The Glorious Inevitability of the Cross Text: Luke 18:31-34
Introduction: The Unwanted Itinerary
We live in an age that prizes personal autonomy above all things. Modern man believes he is the captain of his own soul, the master of his own fate, and the author of his own story. He wants a god, if he wants one at all, who serves as a celestial concierge, arranging for a pleasant journey through life with minimal disruptions. The idea of a sovereign God with a fixed, unalterable plan, a plan that includes suffering and death as the centerpiece of glory, is offensive to the modern mind. It is, to use the biblical term, a stumbling block.
And yet, this is precisely what we are confronted with in our text. Jesus, on the road to Jerusalem, takes His twelve disciples aside to give them a private briefing. This is not a suggestion. It is not a proposed itinerary, open to feedback. It is a divine declaration of what must happen. He is not asking for their permission; He is informing them of the unalterable script of redemption. This is the third time He has explicitly told them of His impending passion, and as we will see, the message still does not compute. They are following the Messiah, but they have their own script in mind, one that involves thrones and glory and the overthrow of Rome, but which conveniently omits the cross.
Their confusion is our confusion. We, too, want the crown without the cross. We want the resurrection without the tomb. We want victory without the battle. But God's economy does not work that way. The path to glory is paved with suffering. The way up is down. Life comes through death. This is not just the pattern of Christ's life; it is the pattern for every Christian life. What Jesus lays out here is not just His personal destiny, but the very grammar of the gospel. And the disciples' inability to comprehend it is a standing warning to us. It is possible to walk with Jesus, talk with Jesus, and see His miracles, and yet be completely blind to the central purpose of His coming. It is possible to be so fixated on our own expectations of what God ought to do that we are deaf to what He has plainly said He is going to do.
This passage forces us to confront the absolute sovereignty of God in salvation. The cross was not an accident. It was not a tragedy that God later redeemed. It was an appointment, set in eternity past and written down by the prophets centuries before. It was the hinge of all history, the fulfillment of all Scripture, and the only way for sinful man to be reconciled to a holy God. And the disciples' profound blindness highlights our own natural inability to grasp this glorious, bloody wisdom. We need more than information; we need revelation.
The Text
But when He took the twelve aside, He said to them, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all things which are written through the prophets about the Son of Man will be completed. For He will be delivered over to the Gentiles, and will be mocked and mistreated and spit upon, and after they have flogged Him, they will kill Him, and the third day He will rise again.” But the disciples understood none of these things, and this statement was hidden from them, and they did not comprehend the things that were said.
(Luke 18:31-34 LSB)
The Divine Script (v. 31)
Jesus begins by grounding His impending suffering in the authority of Scripture.
"Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all things which are written through the prophets about the Son of Man will be completed." (Luke 18:31)
The word "Behold" is a summons to pay attention. Jesus is about to unveil the central mystery of His mission. He is going up to Jerusalem, the religious heart of Israel, not for a coronation in the way they expected, but for a crucifixion. And this is not a deviation from the plan; it is the plan. Notice the absolute certainty: "all things... will be completed." The Greek word here is teleo, from which we get "telos," meaning end, goal, or purpose. Jesus is saying that everything the prophets wrote about the Messiah's suffering and glory is now coming to its appointed fulfillment.
This is a profound statement about the nature of Scripture and God's sovereignty over history. The Old Testament is not a random collection of stories and religious musings. It is a coherent, divinely authored narrative pointing relentlessly to Christ. From the protoevangelium in Genesis 3:15 to the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, the prophets painted a detailed portrait of a Messiah who would suffer before He would reign. Jesus saw His life, and particularly His death, not as a series of unfortunate events, but as the deliberate fulfillment of this ancient script. He was not a victim of circumstance; He was the Lord of history, ensuring that every jot and tittle of the prophetic word was accomplished.
This demolishes any notion of a "plan B" gospel. It was not as though Jesus came offering the kingdom, the Jews rejected it, and so God had to improvise with the cross. No, the cross was the plan from the beginning. Peter would later preach this very truth on the day of Pentecost, saying Jesus was "delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God" (Acts 2:23). God was not reacting; He was acting. He was not being thwarted; He was triumphing, using the wicked hands of men to accomplish His holy purpose.
The Brutal Details (v. 32-33)
Jesus does not speak in vague generalities. He provides a stark, itemized list of the humiliation and agony He will endure.
