Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And some of the bystanders hearing it said, “This man is calling Elijah.” And one of them at once ran and took a sponge and filled it with sour wine, put it on a reed and gave it to Him to drink. But the others said, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come out to save him.” And Jesus cried out with a loud voice and yielded up His spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom, and the earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs were also opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many. When the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe and said, “Truly, this was the Son of God.” There were also many women there looking on from a distance who had followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering to Him, among whom were Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jesus, sorry, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee. And then turn over to Matthew 28. We'll read from verse one. Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And behold, there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow. And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for He has risen, as He said. Come, see the place where He lay. Then go quickly and tell His disciples that He has risen from the dead, and behold, He is going before you to Galilee. There you will see Him. See, I have told you.” So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy and ran to tell His disciples. And behold, Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came up and took hold of His feet and worshiped Him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.” This is the word of the Lord. We've just read of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and of the first encounter that people had with Him after He rose from the dead, the encounter of the women as they met Him coming out of the tomb. But if you rewind from this passage four days to the night of Jesus' arrest, you will find Jesus and His disciples leaving the Passover meal and heading to the Mount of Olives where Jesus wished to pray. And you may remember that as Jesus gathers His disciples around Him, they fall asleep. They're not very good friends. Then after Jesus prays for some time and finds His disciples sleeping time and time again, the chief priests and elders appear in the garden with a great crowd to arrest Jesus. And we read in Matthew 26:56 that all of His disciples left Him and fled. They scattered and ran leaving Jesus alone, captured by an angry mob. One or two of His disciples, at least John and Peter, regained some level of courage and made their way into the courtyard of the high priest where Jesus was on trial that night. But as the night stretched on, Peter is challenged by two servant girls and by a group of bystanders. They say to him, “You were with Jesus of Nazareth. You're one of His friends, aren't you?” And Peter denies he ever knew Jesus, even to the point of cursing. Following this, Jesus is led off to be tried by Pilate and crucified as we read. Jesus as He came to the cross lived the experience of Psalm 22 that we read. In particular, we read of Jesus crying out, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” The Psalmist speaks of that in Psalm 22, being forsaken by God, but Jesus was not just forsaken by God, He was forsaken by everyone. By His disciples as well. The Psalmist in Psalm 22 knew what this was like, he prophesied of it and wrote of the experience. He says how trouble is near and in verse 11, there is none to help. No one at all. Utterly forsaken by His friends, betrayed, deserted, ditched by those who were closest to Him. And they were close to Him. This was not being abandoned by some people who, you know, He'd met once or twice. These disciples had walked with Jesus for three years, lived life next to Him for three years. He had even called them His brothers. Back in Matthew chapter 12, Jesus says this remarkable thing about His disciples. This is verse 47 to 50. “While He was still speaking to the people, behold, His mother and His brothers stood outside asking to speak to Him, but He replied to the man who told Him, ‘Who is my mother and who are my brothers?’ And stretching out His hand toward His disciples, He said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.’” You see how close Jesus was to these disciples? He viewed them as His brothers, His family. And in the context of chapter 12, we should feel the full weight of what Jesus is saying. His biological family are outside. His actual mother and His actual brothers are standing outside saying, “Jesus, we want to catch up with you,” and He puts His disciples ahead of them. His biological family takes a second seat to His spiritual brothers, His disciples. I'm not sure you could come up with more warm, affectionate, strong, familial language than Jesus is using when He views His disciples and speaks to them and says, “Here are my brothers and my mother and my sisters.” Even to the exclusion of His biological family, or in preference to them at least. But perhaps back in chapter 12, Jesus viewed His disciples with this strong familial language because they were good friends at that point. Because they were faithful to Him at that point. They'd walked with Him for years at that point and were still with Him. Here is the question though, what will Jesus think of His disciples after they've rejected Him, abandoned Him, denied Him, and fled from Him? And this is what I want to pick up on tonight. Just a couple of words from Matthew 28 verse 10. Look at the first word that Jesus uses to describe His