The Kiss of Death

0:00Okay, if you have your Bibles this morning, turn to the Gospel of Matthew. We're going to be in chapter 26 as we were last week. And I'm going to ask that you stand as I read verses 47 through 56, which will be our text this morning. And then we will go through these verses and see what God has in store for us this morning. Okay. While he was still speaking, Judas came, one of the twelve, and with him a great crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priest and the elders of the people. Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, The one I will kiss is the man. Seize him. And he came up to Jesus at once and said, Greetings, Rabbi. And he kissed him. Jesus said to him, Friend, do what you came to do. Then they came up and laid hands on Jesus and seized him. And behold, one of those who were with Jesus stretched out his hand and drew his swore a sword and struck the servant of the high priest and cut off his ear. Then Jesus said to him, Put your sword back into its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the scriptures be fulfilled that it must be so? At that hour Jesus said to the crowds, Have you come out as against a robber with swords and clubs to capture me? Day after day I sat in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me. But all this has taken place that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled. Then all the disciples left him and fled. You have heard the inspired, infallible word of Almighty God, which our Lord Jesus Christ said is truth, truth that cannot fail, truth that cannot be broken. Please receive it as such this morning. And all the people said, Thanks be to God. You may be seated. You have to hopefully bear with me as I uh my voice is a little bit shaky this morning. I've had this nagging cough for several weeks now, and I'm trying to talk just a little bit softer so I can make it through this without too much of stumble. So let's get started. We are going to walk through this section. It's very interesting, and this morning I mentioned uh at the beginning that there is one particular verse and it's in Mark, and we will get there at some point at the end. Uh, that's actually a very strange verse, and we're going to look at it in some detail when I close this message. But let me just get started with um with this little uh introduction. I hope you can take your mind and wrap around uh the situation uh in the Garden of Gethsemane. Uh, we had Brother Geraldo uh do a wonderful job last week as Jesus was praying in Gethsemane. Now we're taking it a step further in the rest and the betrayal of Jesus. But I want your minds to kind of wander back in that time. And uh so I'm gonna start this off with a little bit of a talk about uh um a place on our property that has a long corridor of Yopons that form a tunnel that you you walk through. And as you approach the curve, there's a gnarled tree with a hole near the top where the bats come out in the evening. And I sometimes walk down that corridor at a brisk pace, uh hoping to get through the wing creatures uh that uh hopefully won't mistake me as a mosquito. Um I don't uh I haven't seen as as many of them as I used to, but uh they used to come out in in and there was 10 or 15 of them at certain times, right, at the evening. And uh uh this area has just a little bit of eeriness to it as you're walking through it, especially on a full moon or a dark night, uh, and you possibly don't have a strong light and it's dim, and you get that that a little bit of an eerie feeling. And as we gaze back on this the the property out here, and we see those large grapevines that hang up into those uh trees on the on the on the top that run along the ground, and also the ones that run along the ground uh waiting to grab some innocent bystander and coiling them up and dragging them into the woods. Actually, when I'm mowing, I run over those vines and I see them running along the the ground, and there's just that s a little bit of eeriness that goes with that kind of stuff. And and so as I tell you this, you probably will never walk on the backside of my property, or you won't travel to the north end of our church property, or at least without holding a machete, or in Cade's and Caleb's and Isaac's case, a butterfly knife, or a pair of nunchucks. So I just want us to, our minds to drift a little bit and understand the Garden of Gethsemane here. And uh so I cannot help but associate that vision with the a biblical account of of Jesus, our our Savior. The arrest took place at night because it was the night before Passover, and there was a full moon. And so the arrest apparently took place on the slope of the Mount of Olives near the Garden of Gethsemane. And the the uh if you were to see this the city of Jerusalem on one side, the garden is you would go through the brook Khedron and uh and then you would come to the Garden of Gethsemane. And then in Jesus' day, the Mount of Olives was covered with these ancient olive trees. And if you've ever seen those ancient olive trees in Israel, either in pictures, um, or I'll tell you a little story in a minute about Pam and I being there, uh they're very gnarled. And uh they they're big and they have holes in them, they're very knotty, and most of those trees were cut down uh for firewood uh when the Romans besieged