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This Good Friday, we gather to remember Jesus brutally flogged and crucified. How can a day of such evil done to a man be considered good? And why was Jesus, the Son of God, so powerless on this day? Reverend Wei brings us God's word.

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Good morning, brothers and sisters, and blessed Good Friday. This morning scripture reading will be taken from the Gospel of Mark, chapter 15, verses 33 to 39, and Mark chapter 16, verses 1 through 8. Mark chapter 15, verse 33. The death of Jesus. And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the 9th hour. And at the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabbatani, which means, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And some of the bystanders hearing it said, Behold, he is calling Elijah. And someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a rig, and gave it to him to drink, saying, Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down. And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. And when the centurion who stood facing him saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, Truly this man was the son of God. Mark chapter 16, verses 1 to 8, the resurrection. When the Sabbath was passed, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. And they were saying to one another, Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb? And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back. It was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell the disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you. And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

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Church, this Friday morning we are gathered here to remember a day where there was a miscarriage of justice and of brutality committed against one man. This man was abandoned by all his disciples. He was mocked by everyone. Roman soldiers, Jewish leaders, passersby, even criminals who were punished alongside him. He will face the intense agony of flogging by the Roman flagrant, which is a whip with several leather straps, each tight with metal balls or broken nails or broken bones, designed to inflict extreme pain and injuries, causing internal bruising on the one hand, and on the other, tearing skin and flesh, and reducing the man, the man to a bloody pulp. Many will die simply from being flogged alone, but this man will be alive for what comes next. Placing a crown of thorns on his head to cause more pain as well as insult and mockery for this purported king of the Jews. This man will be asked to drag his own cross to Calvary. Which he obviously couldn't carry for long after that ruthless scourging. And thus required the help of some man who was just passing by. And after dragging this cross up the hill of Calvary, he was finally nailed to the cross, lifted up, and left to suffer excruciating and unimaginable pain that lasted several hours before he breathed his last breath. And we call this Friday good. Which sounds like a cruel game of opposites or a perverse sense of humor. But this was no ordinary man, right? We are gathered here because this was Jesus called the Christ, the savior of the world. And Friday, this Friday is not Good Friday because of the brutality against Jesus or that he was utterly humiliated and executed like a scum of Roman society. No, it is because of what he accomplished on the cross for the sake of the world. And so this Good Friday's reading focuses on the last three hours of Jesus' life before he dies. And it also takes a peek into Resurrection Sunday where three women find the tomb empty. In Mark chapter 15, verse 33, we read that when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. Jesus was crucified at the third hour, which is 9 a.m. for us, right? And three hours has passed. And now we are at the sixth hour, which is uh noon, right? Uh where it is also the brightest time of the year. And yet there was darkness over the whole land. And the darkness stayed for three hours.

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Right?

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This darkness was not to provide shade for Jesus, although I'm sure that would have been welcome. But this darkness was about God's judgment. Uh, we read that in Amos chapter 8, verses 9 and 10. On that day, declares the Lord, I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning, all your songs into lamentation. I'll bring sackcloth on every waist and boldness on every head. I will make it like the morning of an for an only son and the end of it like a bitter day. This darkness over the whole land was God's judgment over the whole land, symbolically saying that this was God's judgment over all of humanity. This was a time of reckoning where the sins of everyone on earth is being accounted for. But instead of matting out judgment fairly, instead of matting out judgment on each individual, all the sins of the world was laid on one man who was hung on the cross. So we read in 2 Corinthians 5 19. In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them. Instead, he counted all of our trespasses against Jesus. And the tragic consequence for Jesus is that because he bore the burden of the sins of the world, there was a separation between him and the Holy God as God poured out his wrath on Jesus. Jesus suffered an abandonment from his heavenly father, and the anguish was profound and unimaginable. It was so deep and so cutting that Jesus cried with a loud voice, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Reading like that really doesn't do it justice. That cry is like a scream or a streak. Jesus on the cross was screaming out loud. Which, first of all, should almost be impossible for someone who was flocked and then crucified for the last six hours. You have been so excruciating