disciples to the women. “Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee.” My brothers. The first thought that Jesus had of His disciples after He rose from the dead was, they are my brothers. This is before they repented. This is before they said sorry for running away. This is before they even came back to Him after running away. This is before they came to believe that He was risen, before they were filled with boldness and clarity about who He was, before anything had changed from the night before, or the few nights before. Jesus calls them His brothers. He could have called them all sorts of things that would have been wonderful and amazing. He could have said, “Go and tell my disciples. Go and tell my people. Go and tell my friends.” He could have said all sorts of things. I mean the angel in this passage says, “Go and tell His disciples.” It would have been very natural to just say the same thing as the angel said. But He doesn't. He defaults to calling them His brothers. He views them as His siblings. And this is exactly what we should expect if we're familiar with the savior of Psalm 22. The suffering savior in Psalm 22 experiences full rejection from God and from all of the people around him as well. In verse one, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” all the way through to verse 21. It's just 20 verses, 21 verses of being rejected by everyone around you and having no one there for you. All the way through to the point in verse 21 of Psalm 22 where it turns and all of a sudden the Psalmist says, “You have rescued me from the horns of the wild oxen.” The tense changes, you might pick up. Everything before this has been, “I'm being abandoned, this is a disaster,” but now, “You have rescued me,” and then look what happens in the very next verse, in verse 22, “I will tell of Your name to my brothers.” And we should be thinking, where did these brothers come from? Where were they? For the last 21 verses. I thought there was no one to help. Where are these brothers, David? But it doesn't matter to the suffering savior of Psalm 22 that there were no brothers to help him during his suffering. He still wants to declare God's name to his brothers after he is rescued by God. This is Jesus. This is His heart towards His people. He views His people as His brothers, and He views them as brothers before they've done anything and after they've abandoned Him. You know, God describes His relationship to His people in familial terms throughout the Old Testament. There are two distinct pictures that we're given very explicitly. God calls Israel His son and so you get this idea that God is a father to His people. And God calls Israel His bride, calls Himself the husband of Israel, and so you get this idea that there's a marital relationship. These are both family terms, but both of these terms have hierarchy involved. A father outranks a son and a husband outranks his wife. Nowhere in the Old Testament does God explicitly say that He has a peer-to-peer relationship, familial relationship with His people. It is only once we get to the New Testament that God makes this explicit and clear as Jesus starts to speak of His disciples as His brothers. But God has teased this story before. Think of Joseph. He's abandoned by his brothers. Worse, they sold him into slavery. They wanted to murder him. This is rejection at the highest level, and yet even after all of this, when Joseph's brothers came to Egypt seeking food and Joseph recognizes them, what is his heart towards them? How does he think of them as he sees these men who rejected him, betrayed him, sent him off to be sold into slavery, possibly to die? Listen to Genesis 45. “Then Joseph could not control himself before all those who stood by him. He cried, ‘Make everyone go out from me.’ So no one stayed with him when Joseph made himself known to his brothers, and he wept aloud so that the Egyptians heard it and the household of Pharaoh heard it, and Joseph said to his brothers, ‘I'm Joseph. Is my father still alive?’ But his brothers could not answer him for they were dismayed at his presence. So Joseph said to his brothers, ‘Come near to me, please.’ And they came near, and he said, ‘I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life.’” Can you hear how Jesus is fulfilling this story as He comes out of the tomb to seek His brothers who have fled from Him just days before? You can imagine that the disciples may be full of fear if they saw Jesus risen from the dead, knowing that they left Him, they abandoned Him during His time of need. But Jesus can't wait to draw near to them. “Come near to me,” He's saying. “Come meet me in Galilee. I'm your brother, Jesus, whom you abandoned to the cross. Do not be distressed or angry because you rejected me, for God sent me to preserve your life.” This idea is what the writer to the Hebrews talks about in chapter 2 verse 11 and 12 when he quotes from Psalm 22 and he says, “He,” speaking of Jesus, “is not ashamed to call them brothers, saying, ‘I will tell of Your name to my brothers.’” He's quoting that Psalm 22 verse 22. But He's not ashamed, is He? Just like Joseph wasn't ashamed. This is what the... it would be so easy for us to explain how Jesus is ashamed to be identified as a brother to His disciples or to us. Wouldn't it? So easy to think about, you know, how weak we are. We fail, and when we fail, we often do so on purpose. We reject Christ willfully and knowingly. You know, the disciples if you think about that, they knew something difficult was happening. Jesus had been talking to them as He's approaching Jerusalem telling them the Son of man's going to suffer. Peter had even said, “I'll die