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When we come back chapter 19 beginning at verse 1.
John 19.6
Milk
April 26th 2015
We left Jesus having told Pilate that He was a King that came into the world to present the truth.
In response Pilate asked, “What is truth,” walked out and told the waiting/hating Jews that he found no fault in Him and asked them, in the name of a custom to let one prisoner go during Passover, if he should let Jesus, the King of the Jew go.
The response from the crowd was, No not Jesus but Barabbas. And John added that Barabbas was a robber.
Verse 1 chapter 19:
John 19:1 Then Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged him.
2 And the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, and they put on him a purple robe,
3 And said, Hail, King of the Jews! and they smote him with their hands.
4 Pilate therefore went forth again, and saith unto them, “Behold, I bring him forth to you, that ye may know that I find no fault in him.”
5 Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, “Behold the man!”
6 When the chief priests therefore and officers saw him, they cried out, saying, “Crucify him, crucify him.” Pilate saith unto them, “Take ye him, and crucify him: for I find no fault in him.”
The crowd of Jewish leaders were determined. They wanted Him dead. Justice was NOT about to happen.
It’s a paradoxical situation because thank God it didn’t happen – if it had there would be no salvation. We would all remain separated from God forever.
It’s another paradox in what we call the Bible. I can only size the whole thing up as when God meets this fallen world, evil will occur (not justified by any means) but in and through it God will ultimately prevail.
Pilate, knowing at least that Jesus was NOT guilty of treason tried yet again to get Jesus released but to no avail – so we enter the next step – to brutalize the Lord and then see if he can get Him released.
So verse 1 says:
John 19:1 Then Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged him.
So, under Roman law, which did not believe in moderation or punishment that extended beyond the crime, ANYONE who was crucified was to also be scourged.
Some believe, because of Pilates general attitude toward Jesus that if crucifixion was a must that he would have had this part skipped on behalf of Jesus.
However, because it was Jesus there was no way he could have gotten away with this merciful act. So as a result he probably used the scourging as a means to try and bring out a merciful response from His accusers once they say Him after the scourging.
Of course we will see this approach didn’t work either.
The word for scourge here in the Greek is
FRAGELLO which, once translated to Latin became Flaggela – which we today speak of when it comes to whipping – as in “self-flaggelation,” the act where devout Catholic priests would take leather whips (a flagella) and whip their own backs due to sin.
There is an interesting connection between sin and pain in the flesh – the place where all sin resides.
In opposition to health, and comfort and life stands disease, discomfort and death.
Which things reside in the flesh.
Somehow the presence of sin and pain in the flesh (which is the source of mortal sin) can relate – and some people actually become destructive of their literal flesh as a means to cope with personal wrong doing.
It’s the connection between a child doing wrong and then receiving a reasonable swat or spank delivered to guide and direct and not actually cause pain.
They disobey and the swat wakes them up a subliminal reminder that they cannot live by the flesh or they will possibly die by the flesh.
When I was in seventh grade a boy named Randy Ward called my mom and ape.
Of course this was time for retaliation and Randy and I got in a brawl out on the school lawn. I was on top of Randy flailing away and the lunch was running from across the field screaming for me to stop. I tried as hard as I could to deliver as many blows to Randy’s face before the aid could reach us – something he reported to Mr. Collins, the Principle, when Randy and I were taken to the office.
Randy had called my Mom and ape and received blows which taught him to reconsider ever doing that again.
In Mr. Collins office I too received a reminder to never do what I did to Randy again. What was called, “a swat.”
After determining guilt, Randy and I both were sentenced to a swat from Mr. Collins and his paddle – a wide thick board that hung on his wall. The thing was modified by holes drilled through it to add speed to Mr. Collins swing without losing much of the heft of the paddle.
Randy went first. Collins had him bend over. Randy’s face was about a foot from where I was sitting. Then it came. BOOM.
And Randy started crying! I thought it was hilarious – the kid was crying over a single swat.
My turn.
In a flash I had converge all manner of emotions and thoughts from a single utterly shocking blast that reverberated through body and soul.
Collins hit me so hard it took my breath away. I was literally stupefied by the blow – a single simple notice that said, There are rules and you have broken them. You broke them willfully, getting as many punches in on a boy who insulted you.
That will not do. Wake up! Die to your flesh. Live by something better.
It would take a long long time for this message to sink in – but what has come to be known simply as “the swat” inaugurated the process.
Proverbs 8:36 says something interesting about the human connection to pain and flesh and sin. It says:
“But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death.”