that even drawing a small breath at this point would have been terrible. Much less gathered enough air and enough energy to cry out. Has he cracked? Did God fail him? Why has God abandoned him? Jesus was quoting Psalm 32, uh verses 1 and 2 says, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me from the words of my groaning? Oh my god, I cry by day, but you do not answer. And by night, and by night, but but I do I find no rest. Um, the psalm ends on a triumphal note, of course, which Jesus would have known and was pointing towards. But that fact should not blunt the terror Jesus was feeling right there and then. Jesus was clearly in profound anguish with his sense of abandonment. Uh he is screaming, My God, my God, because that was his rawest emotions at that time. He was beaten, he was mocked, he was flogged, and then crucified. But as agonizing as those things were, they were not cause for him to cry out. And he was no stranger to being abandoned, right? All his disciples fled. They all denied him, they left him, they abandoned him. And even then, there was no cause for crying out. But this was something completely different. He was abandoned by none other than God the Father. But notice how he chooses Psalm 22 and he cries out, my God, my God. And that is covenantal language right there, where God says to his covenantal people, I will be your God and you will be my people. And the interesting thing here is Timothy Keller made this observation. Every person in history in the history of the world up to now and since can be assured of this, right? If you give yourself over to God, if you obey God, God will be with you. That is a covenantal promise. I'll be your God and you'll be my people. But when Jesus obeyed God, he was abandoned. And yet it is precisely at this point when Jesus was forsaken, then that we, you and I, were reconciled to God. Instead of condemnation, we are declared righteous before God. Though Jesus was forsaken, we were accepted. And for that reason and that purpose, Jesus obeyed God despite knowing what would happen. Right? He would ex he knew that he will experience the alienation from God. He knew all these things going into Calvary. And yet he obeyed anyway. He obeyed anyway. For your sake and mine, he obeyed God to the point of death, refusing even to come down from the cross. Actually, right from the beginning of his crucifixion, people were already mocking him, right? And they were using such words as, you know, you who would destroy the temple and rebuild in three days. This is in Mark 15, uh, verses 29 to 32. Save yourself. Come down from the cross. Verse 31. So also the chief priest with the scribes mocked him to one another, saying, He saved others, he cannot save himself. Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down from the cross and that we may see and believe. And even our reading this morning, we we see the mockery continue. When Jesus is at the threshold of his life, he's gonna pass over. People are still mocking him, right? Saying that, oh, he is calling out to Elijah. No, quick, let's bring in uh sour wine, right? This vinegar uh wine to let him to drink, right? And he says, wait, let us see whether Elijah will come and take him down. This man was not offering Jesus a drink out of the goodness of his heart, he wanted to prolong his life and prolong his torture to drag it out so that they can see if Elijah will actually come and save him. He was treating this whole thing as a joke. But if we take a step back, actually they make quite a good point, isn't it? Why does Jesus not save himself? If he is who he claimed to be, surely he can do it with ease, right? Surely he would have put on uh a show, even this is his greatest miracle yet, right? He could have given what the people wanted, a miracle so huge that nobody can deny that he is the Son of God. And he could have shut them up in an instant. Instead, he just hung there as powerless as anyone on a cross that day. As if to admit that he was a fraud after all, and he deserved all the mockery that was coming his way. But you see, the people were missing the point, and asking that question misses the point of Jesus' crucifixion. They thought they were executing a blasphemer, they thought they were getting rid of a popular maverick that was threatening their religious order. They thought just because Jesus was hanging and dying on the cross that it meant that they were right, they were vindicated. That Jesus is just a powerless, sad sort fading into obscurity. But Jesus was still on the cross, not because he was powerless to save himself, not because he couldn't get down, but because it was God's will for him to be on the cross for the sake of the world. Saving himself wasn't the point, saving the world was, and ironically, though he may have looked powerless at that time, he was accomplishing something for us for which we are entirely powerless to do for ourselves. He was gaining for us salvation from sin and death. It was for your sake and mine that he was still on the cross. Even when everyone was taunting him, taunting him and mocking him. Love kept him there. And while everyone else saw it as a mere execution of a common criminal, Jesus understood that he was the ultimate and perfect sacrifice on behalf of the world. And far from being powerless, it was a display of the power of God on that wretched cross. Of course, all this could just be a well-meaning gesture that is otherwise empty of real substance, right? So what if a man dies on a cross? That was 2,000 years ago, right? We don't have to be bothered with it anymore, right? And so what if he thought he did it for me? How do we know that there really was power in Christ crucified and that it was not just some wishful thinking? How do we know any of this is really God's will? Of course, we have the privilege of knowing the end of the story, right? We took a sneak peek just now