with you if I need to.” He knows what's coming. And yet in full knowledge of the suffering that is in front of them, they reject it and run away. We do the same thing when we look temptation in the face and choose to sin rather than to obey Christ. We choose our own pleasures and our own desires over loving and obeying Jesus. We reject Him as king of our life. We're saying that we don't want Him to rule and we don't recognize His rule. We are actively saying every time we sin, “My soul needs no king. My soul has no king but me.” This is outright rejection on the same order as Joseph's brothers seeking to kill him. This is forsaking Jesus like the disciples on the night He was betrayed, and in this context, in the face of betrayal like this, Jesus's heart towards His people is one that sees them as His brothers, not ashamed, with no shame. Open declaration, “You are my brothers and I'm proud of it.” Weak, sinful, fickle people like you and me. This is even more amazing when you consider that in order for Jesus to call us His brothers, in order for Him to be identified as a brother with us, He had to be made like us. Later in chapter two of Hebrews, the writer says, “He had to be made like His brothers in every respect.” What's he talking about? He's saying, he goes on in verse 14, “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise partook of the same things.” You see, Jesus was not always a brother. He was the Word of God, the Son of God who dwelt in unapproachable light, God of God, light of lights, true God of true God, begotten and not made of the very same nature of the Father by whom all things came into being, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. That God partook of flesh and blood so that He could be made like His brothers in every respect except sin. The divine partook of flesh and blood. Glorious eternal God, the Son who bears the same nature as the Father, the creator of all things, a being so separate from us that we cannot even begin to fully grasp what He is like and how distant He is from us. He is spirit, eternal, glorious and holy, outside of time. This Son of God partook of flesh, born of a virgin, for a very specific purpose. Not to save some people so they could become slaves to His rule, not to save some people so that they could praise Him and glorify Him to reward some oversized ego like some desperate ancient king. No, He took on the nature of man, the divine partook of flesh and blood so that He could be called our brothers. Notice what verse 17 of Hebrews 2 actually says. It says, “Therefore, He had to be made like His brothers.” You see what he's saying there? Jesus first considers us His brothers. He wants to be our brothers, He thinks of us as His brothers, then He has to be made like us. It doesn't say, “Therefore, He had to be made like us in order for us to be His brothers.” It says, “Therefore, He had to be made like His brothers.” Jesus considered us brothers, then He went about doing what was needed in order to solidify that relationship. He took on flesh, became a man, suffered and died, rose from the grave, sought us out, gave us His Spirit, prays for us even now. Why? Because He considers us His brothers. He wants us to be His brothers. He wants us to draw near to Him as His brothers. You see the condescension that's required? In a sense you see it in Joseph's story as well. Joseph by this point is the Prime Minister of Egypt, high and mighty. You see the same sort of thing with Moses where God teases this same idea. Moses was a Hebrew but he's not raised as a Hebrew, he's raised as a prince of Egypt in the house of the daughter of Pharaoh. But Moses even though he is raised in this separate and lifted up status, identifies with the Hebrews. He wanted to be a part of them. He felt connected to their pain and trouble and wanted to deliver them. Initially this looked like him standing up for a Hebrew who was being abused, it looked like him killing the Egyptian who was doing the abusing, but Moses was so willing to be identified with the Hebrews that he even put up with being despised by the Hebrews themselves. As he fled into the wilderness, it was in part because of the rejection he received from the Hebrew people. You remember the story? He kills the Egyptian, and the Egyptians come after him and he says, “I want to help you Hebrews. I'm one of you, I want to help you,” and they say, “Who are you to rule over us? Get out of here.” And he flees off to Midian for 40 years. Listen to how this incident is described in Exodus 2. “One day when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked upon their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people. He looked this way and that and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.” Could Moses who's writing Exodus put any more emphasis on the fact that he views the Hebrews as his people? But then here how he's rejected a few verses later as he sought to intervene with two Hebrews who were fighting each other. They say, “Who made you a prince and judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” But Moses continues and presses on to be counted as a Hebrew, doesn't he? He's not ashamed to be counted as one of them, even though the Hebrews themselves reject him time and time again. This again is the heart of Christ for us. Not ashamed to call us brothers, to come down from His princely state as He reigned as God in the heavenly places and to be counted as one of us. Even if it meant being rejected by us. You know there's a great line in the Lord of the Rings, the Two Towers movie. Everyone seen that? Yeah, some nods. It's the best one of the three. And there's a battle, the