Text: Matthew 27:27-31
Date: November 22, 2020
Event: Christ the King Sunday (The Last Sunday of the Church Year), Year A
Matthew 27:27–31 (EHV)
27Then the governor’s soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole cohort of soldiers around him. 28They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him. 29They twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand, knelt in front of him, and mocked him by saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” 30They spit on him, took the staff, and hit him repeatedly on his head.
31After they had mocked him, they took off the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him.
Jesus’ Subjugation Is Our Exaltation
When you think of kings and queens, what thoughts roll into your mind? Since shelter in place started, Oliver and I have read through the entire Chronicles of Narnia series of books, some of them more than once, and those books are filled with scenes and imagery of opulent regal affairs. Feasts and castles, crowns and other adornments, kings and queens ruling and protecting their people.
That’s really something that you and I in America don’t have a good sense of. If we’ve lived here our whole life, we’ve never lived in a monarchy. And while when you see images of the interior of the White House or Air Force One those places are certainly nice there just a certain something that is missing compared to our ideas of regality, whether those ideas are based in reality from current day or history, or based on fantasy extrapolations.
It doesn’t really matter what our idea of a monarchy is in our mind, though. The scene before us is the polar opposite of what we think of when we think of a king. Nothing about this is regal, nothing about it is authoritative, nothing about it is comforting. It’s horrifying and sad. And yet, as we see Jesus, our supposed-King, undergoing this mocking treatment at the hands of the Roman soldiers, we recognize that he endures all this and much, much more for us. The fact that Jesus willingly allowed himself to undergo all of this, to be subjugated by his own creation, in the end means that we, his people, will be exalted.
We don’t need to spend a lot of time on the background to our text this morning. We know it well, although maybe it seems more appropriate for a Lent or Good Friday service rather than our more joyful celebration today. But this takes place at the end of Jesus’ “trial” before Pontus Pilate. The Jewish leaders have dragged him here to Pilate and made all sorts of false accusations. Both Pilate and Herod have examined him and found no wrongdoing in him. And yet Pilate still had Jesus flogged, whipped with a whip with tiny pieces of metal on the ends of the straps, to try to appease the bloodthirsty crowd. It didn’t work. So he still gives the order to have Jesus, a man he’s found to be completely innocent, crucified.
Jesus is handed over to the soldiers who will carry out the crucifixion. But before they head to Golgotha, they want to have some fun at Jesus’ expense. They had heard the accusations that Jesus had claimed to be a king, and thus opposed Caesar, the emperor. Perhaps some had even heard Jesus talking with Pilate earlier, telling him, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). And so their mockery centers on this detail.
They strip Jesus’ clothes off—likely painfully as the cloth was probably stuck to his body with coagulated blood from the earlier flogging. They take a scarlet robe, one that would’ve been used in the dress of the soldiers, and wrap it around Jesus. Everything about this scene is a mockery because this would have been a cheaply dyed piece of cloth, in opposition to an actual purple robe that a king would wear which would have been dyed beautifully and been very, very expensive. The crown, a symbol of power and authority, is fashioned out of thorns, and pounded into his head with the staff they had shoved into his hand.
In mocking reverence, they cry out to Jesus, “Hail, King of the Jews!” insulting both Jesus and the Jewish people at the same time. In other words, “Get a load of this pathetic excuse for a king! This is the best person these pathetic people could put forward!”
It’s one of those scenes that makes you want to crawl into the pages of your Bible and stop, right? Even with the assumption that Jesus’ death on the cross is necessary, is all of this cruelty around the edges needed? We want to defend our Savior and stop these soldiers from treating him like this, right? “Just leave him alone!” our hearts cry out.
But let’s take a step back here this morning. We don’t want anyone to do this to our Savior, to our King, and yet, we do, don’t we? We’ve done so much more, so much worse to insult and mock him. Each and every sin we commit against him spits in his face and ridicules him, “Hail, King Jesus! You’re so important to me that I do what I want to do and ignore everything you’ve told me to do. What I want to do is so much more important than you are. You are a pathetic excuse for a king!”
And what does our King do? Well, what did he do with the Roman soldiers? We see no flashes of lightning. Not even a word spoken in his defense, nor an arm raised to protect himself. He just stood there and took it all. At the cross, he would even pray for their forgiveness. Why? Why does the Creator of the universe allow his insolent creation to treat him in this way? Why does he subjugate himself to people doing and saying these horrid things? Why does he not even attempt to stop them after all of this when they led him away to the cross?
It doesn’t look like it at all but in these pathetic-looking moments, Jesus is being exactly the powerful King we needed him to be. We often associate a monarch with regality and pageantry, but that’s not what it means to be a king in the purest form. A king’s chief job is to protect his people. That means leading the army into war, potentially even risking injury himself. Muddy, and perhaps bloody, a true king will do everything he can to stop an enemy to make sure that his people are safe.
And that’s what Jesus is doing here. He’s not protecting anyone from the Jewish leaders or the Roman soldiers. No, he’s going to battle, to war, with our real enemies, enemies that are not mentioned in this account nor are they visible. He’s going to battle with sin, death, and hell, with Satan, the world, and our own sinful natures. He’s going into battle to save us from those who wanted to destroy us. He’s going to war to defeat those whose goal it was to drag us to hell.
Jesus goes to the cross, an act of apparent weakness and defeat. But the reality is that it was conquest and triumph. Because here, having suffered hell in our place, Jesus defeated the sin that condemned us. He rescued us who were held captive by sin and death. Our King put everything on the line for us because he loves us. He rescued us when we were not able to do anything to help ourselves. He defeated our enemies and now we are safe, not just from temporal, external things, but for eternity.
So for all the mocking, ridicule, humiliation that our King endures in the scene before us, truly here and at the cross we see him in all of his true regal glory. Here his heart is on display—willingly enduring all of these things to save us, to sacrifice his life to save ours.
But our King’s story is not one of defeat. It does not end with his death on the cross. Remember what the apostle Paul wrote in our Second Lesson for this morning: But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came by a man, the resurrection of the dead also is going to come by a man. For as in Adam they all die, so also in Christ they all will be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ as the firstfruits and then Christ’s people, at his coming. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has done away with every other ruler and every other authority and power. For he must reign “until he has put all his enemies under his feet.” Death is the last enemy to be done away with (1 Corinthians 15:20-26).
Your King has conquered. Your King has returned from the battlefield triumphant. Your King has saved you—his death paid for your sins and his resurrection, the certainty of his victory, is your certain hope. You, too, will not stay in your grave. You will be raised with him. And then we will live an eternal life where every enemy that threatens us now—sin, hell, and even death itself—has been subjugated, trampled under his feet. They are done away with. They are gone.
My brothers and sisters, in a world that continually feels like its spinning out of control, remember this: Your King has conquered; your King reigns. All things are placed under his feet. He has destroyed your enemies and reigns supreme over all things for your eternal well being. He endured the mocking, suffering, hell, and death to save you. He rose from the dead and will raise you from your death as well. Hail, King Jesus! Praise and glory be to him forever and ever! Amen.