at the event on Sunday after Jesus' crucifixion. Uh, I'm not gonna go too deep into it, but in the last chapter of Mark's gospel, we read that three women uh and followers of Jesus went on a Sunday to the tomb to finish up the burial uh rites for Jesus, right? And to their surprise, the huge stone that was covering the entrance of the tomb was rolled away. And an angel was there to tell them, Jesus is risen. He is not here. And actually, more astoundingly, he says, See the place where they laid him. The stone was not rolled away for Jesus' benefit, right? The stone was not rolled away to let Jesus out, right? He could have just walked out if he wanted to, right? Um it was not for his benefit. The stone was not rolled away to let Jesus out, but to let people in. Then the angel was asking the three women to go in, see the place where they led him. And later on, the other disciples will come running to the tomb to see for themselves as well, to go in and to verify for themselves that Jesus was really not there, that he has indeed risen. And the antitomb and the resurrection of uh of Christ is God's vindication of Jesus, that he truly was who he said he was, and all that he did on the cross was indeed effectual. Jesus is truly the Son of God who was able to take on all of our sins as the perfect sacrifice so that by his blood we may all receive the eternal life found in his resurrection because of the empty tomb. This Friday is indeed good. It is good because uh and we hear echoes of this uh in um Genesis 50, right? Where Joseph realized and he tells his brothers in uh Genesis 50, verse 20, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive. And so it was here on Good Friday. They meant evil against Jesus, but God meant it for good. To bring it about that anyone who believes in Jesus shall be saved. And so this is Good Friday. What was meant for evil against Jesus, God meant it for good for the world. Instead of you and me facing the punishment that we deserve for our sins, God laid it all on Jesus Christ alone, who willingly walked the road marked with suffering because of his love for us. That for our sake he made himself to be seen who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. This is the suffering servant, the son of man who came and gave his life as a ransom for many, who died so that we may have life. He faced cruelty and anguish, and more profoundly, he faced abandonment from God so that we could be reconciled to God and in fact come to God freely. And in the final moment uh of Jesus' life, uh, we read in uh today's uh chapter, uh, Mark chapter 15, verses 37 and 38. Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last, and the curtain of the temple was torn into from top to bottom. This is the curtain that you know kept the holy of holies away from the people, right in the center of the temple, right? Uh access was limited only to the high priest. But Jesus tore that curtain, and now we may enter it freely by the blood of Jesus. And I had a chance to visit uh a Syrian Orthodox church in Singapore called Matoma Church. Uh, this was part of my field education when I was studying in TTC. Before the service starts, they have a huge curtain that was drawn on the on the chancel, right? Everything behind here would be hidden from the people. And when the service starts, the curtain is drawn and they begin to sing their liturgy. Um, it is not because it is the start of a show that they're putting, so they now draw the curtain and now the the show has begun, right? It was meant to symbolize Jesus' tearing of the curtain so that now access to God is given to everyone in church. Everyone can freely come into the Holy of Holies to worship God. And the image of the curtains being drawn as we begin worship service that day really stayed with me after all these years, and you know. It's because of what Christ did on Good Friday that there is now no more barrier between God and us. We can all freely go to Him. And so as we are gathered here to observe Good Friday, Jesus is once again communicating his gospel and his love to us through his word. And it may be a word that you have heard for the first time today. It may be one which we have heard 10 times, 20 times, even 30 times already. For some, it might feel like watching the safety instructions or the safety video on airplanes before you take off. Normally they have to go through this whole show you the seat buckle, show you what to do, right? The first time I sat through it, I was panicking, man. Like they were going so fast, I couldn't catch everything that they were saying. I thought this is so important. My life depends on it, and yet I understood nothing. Tried to read the manual, didn't understand what was going on. And I keep thinking to myself, what if my life jacket is not there? What if only my life jacket is missing? What if my oxygen mask doesn't fall? Right? Of course, after a few times of flying, um it is so boring now that I don't even pay attention to it. And for many of us, it's sometimes like this, right? We come uh for Good Friday service, we come for Easter, Sunday we come for Christmas. You know, we've been here so many times, right? And sometimes it feels like I've heard this a hundred times already. I probably don't need to hear it again. Yet familiarity doesn't necessarily have to breed contempt, right? Um, and I think it might be more akin to celebrating, say, a wedding anniversary, right? Where every year you intentionally spend time to celebrate your marriage. You remember how you get to know each other, you remember why you fell in love, you remember the grace of God who brought you together and how you have grown together as a couple. And I I trust and I hope that today, and also on Sunday, when we come together again for Easter, that it will be like that, that we come together to once again remember what God has done for us. You know, throughout