A direct connection, in my opinion to sin and the human response to it from the heart – death and acts that lead to it.
The solution – God became flesh, took on a body of flesh and bone and blood, and then on behalf of us and our willful, sinful flesh, had HIS destroyed – for us.
The act of Pilate may seemed to have been situational but it was known he would take this course since the foundation of the world – prophesied in scripture in fact.
Speaking about his youth and prophetically about the Messiah David says something interesting in
Psalm 129:3:
“The plowers plowed upon my back: they made long their furrows.”
Isaiah, speaking of Jesus, said in Isaiah 50:6
“I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting.”
Of course we recognized more of Isaiah’s words in
Isaiah 53:5, saying:
“But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.”
Of course scourging under Roman hands was a brutal, barbaric practice.
According to Deuteronomy 25:3 which says:
“Forty stripes he may give him, and not exceed: lest, if he should exceed, and beat him above these with many stripes, then thy brother should seem vile unto thee.”
Now, that was the Jewish law. And it was imposed typically in a number of 39 so as not to go over 40 and to show mercy in the face of punishment.
We know that Paul was scourged five times with “forty stripes save one” (he was also beaten with a rod three times and stone almost to death once).
Part of the reason for the number forty for stripes presented in Deuteronomy is due to the significance of the number itself in scripture.
Scripture uses forty often in connection to spans of time related to humiliation, affliction, and punishment.
Remember that Moses humbled himself TWICE with fasting and prayer for forty days and forty nights (Deuteronomy 9:9 & 18). Elijah fasted forty days (1st Kings 19:8) and the Lord (Matthew 4:2) did the same.
For forty years Israel was afflicted in the wilderness for their sins, (Numbers 14:33,34).
And forty years Egypt was desolate for treacherous dealing with Israel (Ezekiel 29:11-13).
When a woman had a male baby she was in purification for forty days and when a female double (forty twice) (Leviticus 12:4-5).
Genesis 7 tells us it rained forty days and forty nights at Noah’s flood.
Ezekiel bore the iniquity of the house of Israel for forty days (Ezekiel 4:6).
When Jonah preached he said, “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown,” (Jonah 3:4)
For forty years the Canaanites had to repent after Israel came out of Egypt and then wandered that many years in the wilderness (Numbers 14:33).
Genesis has Noah preaching repentance to the old world for 120 years – three cycles of forty years.
Moses was forty years in Egypt, forty years in wilderness, forty years with the Nation of Israel.
Acts 1:3 & 9 tells us that Jesus ascended into heaven forty days after his resurrection and finally it was forty years – a Biblical generation – before Jesus returned to the House of Israel to wipe out the temple, the genealogies, and over a million of the covenant people . . . by the hand of the Romans – the same group that was laying the stripes across Jesus back.
While forty sounds like a huge number to us in our day Jewish historian Maimonides said that the whip was composed of three strands so we are really talking about (at most 13 actual lashes).
This is what he said:
“When they judge (or condemn) a sinner to so many (stripes) as he can bear, they judge not but by strokes that are fit to be trebled. If they judge that he can bear twenty, they do not say he shall be beaten with one and twenty, to the end that they may treble the stripes, but they give him eighteen.-Maimon in Sanhedrin, chap. xvii., sec. 2.
In other words, if the individual could not take the full brunt of forty less one they would be given what they could bear. When it comes to mercy – which God implored of his people – this approach to whippings is starting to make sense.
But again, in Jesus case, the stripes or scourging was in the hands of the Romans and not the Jews.
Under the Romans we do not know how many stripes Jesus received. It could have been more than forty, it could have been less – but certainly more than two because stripes is plural.
Regardless of the number (and I would believe the Romans would have leaned to ward giving many more than less) but despite the number we know that the severity of the Roman stripes was far, far more worse than those delivered under Jewish law.
Why? How?
Their whips were, like Mr. Collins swat board, altered to increase affliction.
First of all, the scourging itself was used to make the crucifixion far more miserable by flaying the back open so as to expose the nerves against the rough hewn wood.
This was done by integrating slivers of stone and bone into the woven cords so when they come in contact with the body they would burrow in at odd angles on to remove flesh when yanks away.
While utterly brutal I can’t help but find a tremendous amount of symbolism present in the barbarism.
Think about this.
Jesus
Jesus – emmaunel – meaning God with us, took on something that God did not and does not have – a body –flesh and blood.
