Deo Gloria
March 2, 2022
Sermon for Ash Wednesday
Pastor Martin Bentz
Text: John 18:12
Theme: They Bound Him
I suppose that’s what you did. I suppose it was standard operating procedure to bind prisoners before transporting them. Binding their hands and feet made life easier for everyone, except for the prisoners, of course. It eliminated the possibility of an unpleasant surprise. It would keep the prisoners from thinking they could make a break for it and escape. It would keep the prisoners from trying to use their fists to exact a little revenge on their captors. It would help the prisoners recognize that they were not in charge, that they were totally under the control of their captors.
The crowd in Gethsemane bound Jesus. While it may have been standard operating procedure, this was no standard operation. Binding Jesus was silly, ineffective, and also completely unnecessary.
It was silly because . . . well, why did they bind a prisoner’s hands? Often it was because the prisoner’s hands had proven to be dangerous. Often the prisoner had been arrested because he did something evil with his hands. In fact, in some cases his hands were still covered in blood.
But Jesus’ hands? Why bind his hands? What harm had those hands ever done? His hands had always been used to help, to heal, to bless. Jesus’ hands had healed the blind, the deaf, and the lame. Mere minutes before this, Jesus had used his hands to heal the ear of a man named Malchus, one of the men who had come to arrest him (Luke 22:50,51; John 18:10,11)!
Consider also what the psalmist has to say about God’s hands. He writes: “You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing”(Psalm 145:16). The last thing you would want to do with such gracious, gentle, giving, helping hands would be to bind them!
Yet we do something like that at times, don’t we? We “bind” Jesus’ hands when we fail to pray to him. When we do not pray for deliverance and healing, when we do not ask him to “open his hand,” when we choose to try to handle things on our own instead of seeking his help, we betray our weakness and our lack of faith. In that case we should not be surprised if Jesus’ hands remain still, allowing us to find out the hard way how foolish it is to rely on ourselves. James wrote, “You do not have because you do not ask God”(James 4:2).
Other times we bind him more forcefully. We choose to go our own sinful way and want him to remain silent. We turn a deaf ear to his Word and bind his mouth, because our rebellious, sinful nature doesn’t want to hear what he has to say. Oh, we’ll let him know, of course, when—or if—we’re interested in hearing from him again. If we get ourselves into serious trouble, then we’ll ask him to bail us out. But until then, he needs to stand in the corner and keep quiet.
As you see Jesus being bound by the mob in the garden, isn’t there a part of you that’s frightened—not for Jesus but for those who are doing the binding? Something similar had been tried in the past. Earlier in his ministry when Jesus was preaching in Nazareth, the crowd decided that they weren’t going to bother with arresting him and trying him in a court of law. Instead they decided to throw him off a cliff. What happened on that occasion? The Bible tells us that “he walked right through the crowd and went on his way”(Luke 4:30).
And let’s not forget what happened just moments before this. As they came to arrest him, Jesus asked whom they were looking for. They answered, “Jesus of Nazareth.” When Jesus replied, “I am he,” the whole group of soldiers “drew back and fell to the ground”(John 18:6). Jesus made it abundantly clear that he didn’t even need to lift a finger to keep them from arresting him, much less binding his hands with ropes.
And even if they somehow managed to bind him, nothing could have held Jesus against his will—not ropes, not shackles, not chains, nothing. So as they bound him, as they tied the hands of the very Son of God, you expect it to be about as effective as binding the hands of the Incredible Hulk with strands of spaghetti. You expect that they will soon find out that binding Jesus is impossible.
And yet, John tells us they bound him. In one sense, the statement “they bound him” is false—or at the very least, incomplete. It may have seemed to those arresting him, and to anyone watching as well, as if the Roman soldiers and Jewish leaders were taking control and binding Jesus. A far more accurate description of what was actually taking place would be this: “Jesus allowed them to bind him.” They couldn’t do so without his consent, but Jesus consented. In a sense, he really bound himself.
Why? Because he had already previously bound himself to us. We were the ones who were bound, bound so tightly by our sins that we had absolutely no hope of escape. One of our hymns describes it like this: “Enslaved by sin and bound in chains, Beneath its dreadful tyrant sway, And doomed to everlasting pains We wretched, guilty captives lay” (Christian Worship, 1993 102:1). We had no way of escaping the power and guilt of sin, no means of setting ourselves free.
Jesus chose to bind himself to us when he “came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became truly human”(Nicene Creed). That’s why this binding by the chief priests and Roman soldiers was completely unnecessary. Jesus wasn’t going anywhere. He had already chosen to be our substitute, already chosen to take our sins upon himself, already chosen to walk that road to Calvary. By doing so, he had also chosen to be bound, not just by Roman soldiers and Jewish leaders, but by sin and death.
Jesus allowed himself to be bound by the mob so that he might also be bound by God on the cross, forced to receive every last ounce of punishment from God for our sins. In addition, he gave himself over to death, whose power to bind is unmatched. Some people are bound very quickly by death at a very young age. Others are able to hold off death’s efforts to bind them for years. Still others manage to cheat death for a while, surviving accidents or illnesses that should have ended their lives; but it’s only for a while. Eventually death catches up with them too and binds them like everyone else.
As our Savior, Jesus willingly placed himself into what one of our hymns calls “death’s strong bands”—bands far too strong for you and me, but not too strong for Jesus. Maybe we’re not supposed to talk too much about Easter during the season of Lent, but how can we talk about Jesus being bound in Gethsemane and then being bound in death’s strong bands without talking about how Jesus burst those bands on Easter Sunday? Jesus broke the bands of death as effortlessly as Samson tore apart the ropes that were holding him.
As a result, you and I are no longer bound by the guilt of sin and the fear of death. That’s the purpose for which Jesus has set us free. The writer of Hebrews said that Jesus died in order to “free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (2:15). The grave could not bind Jesus. And it cannot bind those who trust in him either. Yes, our bodies may spend some time in the grave, but they will not stay there. One day Jesus will bring them back to life and make them perfect just like his. So our fear of death has been shattered and replaced with the sure hope of life, eternal life in heaven.
Jesus also set us free so that we would no longer be “slave[s] to sin”(John 8:34), so we would no longer be bound by sin in our daily lives, but might live new lives to the glory of God. That’s an ongoing battle, isn’t it, because Satan is always after us, trying to lasso us with his temptations and bring us back under the power of sin? But we don’t have listen to him. We don’t have to give in to his temptations. Our Savior Jesus has set us free. With the power of the Holy Spirit we can “throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles” and live a new life to the glory and honor of God. And that’s exactly what I urge you to do for your Savior’s sake.
Jesus was bound by the soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane, but the truth is he allowed himself to be bound for your sake and mine, so that he might set us free from sin and death. In response I urge you to bind yourself to him. Cling to him in faith and love every day, that you might be free, free from the power of sin and death both now and forever. Amen.