Jesus' crucifixion, we read different groups of people taunting them, right? And uh Mark uses this a lot, right? They were seeing Jesus or they were waiting to see Jesus come down to save himself, right? They even say come down so that we will see and believe. Right? There's a motive of seeing Jesus, and more importantly, it betrays the condition of their hearts because throughout the Gospel of Mark, they were seeing without perceiving, right? Jesus was right in front of them, but they could not perceive who he truly is. They were spiritually blind, but you know what is fascinating? One person saw rightly, and of all people, it was a Roman centurion. Uh, in in verse 39 of our passage, uh, the centurion who stood facing Jesus saw that in this way Jesus breathed his last. He uttered a loud cry and then he passed on, right? Saw that in this way he breathed his last. He said, Truly, this man was the son of God. And so the message of Good Friday caused us to see Jesus for who he really is, in order that we may truly respond to him and receive his gift. And so for us today, what do you see at Calvary? What do you see at Calvary? Uh, our eyes glazed over with contempt or boredom, or do we see as a centurion saw, this man is the son of God. Do we see Jesus for who he really is or what he really has done for us at Calvary? Because Jesus at Calvary shows us for sermon reflection today three things, right? That he is a God who loves unconditionally. As we see Jesus on Good Friday, we are gazing at the wonder of the cross, at Christ crucified, at his display of unconditional love for you and me. There's no one here that God does not love. Everyone is loved by Jesus who was willing to be hung on the cross for our sake. And some of us may think that we are unworthy of love. Where nobody is, we are unimportant to everyone and to God. We may have been rejected, we may have been despised, shunned, we may think that we are invisible to people around us and even to God. Maybe God has forgotten about me. He doesn't care about me. Or we think we have messed up so many times in life. We are so flawed, so broken that Jesus couldn't accept me. I am too stained, too dirty for Jesus to accept me. Good Friday shows us that Jesus sees all of us as precious. So precious that he willingly laid down his life and took out the punishment for us. At the cross, Jesus extends his arms to anyone who will look at him, who will come to him and acknowledge that he is Lord and Savior. And on Good Friday, we are called to look at him with fresh eyes and to see his love for each of us. A love that is unconditional, that treasures us and accepts us. A love that seeks to transform us and give us a new life in him so that we may truly flourish as his people. And so that's the first thing we see: a God who loves unconditionally. Second, we see a God who says powerfully and says freely. He lovingly invites us to come with nothing in our hands. Because there's nothing we can do, nothing we can bring to Jesus that can earn his salvation. Which is probably quite a jarring message for many Singaporeans who espouse these ideal ideals of meritocracy, right? That I need to work for it myself. And for better or for worse, um, meritocracy creates a lot of pride in us, making us think that we are capable of doing anything and everything for ourselves by our own efforts. And sometimes we might even think, we don't really need God. Um some might think, I can't do anything for God. I don't have enough merits. But the good news is that we are not saved by our works, but purely by what he did on the cross on Good Friday. We don't contribute anything to our salvation, right? There's no need to get our life together before Jesus can uh bring uh bring us into church and uh give us salvation. Right? He did what we were all powerless to do, and he gives his salvation and life freely to those who believe in him. So a God of love, a God who saves powerfully and freely. Lastly, a God who is trustworthy, and the empty tomb proves that. In fact, it is the basis of our Christian faith that the crucifixion and the resurrection are real events that happen as God acted in human history. It all happened in space, time, and history. Right? And we know that He is a God who is trustworthy to follow. If you're here for Monday, Thursday service last uh last night, we you would have heard from last week's sermon from uh Pastor Richard that you know God caused us to courageously identify ourselves with Jesus, who caused us to take up our cross and to follow him. And it is daunting. Most of us would rather just hide the fact that we are Christians, we don't want to expose ourselves, we are scared that it will bring uh you'll bring shame to our name or our reputation if we do something wrong. Uh but Jesus obeyed God fully despite knowing what he would have to go through. Because he trusted in God's perfect plan. And indeed, God did not abandon Jesus to the grave but raised him up and glorified him. And so Jesus at Calvary on Good Friday gives us an example of what it means to trust in God's good and perfect will. He is trustworthy. The resurrection of Jesus, the first fruit of new creation, gives us this assurance that we can trust God. Trust him enough to follow him wherever he calls us to. Trust him enough to obey his calling and to fulfill his purposes. Trust him enough to know that as we obey and serve him, our future is sure and certain. So God, sorry, Jesus is a God who loves unconditionally, who saves freely, and who is trustworthy. And so as we observe Good Friday today, may we see Jesus afresh and see him clearly. That we may gaze upon Jesus crucified and grasp how high, how wide, and how deep is his love for us. May we be filled with thanksgiving and praise for his free gift of salvation. And may we be encouraged to follow Jesus' footsteps and to entrust all that will happen to us in our lives here on earth.