Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!’”
NL Daily Devotion for Friday, April 18, 2025
by Rev. Dr. Miles Hopgood, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: Jesus came not to save himself but to save us. On the cross, he turns our rejection of him into his salvation of us so that we might know how great the will of God is to save and how far God will go to rescue us from death.
Three is an important number in Biblical storytelling, especially threefold repetitions. It is on the third calling of Samuel that Eli realizes the boy isn’t having a nightmare but instead that the Lord is at work. We have threefold repetitions in the account of Jesus’s passion as well. From the “Holy, Holy, Holy” of the crowds at his entrance to Peter thrice denying Christ, threes are everywhere.
But the most important threefold repetition is on the cross. There, Jesus is mocked three times to save himself, first by the leaders, then by the soldiers, and at last by one of the thieves being crucified with him. Each time, their jabs are connected to his status as someone special, as either the Messiah or the King of the Jews. Their implication is that if Jesus lacks the power to save himself, he can by no means save others. These onlookers see the cross as the refutation of Jesus’s power to save.
Each time, Jesus remains silent. How do we make sense of his lack of response? Certainly he is not in agreement with these criticisms, but what then does he mean by his silence? Just as it takes a third time to confirm God’s call of Samuel and Peter’s rejection of Jesus, so too, Jesus here is cementing his will to save us, even as we reject him. We chose to kill Christ, and rather than reject that choice, Christ embraces it as a means to complete his own will to save us.
This is where Good Friday breaks us. The cross is our rejection of Jesus too, no less than it was for the leaders, the soldiers, and the thief. Today Christ demonstrates his power to save by turning the tool of our rejection into the instrument of our salvation. By embracing the cross and refusing to save himself, Christ embraces the whole of us, even the part of us which will never love him and always resent him for what he shows us on the cross, that his love is greater than anything we could array against it. The cross is a both/and: at once our total rejection of God and yet also God’s power to make our rejection into the means of salvation.
There are many who struggle with whether or not they are acceptable to God, or even if they want to be acceptable. You may even be one of them. Hear in Jesus’s threefold refusal to save himself the eternal confirmation of his will to love you no matter what. If God can work salvation out of rejection, no one and nothing is beyond the reach of God. While today we sit with the irresolution of the death of God, even in the cross we can see the promise that resurrection will come, and it will be good news for all.