And part of His mission for man was to not let His flesh ever have control over His Spirit. To be sinless. To live and walk entirely by the heavenly presence within Him and NOT the flesh that surrounded Him.
He was successful in this – always doing the will of the invisible God (His Father) and never the will that resided in his carnal body.
In His passion this principle was taken to the ultimate extreme. How? In this final stage of life His literal flesh was tortured.
How would he respond in this situation?
I mean its one thing to forgive people who say mean things about us. It quite another to forgive them when they are slapping you, spitting in your face, laughing at your paid and now stripping the literal flesh off His back – a symbolic gesture if there ever was one on how to live and act as Christ – where not matter what our flesh is experiencing, to do the will of God.
By the Spirit.
Paul, speaking of people who have realized that there is no other way to live than by the Spirit, realizing that in the flesh only sin, said in Romans 8:
1 There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.
2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.
3 For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh:
4 That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.
5 For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit.
6 For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.
That line , “For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit,” was utterly exemplified in the person of Christ, who, having the very flesh torn from His frame, continued . . . to love, by the Spirit, which was the will of the Father.
Truly, by His stripes, we are all healed – as we let Him work in us.
Verse 2, “And . . . “
The strips weren’t enough. There was more. To the man who could have called down a legion of angels to wipe His tormentors out (we know this is a fact from what He told Peter outside the Garden AND due to the idea of choosing as a means to prove love.
Let me put it this way:
God put a tree with fruit in the Garden that He forbade Adam and Eve from eating.
No tree, no forbidding, no ability to choose and prove love and allegiance.
By have the tree there Adam and Eve were able to show love and allegiance but refraining or self-will by indulging.
Jesus, the second Adam who overcame all that the first Adam failed to do, also had a choice – to, AS MAN, show love and allegiance to the will of God by refraining OR to refuse and indulge His self-will, and call down angels to wipe His enemies out.
Lacking flesh over his back (and probably his thighs, neck and calves) He still chose to do the will of God in the Spirit – completely showing the opposite characteristic of Adam.
2 And . . . the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, and they put on him a purple robe, (verse 3) And said, “Hail, King of the Jews! and they smote him with their hands.”
You know, while all this was going on, the accusations, the scourging – someone got in in their head that to make Him a crown.
I mean, this person or persons had to construct this thing especially for Him. More on this in a minute. But the facts about the thorns needs to be addressed first.
Most of us have seen what the painters of the middle ages have done with this passage – making the crown a thing of torture and the thorns long and dry and very pointy.
(like the one here that came from Mexico and that is used in their village reenactment of the crucifixion).
But it seems that the crown was intended more to humiliate Him than to torture Him. Like the purple robe they placed on His body and the reed they places in His hand as a false scepter . . . and then the bowing down they did to feign worship.
The crown was probably not made of the long dried uber-sharp thorns like a boganvilla plant.
Many scholars believe that the crown was formed of the herb “acanthus.”
This conclusion came about due to a reading of Mark 15:17, and this verse (19:5) which refer to the crown of thorns as “stefanon akanyinon,” which may very well be translated “an acanthine crown” or “wreath,” formed out of the branches of the acanthus or “bear’s foot,” herb.
Pliny the Younger, a historial, says that the Acanthine herb grows to ten cubits long in the stem and the flowers were used “ad deos coronandos,” – for CROWNING THE GODS.
The Acanthus – still all over the world – has leaves that are thorny and therefore relates to the Greeks name for the plant which relates to thorns. But they are not the type of thorns we imagine.
If Jesus “crown” was first constructed to mock Him as a King and was then made from a plant available to them in that area, the fact that the leaves were thorny seems to have been incidental to its application.
Christians – as time has gone on and out of a desire to make His passion more wicked than it already was – have added to this narrative and even have included a myth that once the long sharp crown of thorns were in place they took a club and pounded it onto His head.
Based on the available records this is not true.
Nevertheless, there is also a remarkable symbolism found in this act of Jesus being crowned with that appears to have been the Acanthan Herb with its spiney leaves.
Going back to the Genesis account of the Fall, we read God saying to Adam:
Genesis 3:17 “Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
As the result of Adam’s choice God mentioned elements (all the way back in Genesis) that were present in Jesus passion, including:
a crown of thorns and thistles
from an herb
placed on the head of Jesus (over what had to have been His sweaty face)
resulting from His work of love on behalf of the world.
Amazing.
In addition to the crown of thorns John 19:2 adds:
“and they put on him a purple robe.”
