Vision When It’s Hard to Look

Matthew 27:27-31, CEB The governor’s soldiers took Jesus into the governor’s house, and they gathered the whole company of soldiers around him.  They stripped him and put a red military coat on him.  They twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head. They put a stick in his right hand. Then they bowed down in front of him and mocked him, saying, “Hey! King of the Jews!”  After they spit on him, they took the stick and struck his head again and again.  When they finished mocking him, they stripped him of the military coat and put his own clothes back on him. They led him away to crucify him.

This scene is hard to imagine. Not hard in the sense that I cannot picture what happened, but it’s hard to make myself imagine it fully.  The text says that a cohort of Roman soldiers were called upon to take Jesus to the Praetorium, the house of the Roman Governor.  A full cohort is six hundred men.  Jesus is stripped, mocked, spit upon, and beaten by as many as six hundred men.

These are six hundred men that don’t even know Jesus.  He’s “just another Jew” to them.  This is not personal to them as they have no real reason to have any feelings for Jesus, positive or negative.  They seem to be having fun being extremely cruel to another human being.   Perhaps why this is so disturbing to try and picture is that most of us have seen it before.  Someone is cruel, maybe even violent, for no apparent reason.  Unfortunately, it happens every day.  We might even call it normal in the human realm. 

When I have witnessed this kind of barbarism before, it makes my insides boil.  The times that I can recall right now are situations where I had no power to stop the cruelty.  I could do nothing but watch. . . and get more and more angry.  The anger would fuel fantasies of the tormentors getting punished with the same blatant cruelty they were dishing out.  My guttural response to senseless brutality is revenge.  Perhaps I’m not alone in that. 

This is why Jesus’s response to the soldiers’ actions is so unbelievable.  First, Jesus does have power to respond.  He is outnumbered 600 to 1, and yet, it is the Roman cohort that is the inferior force.  At the very least, Jesus could have prevented them from hurting him.  He could have struck them mute to silence their taunts.  Jesus could have, if he wished, vanquished the entire company with a word. 

But instead, Jesus does nothing.  He simply endures the humiliation and violence.  He absorbs it all without responding in any way.  It occurs to me that Jesus imagines something in this moment that is the extreme opposite of the revenge I conjure in my mind.  Jesus imagines redemption.

In the next chapter of Matthew, we’ll witness a Roman Centurion proclaim Jesus to be the Son of God.  I can’t help thinking that Centurion was one of the 600 – how could he not be?  This leader of soldiers witnessed Jesus’s response to the Roman cohort’s cruelty and a day later, becomes convinced that Jesus had the power to stop it all along but didn’t.  His heart and mind changed. 

Physical force can never change a heart like this.  In fact, when cruelty is returned with similar force, the effect is that the resolve behind the original cruelty is often strengthened. As Martin Luther King, Jr. famously stated, ​“Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”  What Matthew would have us see here is that the superior power in this story is love.  Love can do what no amount of military power can ever do. 

Love is marching in this story and will be though the end of Matthew’s gospel.  Though we see humiliation, cruelty, and eventually, death, Matthew (from the other side of the resurrection) sees redemption and victory.  He invites us to see it in this story as well.  Even more than that, Matthew invites us to see it in our story as well.  Love is still marching.

Question:  Are we able to see love “marching” even in the current state of our world?

Prayer:  Lord, as we continue to see the clash between “earthly” power and the power of Your kingdom of love play out in our current reality, help us hold your vision of redemption in our hearts.  Help us not be governed by our base desires for revenge and resentment.  May our response to what happens around us and to us be more and more like Jesus.  Amen.

Prayer Focus:  Pray for someone for whom you currently hold negative feelings.

Song:  Native Tongue – Switchfoot