battle of Helm's Deep, and there's a scene where Legolas is speaking to Aragorn and he says to Aragorn, “There's no hope in this battle. They're all going to die.” And Aragorn replies, “Then I shall die as one of them.” And I shall die as one of them. Why? Why is he doing this? Because he wants to be counted as one of the one of the men of Rohan. He wants to be by their side even if it means death. It's the spirit of Moses, it's the spirit of Joseph, it's the spirit of Christ. Jesus looks upon us, His enslaved, rebellious people who reject Him time and again, and He says, “My brothers.” He sees us destined to die in our sins and He says not just that He will die as one of us, but that He will by dying as one of us, deliver His brothers from death and from Satan. It's what Hebrews 2 goes on to say. “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise partook of the same things. Why? That through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.” The brotherhood of Christ is a truth which relates to our adoption by the Father as well. We're adopted by God the Father as His sons, which makes us sons alongside the Son. Brothers with Christ. And our brother is so keen to call us his brother. That's what we're seeing the whole time here tonight. You can think of it in terms of the parable in Luke 15 of the prodigal son, where you've got this wayward son who goes off and wastes his father's money, rejects his father, wants him dead, and as the prodigal son returns, hoping to find some level of mercy, the father is running out to meet him. And we often see in that parable the heart of the father towards us, desirous to bring in the wayward son, desirous to forgive and have mercy, not just bring him in as a slave but to bring him in as his son. And the older brother is a disappointment in the story as he stands off in the corner. The older brother in that story is an anti-type of Jesus. Jesus is the exact opposite. Jesus is the older brother running out with the father. Now, Jesus is actually the older brother who goes after the wayward son and finds him in the pigsty, pays his debts and brings him home. This is a glorious thing to know that our savior and our God does not just desire familial relationship with us where we are subordinate to Him, but He desires peer-to-peer familial relationship. And there are all sorts of applications of this truth. As we've seen, this is why, as Jesus seeks to partake of our flesh and blood and become brothers with us by taking on flesh, He takes upon Himself all of the rot and ruin of our family. He takes upon Himself our debts and our guilt and our failings and our faults and He says, “I'll deal with that, my younger brother. I've got it sorted.” Hebrews also tells us that because we have a God who is a brother with us, then we have a high priest who is able to sympathize with us in our weakness. You know there's many elements of a father-son relationship where the father cannot sympathize with the son because the son's experience is different to the father's experience. But Jesus became a brother with us. He partook of our life, our flesh and blood, our sufferings and our sorrows, our trials and our temptations, our very nature. And so He can sympathize with us. He knows what it's like to be one of us. But there's more than that because Jesus desires our brotherly relationship so much that not only does He come down and partake of our nature, He lifts us up that we might have something of His nature. 2 Peter 1 speaks of this when it speaks of us partaking of the divine nature. It's the idea that the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of God as He's sent into us, brings us up into glory so that we might know something of what it means to commune with God as God Himself has done for all eternity past, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, living in perfect loving relationship with one another. Jesus says, “My brothers, I'm not just going to come down and leave the glory, I'm going to bring you up so that you might experience the wonder and beauty of relationship with my Father and with me and with the Holy Spirit.” And the last aspect of this that I want to draw your attention to tonight is that Jesus becoming our brother means that we become co-heirs with Him. Jesus really is the the crown prince of the universe. He is the one who will inherit the world. And by becoming our brother, He makes us co-heirs with Him. Paul puts it this way in Romans 8, “The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ. Fellow heirs with Christ. Provided we suffer with Him in order that we might also be glorified with Him.” See what Jesus is doing? “I'll bring you up. All that I have won, all that I have achieved, you can share it all. All that the Father has given me, I will share it all with you because you are my brothers.” And the encouragement I want to leave you with tonight is that this is the way that Jesus thinks of you. It does not matter what your week has looked like. It does not matter how many times you've fallen, how many times you've failed. Jesus doesn't think of you as a brother only if you have been honorable and He's... you know sometimes when you have like teenage kids, their younger brother rocks up to a party where there's where one of the kid's friends are and they don't want to be seen with them, you know? Don't want to be seen with my younger brother because it's a shame. It's too much of too much shame associated with it. Jesus is not like that at all with you. He has gone to great lengths to be made like you, to bring you into His family, into the family of God, and to call you His brothers. It's a beautiful thing. Let's pray.