Jerusalem uh back or some three decades uh uh later, but they were still standing when Jesus uh and his disciples went there, and they were casting their weird shadows uh in the moonlight to set the stage for the arrest of our Lord. And there in some sense was that same eeriness that I get, and maybe you might have it if you walk through that corridor on our property, uh, that eeriness about that night with the moonlight and those olive trees that uh that have the big holes in them, and the they're all wound up, and uh it's just a uh a little bit of a a weird feeling when you're standing before some of that kind of stuff. I know Martin Luther at one time said that as he walked, and in fact it was the day that um that that our Lord convicted him, and uh it was about this weird path that he walked through with all of these gnarly trees. And I can remember back in the early 80s, Pam and I standing in the Garden of Gethsemane, and I'd never paid that much attention to it because it was in the daytime, uh, attention of the uh of what it might be like at night. Uh but we were there watching a couple of our friends get married in the Garden of Gethsemane. And you could see those big olive trees. I don't know if she remembers them, but actually I was looking not too long ago at some of those pictures about how uh they were all gnarled together. And uh so we begin here in this particular text with the kiss of death as our Savior is arrested. And I will uh tell you a little bit about uh that kiss of death as we move through this. But this is one of the most wicked acts in all of history when it took place. Appropriately, not in the light of day, but in the darkness of night. It was the betrayal of Jesus by the kiss of Judas, known in history as the kiss of death. Now in the Gospel of Mark, he tells us immediately while he was still speaking, Judas, one of the twelve, with a great multitude with swords and clubs, came from the chief, or with the chief priest and the scribes and the elders. It was no surprise to Jesus, who had just said that his betrayer was at hand back in the upper room. Matthew gives us an account of Christ's agony in Gethsemane, as was so eloquently expressed by Brother Geraldo last week. Luke tells us that he became so sorrowful that his sweat was like great drops of blood. So he was falling down, and uh. And he begged the father to let the cup of his suffering pass from him. But Matthew focuses instead on the arrest of Jesus there in the garden. And so Matthew proceeds to the story of the arrest. He lets his readers see that Jesus is clearly in command of the situation. He's already told the disciples what is happening, and so this arrest is divisible into three little speeches by Jesus. First to Judas in verses 47 through 50, to the sword bearer, who in Luke is mentions as Peter, and I believe maybe Mark mentions it too. He's not called Peter in Matthew, but we will say that it was Peter, because it's actually in the text in one of the other gospels. That is in 50 B through 54, and then to the crowds in 55 and 56. So he proceeds to rebuke first Judas, then the disciple who used the sword to strike the high priest's servant, and then the crowds who came to arrest him. Jesus here is the only one who didn't act. He only speaks. And yet what he says determines everything. Folks, this is not the behavior of a terrified fugitive, but of a lordly person. He was calm in his doing of the will of God. And I know that you can imagine after hearing Brother Guzman last week as he broke it down and talked about Jesus and asking the Father to take the cup from him and just different parts of that story. It is a bizarre sight here. Men with swords pressing forward to arrest the Son of God, others with torches, as John tells us in his gospel, coming into the darkness to arrest the one who is the only source of light. And so we begin to see Judas here. And the question for us this morning is why was Judas needed? The last we saw Judas, if we were to go back in some of our earlier verses and chapters, was in the upper room where Jesus identified him as the betrayer. He had left after that. Jesus and the eleven disciples left the city for the Mount of Olives, and Jesus prayed about his coming crucifixion that was mentioned last week. Jesus or Judas went to the priest and collected the large crowd that would take his master into custody. The real question about Judas' role in the arrest is why was he needed at all? And many commentators usually suppose that he needed to show the arresting party where Jesus was. But that is not obvious as one might suppose. Jesus has not been hiding. He had been guarded in his earlier movements, but not this week. From Friday preceding his crucifixion, when he arrived at Bethany, he could hardly have ever been more open. It should have been easy for the crowd to find him and arrest him. It's usually said at this point that the leaders of the people wanted to arrest Jesus secretly for fear of the people, which was clearly a factor. Even so, there must have been many moments that week they could have moved against him quietly. And there's a famous, I say famous, he was an English Christian apologetic writer. His name was Albert Ross. He wrote under the pseudonym Frank Morrison. And he provides an interesting suggestion in his book, Who Moved the Stone? He argues