Matthew calls it a “scarlet robe.” Mark joins with John and calls it purple.
Scarlet back then came from a fruit and purple came from a shell-fish. Anciently the name purple was given to any color that contained any mixture of red in it.
Consequently these different colors – scarlet and purple were probably the same.
Purple is mentioned fifty times in the Bible – fifty-three times so we know that the color and its variants were important to the ancients – especially when it came to royalty of any sort.
A roman general wore purple as did governors which would distinguish them from other Roman officers. And its quite doubtful that they would have draped a new purple robe over the Lord so they probably located one discarded by a fallen Roman ruler and put it on the Lord’s ploughed back.
Matthews account adds that they also put a reed in His right hand and feigned to bow before Him in utter mockery.
Little did they know.
You know, sometimes it can be hard for us to relate to what was happening here. It’s an account that not only is far removed from us it has been told so often we lose something sometimes in the repetition.
I frequently wonder what God – who had wiped people out for far lesser crimes – was thinking as He watched this event unfold upon His Son who was perfect and good.
It helps me understand the things that will fall upon Jerusalem within that generation.
Sometimes to bring it home, I think of someone who to me embodies real innocence. Someone who is defenseless in the face of large barbaric men – someone like one of my daughters or my little grandboys.
I imagine the anguish and pain I would experience of soul thinking of any of them undergoing such treatment.
Pretty hard to take.
John’s account adds more salt to the tale, saying that after all this they :
3 . . . said, Hail, King of the Jews! and they smote him with their hands.
The Greek word for smote here is “slap,” not punch – but it also means that they repeatedly slapped Him.
The . . .
(MNT) says:
“They also gave him blow after blow with their hands.”
The (TCNT) says
“ They kept coming up to him and saying: “Long live the King of the Jews!” and they gave him blow after blow with their hands.
The Literal WEB translation says: They kept saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and they kept slapping him.
(BEAT)
Speaking prophetically of Jesus Isaiah 52:14 says something horribly revealing about the Lord’s state:
“As many were astonished at thee; his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men.”
Why?
“By His stripes we are healed.”
“Because God so LOVED this world.”
“You and I – sinful as we are – He sent His only begotten to make amends.”
Being utterly beaten to the point that His visage was beyond recognition maybe Pilate thought that enough had been done to appease the envy of the ruling class. (verse 4)
4 Pilate therefore went forth again, and saith unto them, “Behold, I bring him forth to you, that ye may know that I find no fault in him.”
“I’m bringing Him out to you. He has been routed by my men. Here . . . here He comes! Look at Him! After all of this abuse I still find NO fault in Him at all!
Pilate was still anxious to release Him. Amidst all that Jesus has endured the Roman Governor, who probably stood by and witnessed the scourging and mockery, saw firsthand from the Lord’s ways that He was innocent.
“Here He is!” (verse 5)
5 Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, “Behold the man!”
“Here is the man!”
“Look at the man!”
“Lo, the Man!”
It seems – it seems to me – that Pilate was trying to move these people to compassion, to mercy, to real justice which would, if given, demand that they let Jesus go.
(verse 6)
6 When the chief priests therefore and officers saw him, they cried out, saying,
“We are broken and humbled by this sight! Oh God of Heaven forgive us for what we have done. Release Him! His suffering is more than we can bear having caused.”
No?
No. They cried out and said:
“Crucify him, crucify him.”
“We want Him dead. We want you to now put Him through one of the most barbaric systems of torture known for the taking of human life – the Roman way – crucifixion.”
(beat)
There seems to be a continuum of responses humans have in the face of suffering.
One the one end the presence of real suffering invokes utter sympathy and empathy and compassion on folks.
The sight and sounds of the injured grips the human heart and cries out to help and to alleviate and to comfort.
At the other end the sight of human suffering and misery can produce the opposite response – and actually get some people to cry out for more.
Situations like the Roman collesium events, Salem witch trials, Nazi Germany and the like prove the latter.
This seems to be the Spirit present at the trial of Jesus. His marred visage did NOTHING but provoke the crowd to wanting more carnage – not less.
Pilate had to be astonished at their tenacity and ruthlessness toward the man. And he says:
“You take him and crucify him: for I find no fault in him.”
These are evidently the words of a man who was wearied by their relentless desire for Him to suffer more. So in effect Pilate seems to be saying:
“I am satisfied of his innocence – I find not fault in Him. If you are so determined to see the man killed YOU take Him and YOU crucify Him.
(beat)
We’ll leave off here . . . until next week.
