I. What was this will? What was the moving spring of their fierce resolution that Jesus of Nazareth should die? (1) It was their will that this stern censor of their manners and morals should die. This was, perhaps, the first and broadest reason of their hate. They writhed under His vehement denunciation of their sins the bold hand which rent off the cloak of their sanctity, and revealed the foul sink of corruption that was beneath. (2) They willed that the witness to the truth should die. The Lord belonged to another world which they did not care to enter; a world which troubled their selfish, sensual lives. Men hate the witness of truth when they are bent on transgression. They cannot bear it, they will hot. (3) They willed that the teacher of the people, the friend of publicans and sinners, should die. They were a ruling class, almost a caste. And such rulers hate none so bitterly as those who speak loving, quickening, emancipating words to the poor. "The common people heard Him gladly." As society was then constituted in Judæa, that meant that He or the rulers must fall. (4) There was something deeper and more malignant than this. It was their will that their Saviour should die. One cannot shake off the impression, reading the Gospel narrative, that the rulers knew Him. Nicodemus was not without vision of the truth. Others must have shared his ideas. They felt that He had come to save them, and they would not be saved. This was the will of the Jews.
II. But what, meanwhile, was the will of God? St. Peter explains it (Acts 2:23): "Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain." How is this? It was God's will as well as their own; as far as the act was concerned, the Father delivered the well-beloved Son into the hands of the Jews. To understand this, we must consider (1) that it was not possible that the God-Man should be holden of death. The Jews willed that He should die, but what He was, what they hated, could not die. (2) Through death the power of Christ, His witness to the truth, His witness against sin, His redemptive work for mankind, became living, nay, all-pervading and almighty realities in the world.
J. Baldwin Brown, The Sunday Afternoon,p. 159.
References: Luke 23:26. J. Vaughan, Sermons,15th series, p. 149; A. Blomfield, Sermons in Town and Country,p. 99; Spurgeon, Morning by Morning,p. 96. Luke 23:27. Ibid.,p. 100. Luke 23:27-31. Ibid.,vol. xxii., No. 1,320. Luke 23:28. W. Morrison, Church of England Pulpit,vol. vii., p. 203.