that the Jewish leaders were afraid of Jesus in two senses. They knew he was popular with the people. If they confronted him openly, there was always the possibility that he would call the crowds at his defense and an uprising would result. They did not want that. Even more disturbing, however, was the matter of Christ's undeniable supernatural power. They had tried to arrest him on an earlier occasion, but he had simply slipped away from them. On another occasion, the soldiers who had been sent to take him prisoner came back with an incredible story. No one ever spoke like this man, they said. What if in the final analysis Jesus was unarrestable? And then Ross goes on to suggest that Judas gave the leaders information that led them to think that in spite of the difficulties they faced, this indeed was the opportunity they had been waiting for. What might Judas have said? If we recall that Jesus had been talking about his death, he was trying to prepare his disciples for it, Judas might have said something like this to those that are the Sanhedrin. Jesus had been talking as if he's about to die. I would say that he is tired and defeated, and that the mood of surrender is on him. If you move now, I think he would go with you. But you must move quickly. He must be arrested tonight. Hurry and make your arrangements. I will lead you to him. And hurry, they did. So why did he do it? Millions have asked this question ever since that time. Was it greed? Did he do it for money? Thirty pieces of silver wasn't a lot of money. Was it jealousy? Disappointment that Jesus was not turning out to be the Messiah he expected? Resentment for having wasted three years of his life and work turned out to be a lost cause? The only, folks, the only explanation we can reject outright are those that attempt to exonerate Judas, such as saying he was only trying to force his master's hand and get him to seize power boldly. Folks, here it is. And there may be a lot of reasons why he did it. But this Judas character is a warning to all mere adherents of religion. And our great missionary-minded John Ryle. He points out that Judas was an apostle, an eyewitness of the miracles, a hearer of the Lord's sermons, a fellow laborer with the eleven, and a reputable professor of religion. Not one of the eleven seems to have doubted him. Yet Judas was no friend of Jesus. He was lost, and he is now in hell. That's my opinion. We need to learn from Jesus, or we need to learn from Judas how important it is, as John Riles says in his statements, how important it is to make your calling and your election sure, as it is mentioned in 2 Peter chapter 1, verse 10. Remember what I said, or we've said probably several times in sermons how about people will come to the Lord saying, Lord, Lord. You know, I've done this and I've done this and I've done this. And finally the Lord will say, I never knew you. See that statement of using the double name is a statement of honor. And it's happened only about 15 or so times in scripture. We can remember Abraham, Abraham, before Abraham was going to kill his son Isaac. And then we can remember Moses when God talked to Moses. Moses, Moses. And then David, Absalom, Absalom. And then Jesus when he was talking to Martha. Martha, Martha. And Samuel. Samuel. So many of these cases here. And if you were looking the King James Version, Judas in his or New King James Version, I believe, Judas in his hypocrisy and vengeance went to the Lord in the garden as he approached him. And he said, Rabbi, Rabbi. Yet Judas was no friend of Jesus. Learn from Judas how important it is to make your calling an election sure, as it is mentioned in 2 Peter. So we have Judas doing what he did. And now we go to Peter. Peter's attack. It's not only from Judas that we learn about failure. We learn from Peter too. Though Peter's failure was of a different order, and I mentioned Earlier, Matthew does not mention Peter, perhaps because Peter was still living when Matthew wrote. And Peter might have been placed in danger. But John, who wrote later, tells us that Peter attacked the servant of the high priest. So it was John. And the servant's name was Malchus. What was Peter trying to do? He mentions cutting off his ear. This is what I think. I think he was trying to cut off Malchus' head. Peter was a great fisherman, but he was a lousy ninja. I think he missed. I think Peter missed. I'm spitballing here, but I think Malchus ducked and lost an ear, which Luke says Jesus healed. But more was going on than this. After Jesus repeated warnings, Peter felt that the critical moment of his testing had arrived. He had been asleep. He awoke suddenly to find the arresting party moving toward Jesus in the garden. He was courageous and drawing his sword struck out boldly. But Peter's also pathetic. Because his boldness evaporated in a moment when Jesus rebuked his action. And he quickly fled into the darkness with the others. What did he not anticipate? Was his real test would come later. When a servant girl would ask him if he had been there with Jesus of Nazareth. Oh Peter. Boy, he had every chance to say, oh, yeah, I was right there with Jesus. My buddy, my friend, my mentor. And oh Peter just, he failed miserably. It's often that way. We think that our tests are physical. Well, we have the courage to act in some bold way. Actually, they