the Sheep Back

Luke 15:5

And when he [the shepherd] has found it [the lost sheep], he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing.

Kenneth E. Bailey, The Cross & the Prodigal

After finding the lost sheep the shepherd’s hardest job was still before him because he had yet to carry the heavy beast back to the flock. . . . The shepherd takes his heavy burden “rejoicing” and accepts this backbreaking task happily. . . . When the lost is found, the task of restoration has barely begun. . . . [This] is a crucial theme within which lies the cross (31-2; emphasis original).

Suffering, the Cross and the Resurrection

Timothy Keller, Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

The Cross and Suffering (pg. 30-31)

If we again ask the question: “Why does God allow evil and suffering to continue?” and we look at the cross of Jesus, we still do not know what the answer is. However, we now know what the answer isn’t. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us. It can’t be that he is indifferent or detached from our condition. God takes our misery and suffering so seriously that he was willing to take it on himself. Albert Camus understood this when he wrote:

[Christ] the god-man suffers took, with patience. Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to him since he suffers and dies. The night on Golgotha is so important in the history of man only because, in its shadows, the divinity ostensibly abandoned its traditional privilege, and lived through to the end, despair included, the agony of death. Thus is explained the “lama sabachthani [why have you forsaken me?]” and the frightful doubt of Christ in agony.

The Resurrection and Suffering (pg. 32)

The Biblical view of things is resurrection – not a future that is just a consolation for the life we never had but a restoration of the life you always wanted. This means that every horrible thing that ever happened will not only be undone and repaired but will in some way make the eventual glory and joy even greater.

Dostoyevsky put it perfectly when he wrote:

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the important and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed,; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.