Read
1Pilate gave orders for Jesus to be beaten with a whip. 2The soldiers made a crown out of thorn branches and put it on Jesus. Then they put a purple robe on him. 3They came up to him and said, “Hey, you king of the Jews!” They also hit him with their fists.
4Once again Pilate went out. This time he said, “I will have Jesus brought out to you again. Then you can see for yourselves that I have not found him guilty.”
5Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said, “Here is the man!”
6When the chief priests and the temple police saw him, they yelled, “Nail him to a cross! Nail him to a cross!”
Pilate told them, “You take him and nail him to a cross! I don't find him guilty of anything.”
7The crowd replied, “He claimed to be the Son of God! Our law says that he must be put to death.”
8When Pilate heard this, he was terrified. 9He went back inside and asked Jesus, “Where are you from?” But Jesus did not answer.
10“Why won't you answer my question?” Pilate asked. “Don't you know I have the power to let you go free or to nail you to a cross?”
11 Jesus replied, “If God had not given you the power, you couldn't do anything at all to me. But the one who handed me over to you did something even worse.”
12Then Pilate wanted to set Jesus free. But the crowd again yelled, “If you set this man free, you are no friend of the Emperor! Anyone who claims to be a king is an enemy of the Emperor.”
13When Pilate heard this, he brought Jesus out. Then he sat down on the judge's bench at the place known as “The Stone Pavement.” In Aramaic this pavement is called “Gabbatha.” 14It was about noon on the day before Passover, and Pilate said to the crowd, “Look at your king!”
15“Kill him! Kill him!” they yelled. “Nail him to a cross!”
“So you want me to nail your king to a cross?” Pilate asked.
The chief priests replied, “The Emperor is our king!” 16Then Pilate handed Jesus over to be nailed to a cross.
Jesus Is Nailed to a Cross
(Matthew 27.32-44; Mark 15.21-32; Luke 23.26-43)
Jesus was taken away, 17and he carried his cross to a place known as “The Skull.” In Aramaic this place is called “Golgotha.” 18There Jesus was nailed to the cross, and on each side of him a man was also nailed to a cross.
19Pilate ordered the charge against Jesus to be written on a board and put above the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” 20The words were written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.
The place where Jesus was taken wasn't far from the city, and many of the people read the charge against him. 21So the chief priests went to Pilate and said, “Why did you write that he is King of the Jews? You should have written, ‘He claimed to be King of the Jews.’ ”
22But Pilate told them, “What is written will not be changed!”
23After the soldiers had nailed Jesus to the cross, they divided up his clothes into four parts, one for each of them. But his outer garment was made from a single piece of cloth, and it did not have any seams. 24 The soldiers said to each other, “Let's not rip it apart. We will gamble to see who gets it.” This happened so the Scriptures would come true, which say,
“They divided up my clothes
and gambled
for my garments.”
The soldiers then did what they had decided.
Reflect
This is a passage many of us know well. Too well, perhaps, because unless we are careful the power of what John portrays here can be lost to us. We have heard this story so many times. It can become so familiar and “ordinary” that we lose sight of the extraordinary it lays before us.
There were no fireworks when Jesus saved the world. CBC or CTV or CNN or FOX NEWS were not there with exclusive coverage of a historic event any more than they were there when the Son of God was born in Bethlehem 30 years before. The execution of Jesus, but for friends and family and some people in the crowd, was a non-event for the world at large. It was just another trial of another criminal that ended with another gruesome Roman crucifixion. It was ordinary. Nothing special.
Yet even in the ordinary there was one clue that not everything was as ordinary as it seemed. Jesus wore a rare garment. It was a robe that had no seams because it had been sewn in one piece. This startled even the tough Roman soldiers. This was a real find, a prize, so instead of ripping it into equal shares, they decided to leave it whole and gamble for it, so that the winner would have the beautiful robe intact.
The robe in fact pointed to the real prize – the man who had worn it who was bleeding to death on the cross. But the soldiers did not connect the beauty of the robe to the beauty and importance of the man. An extraordinary robe in the midst of an ordinary execution – but they did not connect the dots.
And often we are like the soldiers. We see an apparently ordinary day or an ordinary event or an ordinary person and that’s all we see. There may be clues that there is more to this ordinariness than meets the eye but we miss them. God may be doing something momentous but it goes right over our heads because we think if he is going to do something momentous it will be obvious. We think there will be music and cameras and maybe angels. We forget that things as important as Christ’s birth and death went unnoticed by most. God frequently brings about the extraordinary within the ordinary. It is so in the Bible and it is so in our daily lives. God is doing something in our church, in our city, in our family, in our own lives but we do not see it because it does not come dressed the way we expect. We need to learn to see the God moments in the ordinary life moments, the moments clothed in grace that to our eyes are clothed only in the stuff of everyday. Once we learn this we soon see our world as God sees it and just as the poet expressed it: “Earth’s crammed with heaven/And every common bush afire with God;/But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.” (From “Aurora Leigh” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
Respond
I don’t want to miss anything you are doing in our midst, Lord, whether large or small, for really there is nothing that is small if your hand is in it. Help me to see your grace and love and power even when it comes looking nothing at all like the way I think your grace and love and power should look. Help me to see your extraordinary in your ordinary. In Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Murray Pura
Murray Pura, a native of Manitoba, is an ordained minister with Masters degrees from Acadia University and Regent College in Vancouver BC. At Regent he studied under JI Packer and also produced a thesis on William Wilberforce which was subsequently published under the title "Vital Christianity". Murray has served churches in Canada and the US. A writer in Christian theology and Christian fiction both, he currently writes full time and is represented by Steve Laube Agency in Phoenix, AZ. Murray has published with HarperCollins, Zondervan, HarperOne San Francisco, Baker, Barbour and Harvest House, to name a few. He has won the Word Guild Award for Best Historical Novel and has also been shortlisted for the Kobzar Literary Award of Toronto. His devotional writings include the books "Rooted" (Zondervan), "Streams" (Zondervan), and "Majestic & Wild" (Baker). He also wrote the study notes for Exodus and Luke in The Life With God Bible (Harper Collins).