“SCENES OF HIS SUFFERING: THE PRAETORIUM”
Midweek Lenten Worship IV
March 9, 2016
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania
TEXT:
The soldiers led [Jesus] away inside the palace (that is, the
governor’s headquarters) and they called together the whole battalion.
Mark 15:16 (ESV)
A cruel bunch, these Roman soldiers were. We read about their
atrocities everywhere they marched. The way that they treated Jesus
was really nothing unusual for them--that’s the way they treated
everyone except their own citizens, who were protected from them by
Roman law. This particular Prisoner, Jesus of Nazareth, must have
provided a pretty good target for their degradation, since the charge
against Him was that He claimed to be the King of the Jews. A claim
like that moved these Roman patriots to defend their emperor by
showing this Jesus just what they thought of His claim. The robe of
royal color and the crown made not of gold but of thorns and a swamp
reed for a scepter were the props that they used to mock the Lord of
Glory. Why did they do it? They wanted to do more here than merely
cause their Prisoner physical pain. Actually their mockery was
twofold: They mocked His dignity as a Man and they mocked His
lordship as King.
Jesus’ dignity as a Man was no doubt under attack in that Roman
“governor’s headquarters,” known to them as the praetorium. No human
being ought to be treated the way that Jesus was treated there. The
soldiers’ mistreatment of the Nazarene betrayed their contempt for
both Him and His people. After all, they thought, He was only a
foreign subject of Rome--and a Jew at that. It wasn’t as though He
were a full-fledged person like the Romans were. I suppose it would
have been bad enough if they had merely refused to treat Jesus as Lord
and King, but they refused to treat Him even as a fellow human being.
That kind of human degradation exists in modern times also. No doubt
there are some still living among us who are old enough to remember
the atrocities of World War II, particularly the mass destruction of
European Jews. And even we didn’t live through it ourselves, we’ve
certainly heard and read about it. Or, if we want to be more current,
we are aware of the countless human lives in our own land that are
systematically (and legally) destroyed each day even before they have
the chance to take their first breath. Incredible as it may sound,
there are some people in this advanced and sophisticated twenty-first
century who have no more respect for human dignity than that band of
soldiers who gathered around Jesus did. What do European Jews and
aborted babies have to do with the mockery of our Savior? Precisely
this: These actions are present-day attacks on Jesus’ dignity as a
Man: “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My
brethren,” He will say on judgment day, “you did it to Me” (Matthew
25:40 NKJV). Because God became a Human Being in Jesus Christ, He
shares an identity with every other human being, however humble. When
the human dignity of any person is attacked, the human dignity of
Christ is attacked.
But the Roman battalion in the praetorium went even farther than
that. They also attacked Jesus’ lordship. This is obvious from the
way that they reacted to Him and the charges that were made against
Him. In mockery they put on all the appearances of reverencing Him as
king. The acts of putting a crown on a man’s head and dressing him in
“royal” garb and kneeling before him and acclaiming him as king are
normally indications of the greatest honor and respect, but here they
are performed in mock fashion for no other reason than to make light
of who this Man was said to be.
The attack on Jesus’ lordship, like the attack on His human dignity,
still goes on in our world today. Hypocrisy abounds everywhere.
There are many who pay lip-service to Jesus as their Savior, but in
reality they’re trusting in their own resources to get them through
life and in their own merits to justify them on the day of judgment.
With their lips they hail Jesus Christ as their Lord and King, but in
reality they no more let Jesus rule their lives than the soldiers let
Him rule theirs. They may not literally spit in His face, but some of
their attitudes and actions are every bit as much of an insult to His
lordship. The truth of the matter is that Jesus is the Savior, the
Lord, the King--and as such He is worthy of not just the appearance of
reverence and worship, but of total submission to His will.
What were the real motivations that lay behind the activities of
those soldiers and, for that matter, what are the real motivations
that lay behind the attacks on Jesus’ dignity and lordship today? Is
it sadism? Patriotism? Prejudice? No one really knows and, to be
honest with you, it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t even matter who
the individuals are who are staging these attacks. It doesn’t matter
because all of us are guilty. Every last one of us is responsible.
This mocked Man--this mocked Lord--is suffering much more than mere
human injustice and hatred. He is suffering the just reward for
sin--your sin and mine. Whether or not we personally have mocked the
dignity of our fellow man or have made a mockery of Jesus’ lordship by
hypocrisy, we are all alike sinners--sinners who have earned the kind
of agony and degradation that our Savior is enduring in the text
before us.
But the power and grace of God comes through for us, even in the
midst of injustice and degradation. As He often does, God takes our
evil and uses it for our good. He takes the mockery of humans and
uses it to punish human sin. He takes crucifixion, arguably the
cruelest method of torture that man has ever devised, and uses it as
the means of man’s justification. Listen to what Isaiah, writing some
eight hundred years before Jesus was born, said about the promised
Savior who was to come: “He was wounded for our transgressions, He
was crushed for our iniquities; upon Him was the chastisement that
brought us peace, and with His stripes we are healed. All we like
sheep have gone astray; we have turned--every one--to his own way; and
the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:5, 6).
The treatment that Jesus received in that praetorium and on the cross
brought us healing because He endured it in our place.
This healing that Christ gained for us by His suffering and death is
total and complete. It means that we no longer stand condemned before
God, because He has taken our guilt upon Himself. It means that we
are no longer lost, wandering about aimlessly in the darkness of sin.
And it means even more than that. What He did in that praetorium and
what He did on the cross was to restore us as creatures of God to our
original perfect state--the perfect state that humankind enjoyed at
creation but has been constantly corrupting ever since its first
generation. Our life as Christians is really a march toward
perfection--a process of daily being conformed to the image of Christ.
This march is possible only because of the power of Christ’s death and
resurrection. It is true that we will never reach perfection in this
life, but that goal lies before us in heaven, and He promises to bring
our march to completion there, where, by His grace we will live with
Him forever and praise Him not in mockery, but sincerely, as King of
kings and Lord of lords.
Amen.
May the One who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood,
making us kings and priests before His God and Father, lead you to a
life of repentance and trust. May He also be glorified in the lives
of you, His people. He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it.
Amen.