are far more likely to come in quiet moments when we need to choose either to speak up for Jesus or deny him. Jesus taught Peter and others three things. Peter's use of the sword was dangerous. Not to Malchus, Jesus healed him. It was dangerous to Peter, since in verse 52, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Now this is not precisely true, of course, because not all people who take up arms in battle die in battle. But it is a general principle and a reminder to Peter that he was called to a different way of life. Peter's use of the sword was unnecessary. Jesus didn't need Peter. Do you think I cannot appeal to my father? And he will at once send more than 12 legions of angels? It says in verse 53. The arresting party that came into the garden that night was probably no more than a hundred people. A Roman legion was 6,000 men. 12 legions of angels would have been 72,000 angels. Clearly, Jesus did not need to be defended. He was arrested because he was willing to be arrested. He suffered voluntary death for our sins. Peter's use of the sword was mistaken. Verse 54, but how then should the scriptures be fulfilled that it must be so? I don't think it was easy for Jesus to say this. He had wrestled in prayer about what was required of him as God's servant and man's Savior just moments before. But this was what the Bible taught. Isaiah had written of the Messiah in Isaiah 53, verse 7. He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth, like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shears is silent. So he opened not his mouth. Folks, this passage doesn't describe a warrior. It describes a person who willingly died for us. And we can look in Psalms 22, we can look in Psalm 69, and we can look elsewhere, and we see this exact same situation. Jesus willingly died for our sins. So I'm going to conclude this with Mark, a passage in Mark chapter 14. If you care to turn there, it's in chapter 14, it's verse 51 and 52. Now, if you were reading this same story of betrayal and arrest of Jesus, if you were reading this in Mark instead of Matthew, you would come to this verse right after the same verse in Matthew as it closes in verse 50, and they all left him and fled. Now comes this very strange verse in fifty-one. And a young man followed him with nothing but a linen cloth about his body. And they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked. Now, how in the world are we to unpack that verse as it applies to Jesus being arrested in the garden? There are some things that we can discern from the text about this strange incident. Presumably, this young man was not one of the twelve. We'll just say that going right off the bat, he was not one of the twelve. I think, I believe he was one of the twelve, but we're just going to say he's not one of the twelve. He obviously was a man of means because only the wealthy wore linen coverings under their tunics. The fact that he had only the linen cloth without the undergarments indicated that he had dressed in haste to come and follow this situation. He probably lived nearby, perhaps in Jerusalem. And this particular verse is a tantalizing morsel for all of us today that are speculative theologians, and I'm surrounded by many of you this morning. And we chew on this verse, and many of you will do so, asking, why is this account of this unnamed person in this embarrassing situation included in the gospel? The young man may have been Mark himself, who was from a family of wealth. Maybe this was Mark's way of inserting himself into this account to indicate that he was an eyewitness of the things that took place that night. If so, it was a harrowing moment for him, as he was nearly caught. His linen garment was grabbed by one of the soldiers, but he spun away and left the garment, just as Joseph fled from Potiphar's wife when she clutched his garment and he escaped, leaving the garment behind. And so as I read this passage in Mark, it reminded me of a book that I have read, and the book came out many years ago. The first book came out in 1997, wrote by the scholarly theologian that I just dearly appreciate, Dr. R. C. Sprohl. He wrote the book titled The Psychology of Atheism. He later retitled the book in 2018, If There is a God, why are there atheists? He dedicated and included in that book chapter seven that talks about the nakedness motif that we find in Scripture and in Western philosophy. And there's several of these well-known philosophers that he talks about in this particular chapter, Kierkegaard, and there's several others that he relates their opinions of different things. But he did a word study on Yemnos, which is the Greek word for naked. Now in the Garden of Eden, the man and the woman were naked without shame until what came into their lives? Sin. The very first psychological self-awareness of guilt and shame was an uncomfortable awareness of nudity. Since then, human beings have been the only creatures who have adorned and covered themselves with artificial garments because it is built into our human fallen humanity to equate and humiliation with nakedness. I do believe that our Lord hung on that cross in that fashion so they could humiliate him to the max. Throughout the pages of Scripture, when God speaks of bringing judgment against the guilty, he does it by exposing their sin and stripping