"For He will be delivered over to the Gentiles, and will be mocked and mistreated and spit upon, and after they have flogged Him, they will kill Him, and the third day He will rise again." (Luke 18:32-33 LSB)
First, He will be "delivered over to the Gentiles." This would have been a particularly galling detail for His Jewish disciples. The Messiah, the King of the Jews, handed over by His own people to the pagan, occupying power of Rome for execution. This was the ultimate betrayal and humiliation. It was the Jewish leadership who would condemn Him, but the Gentiles who would carry out the sentence. This act would demonstrate the universal sinfulness of man, Jew and Gentile alike, conspiring in the death of the Son of God.
Then comes the litany of abuse: mocked, mistreated, spit upon, flogged, and killed. This is not the glorious conqueror they were expecting. This is the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, despised and rejected by men. The mocking would fulfill Psalm 22. The spitting would fulfill Isaiah 50:6. The flogging was a brutal Roman practice, a prelude to crucifixion that often killed men on its own. And finally, death. The Messiah would die. This was the great stumbling block, the central offense of the gospel. A dead Messiah was, to them, a failed Messiah.
But Jesus does not end with death. The final, crucial item on the list is the resurrection: "and the third day He will rise again." This is the vindication. This is the exclamation point at the end of the sentence of death. The cross without the resurrection is a tragedy. The resurrection without the cross is meaningless. Together, they form the heart of the gospel. His death would pay the penalty for sin, and His resurrection would declare that the payment was accepted and that death itself had been conquered. He had the authority to lay down His life, and He had the authority to take it up again. This was the sign of Jonah, the ultimate proof of His identity and the basis for our hope.
The Sovereign Blindness (v. 34)
After this plain, detailed, and repeated prophecy, Luke gives us a stunning assessment of the disciples' reaction.
"But the disciples understood none of these things, and this statement was hidden from them, and they did not comprehend the things that were said." (Luke 18:34 LSB)
Luke uses three different phrases to emphasize their utter incomprehension. They understood nothing. The meaning was hidden. They did not grasp what He was saying. This was not a failure of intellect. Peter, James, and John were not stupid men. This was a spiritual blindness. Their minds were so saturated with a particular paradigm, a theology of glory without suffering, that the plainest words of Jesus could not penetrate it. They had a category for a conquering Messiah, but no category for a crucified one.
But notice the language: "this statement was hidden from them." The verb is passive. This was not just their own stubbornness at work, though that was certainly present. This was a sovereign act of God. For His own divine purposes, God had veiled their understanding. Why? Perhaps to protect them from a despair that would have shattered them before the appointed time. Perhaps to demonstrate that faith is not the product of human insight, but a gift of divine grace. No one can understand the wisdom of the cross unless and until God opens their eyes. As Paul would later write, "the natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised" (1 Corinthians 2:14).
This verse is a profound comfort and a solemn warning. It is a comfort because it shows that even true disciples can be slow, dim-witted, and blind, and yet Jesus does not cast them off. He continues to lead them patiently toward Jerusalem and toward the day when the Spirit would open their eyes. It is a warning because it reminds us that we can be orthodox in our confessions, active in our service, and still be blind to the plain teaching of Scripture if it contradicts our cherished assumptions or our cultural idols. We must constantly pray for the Spirit to give us eyes to see and ears to hear, to save us from our own theological blind spots.
Conclusion: Seeing the Cross Clearly
The disciples' blindness before the crucifixion is a mirror of our own natural state. The message of the cross is foolishness to the world. A God who saves through weakness, who triumphs through death, who reigns from a tree, this is not a message that the proud heart of man can invent or accept on its own. It must be revealed. And it was. After the resurrection, Jesus met two disciples on the road to Emmaus, and what did He do? "Beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures" (Luke 24:27). And then their eyes were opened.
The Holy Spirit is the one who removes the veil. The same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is the one who raises us from our spiritual blindness. He takes the plain words of Scripture, the very words the disciples heard and did not understand, and He makes them explode with light and meaning in our hearts. He shows us that the cross was not a defeat, but the ultimate victory. It was the place where the wisdom of God routed the foolishness of men, where the love of God absorbed the wrath of God, and where the power of God was perfected in weakness.
This passage calls us to abandon our own scripts and submit to God's. It calls us to read our Bibles with the conviction that it all points to the crucified and risen Christ. And it calls us to humility, recognizing that without the gracious, eye-opening work of the Holy Spirit, we too would be standing with the disciples, hearing the most important words ever spoken, and understanding none of it. But thanks be to God, He has not left us in the dark. He has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.