Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2443
Mark 15:23.
OUR Savior, before He was nailed to the Cross, and on the Cross, several times had drinks of different sorts offered to Him. While they were nailing Him to the Cross, they endeavored to make Him drink wine, or vinegar as it is called, mingled with gall. But when He had tasted of it—He did taste it—He would not drink it. When He was on the Cross, the soldiers, mocking Him, offered Him vinegar, or their weak drink of which they ordinarily partook, pledging Him in their cups with scorn. And once more, when He said, “I thirst,” they took a sponge filled with vinegar, dipped it in hyssop and put it to His lips.
This occasion of offering the wine mingled with myrrh is, I believe, different from all the rest. This wine mingled with myrrh was given to Him as an act of mercy. Matthew Henry seems to think that it was prepared by those holy women who were known to attend to the necessities of our Lord. They had followed Him in all His footsteps wherever He went. It was by their bounty that the bag which Judas kept was generally as full as it was required to be, so that out of the store they could go and buy food for their Master and for His disciples. It was these holy women who prepared the spices to embalm Him at His burial. And Matthew Henry thinks that these women, prompted by their compassion for Him, prepared this cup of wine mingled with myrrh that He might be strengthened for His miseries, and that those miseries might, in some degree—be alleviated by the partial stupefaction which a strong draught of wine and myrrh would give Him.
This time our Savior positively declined the cup—“He received it not.” The wormwood He tasted, but this He received not at all. He would have nothing to do with it. Why? The answer is not to be found in our Savior’s abstemiousness, for He was not abstemious—He was never self-indulgent, but He certainly was never abstemious. He was “the Son of Man” who “came eating and drinking.” He felt no repugnance to wine—He, Himself, made it, He Himself drank it. He even earned for Himself the name—“a gluttonous Man and a winebibber”—not deservedly, but because, in contrast to John, who abstemiously refrained from ordinary food, Jesus Christ sat down with publicans and sinners, feasted with the feasters and ate and drank like other men.
Nor do I think the reason is to be found in any love of pain that Christ had, nor in any heartless bravado which would lead Him to say, “I will suffer and I will put the cup away from Me.” Far be that from Christ! He never thrust Himself in the way of suffering when it was unnecessary. He did not go to give Himself up into the hands of His enemies before His hour was come. He avoided persecution when the avoidance of the persecution would not be an injury to His cause. He withdrew out of Judea and would not walk in that land because of Herod, who sought to slay Him. I believe that if our Savior had not been the atoning Sacrifice—if His sufferings had been merely those of a martyr—He would have quaffed to the very dregs the cup that was offered Him and would not have left any of it! The reason why He refused the cup, I think, is to be found in another thing altogether.
There is a glorious idea couched in the fact that the Savior put the myrrhed wine cup entirely away from His lips. On the heights of Heaven, the Son of God stood of old, and He looked down and measured how far it was to the utmost depths of misery. He cast up the sum total of all the agonies which a man must endure to descend to the utmost depths of pain and misery. He determined that to be a faithful High Priest and, also, to be a suffering One, He would go the whole way, from the highest to the lowest, “from the highest throne in Glory to the Cross of deepest woe.” This myrrhed cup would have stopped Him within a little of the utmost limit of misery and, therefore, He said, “I will not stop half-way,
but I will go all the way. And if this cup can mitigate My sorrow, that is just the reason why I will not drink it, for I have determined that to the utmost lengths of misery I will go, that I will do, and bear, and suffer all that Incarnate God can bear for My people, in My own mortal body.”
Now, Beloved, it is this fact that I wish to bring out before you—the fact that Jesus Christ came into the world to suffer—and that because the myrrhed cup would have prevented Him from reaching the lowest step of misery, “He received it not.” I shall have to show you, first, that this was very frequently the case throughout His life—that He would not take a step which would have diminished His miseries because He was determined to go the whole length of suffering. Secondly, I shall try to show you the reason for this determination. Then, thirdly, I shall close up by speaking of the lesson that we may learn from it.
I. OUR SAVIOR WOULD GO THE WHOLE LENGTH OF MISERY—He would suffer in every respect like as we suffer. He would bear the whole of the tortures of Atonement without even the slightest shadow of mitigation or alleviation. Now, I think I can show you that on many occasions in Christ’s life He determined to be tempted in every point in which men are tempted and to be tempted to the utmost limit of the power of temptation. Nor would He accept anything which would have limited the force of the temptation upon man. I will give you some proofs of this.