them of their clothes. A prime example of this comes from the book of the prophet Amos. Amos gives the Lord's list of transgressions by Moab, by Judah, and Israel, and so on. Then he gives God's response, and here it is. Behold, I am weighed down by you, as a cart full of sheaves is weighed down. This is God's rebuke of his people. He then says, Therefore, flight shall perish from the swift, the strong shall not strengthen his power, nor shall the mighty deliver himself. He shall not stand who handles the bow. The swift foot shall not escape. God was foretelling the conditions when he visited judgment on his people. Then he says, the most courageous men of might shall flee naked in that day. Another example is in the book of Revelation, connects the judgments of God on the wicked to nakedness. The motif of clothing and nakedness is at the heart of our understanding of redemption. Folks, as it's said in Isaiah, our own righteousness, we are told, is like rotten, filthy rags. The only way any of us can stand in God's presence is to be stripped of those rags and then clothed afresh in the garments of Christ's righteousness. That is the gospel. You and I, and I mentioned this in our Bible study group this morning, you and I can never stand in the presence of a holy God unless we are clothed from high with the righteousness that is not ours. God has provided for us a covering for our shame and our nakedness. He has invited us into his redeeming presence to experience anew, anew that sense of safety that we have knowing his Son has covered our sin with his blood on the cross and covered our nakedness with his perfect righteousness in his life. What a blessing for us that that shame and humiliation is gone. That we can stand before that holy God one day. And we don't have to stand there under our righteousness because we have none. Folks, you and I are radics, man. We're radical, radically corrupt to the core. But thank God we have a redeemed life and a savior that has covered us with his righteousness. And I think that verse at the end in Mark, I think it points to the gospel. I think it points to that word, how how much shame and humiliation is in us as sinners. In the Christian community. I've heard this so many times. People say, Do you know Jesus? Are you saved? Yet the issue for you and I is not whether we know Jesus. The issue is whether Jesus knows us. As it's mentioned in Matthew, many, many people call in Lord, Lord. Oh boy, they think they know him. But again, the question is not whether you know him. Can Jesus look at you? Does he know you? Judas did not know Jesus. And Jesus did not know him. Even though he came to Jesus saying, Rabbi, Rabbi, as the New King James Version says, Jesus did not have to wait until the last day to see his prophecy fulfilled in Judas. Folks, when our Lord was hanging on that cross, and you talking about honor, and he looked up to heaven and he said, My God, my God. Folks, that's a gesture of profound honor and affection. Judas' kiss was an act of hypocrisy and vengeance. You and I. Clothed. We're no longer that naked man running around, running away. We have been covered and clothed fully by the righteousness of Christ. And the arrest of Jesus our Lord should show us what a wonderful redeemer we have. That stood before that crowd that night. I'm here. I'm coming willingly. Don't need the swords. Don't need any more angels coming. I'm coming along. I'm going to die. For my people. I hope you see that. I hope it touches you. I know Geraldo he he just said it so wonderfully last week. Boy, do we really realize what we've got in Jesus Christ. The life that he gives us, the families that he gives us, the blessings that come. That doesn't make you happy. Something's wrong. We just have so much. So much to be grateful for. Each other. You know. Jobs. Just it's just amazing what our God has done for us. For those who love Christ. We have a wonderful, wonderful Savior. And I hope today that we just get a small glimpse of the gospel and what he has done for us. Let's bow. Heavenly Father, we are thankful again for this wonderful day. We thank you for this word that you have given us today. We have opened the scriptures. We learn from Judas. We learn from Peter. We learn from the crowd. We learn from this man that was naked and ran away. And we thank God that you have clothed us with the righteousness of Christ. That when we do stand before him in that day, that what he will see, he will see that that righteousness is ours. He will see us, not as we are sinners, transgressors, but he will see the light of Jesus Christ. And at that point, we will live eternally with our Lord and Savior. We thank you, thank you for your grace and your mercy and your peace. We thank you that you have taken us and take care of us each day. It is our prayer that we continue to be obedient to your word. That we tend we continue to love as the commandment has told us. Love one another. And we are so thankful for each other in this amazing time that we've had today. Be with us now as we take this Lord's Supper. As we remember our Savior's death and what it did for us. And may we continue to remember that each and every day of what Jesus Christ did for us. And we are so grateful for his love. And we love him with all of our heart. It's in Jesus' precious name that we pray. Amen.