The Thin Line

Mark 15:16-20; Isaiah 53:3-6

March 13, 2016 • Mount Pleasant UMC

An old man walks down a path surrounded by tall trees. His hair is gray and he wears a light blue windbreaker over a golf shirt. He walks with great intent and purpose, as if he’s looking for someone or something. His family is behind him, but they seem to sense this is a journey he must take by himself, and so they let him go ahead alone. When he finally finds the area he is looking for, he emerges onto a vast lawn filled with white crosses. They seem to extend to the horizon, and though he knows which one he’s looking for, he still hesitates. As he approaches the single cross in the field he has been looking for, he wipes his eyes. Then he begins talking, muttering and, as his wife approaches, he turns to her. “Tell me I’ve lived a good life,” he says. She’s confused by his request, and so she stammers, “What?” “Tell me I’m a good man,” he says clearly, and this time she is just as clear. “You are,” she says. “You are.” Then the man who made the journey comes to attention and salutes his fallen comrade before he leaves. The man on the journey is named James Ryan, and the film is Saving Private Ryan, arguably one of Steven Spielberg’s best films. The story begins on the horror that was D-Day, and shortly after that event, Captain John Miller and a squad of seven men are assigned to find James Ryan and bring him home alive. Ryan’s two older brothers were killed on D-Day, and a third brother had been killed halfway around the world. Ryan was to be sent home as the only surviving son of his mother, the commander having determined no mother should have to lose all of her sons to the war. And so Miller and his men set out to find Ryan, but it was war and it doesn’t go well. Most of them are killed in the attempt to bring Ryan home, and in the final moments of Captain John Miller’s life, he had turns to Ryan and said, “James, earn this…earn it.” The scene in front of the cross tells us that Private Ryan spent the rest of his life trying to do just that, to earn what had been given to him (Colson, The Good Life, pgs. 3-7).

But the question that haunts James Ryan in this famous story is the one that often haunts us as well: am I a good person? Nearly every week in the news there is some story or another of someone who has killed people in their neighborhood or at a school or in their workplace, and every time when friends and family members are interviewed, no one ever says, “Yes, they were crazy” or “I knew they were going to do something like this.” Almost always what we hear is, “I don’t know what happened. They seemed to be such a…good person.” What turns an ordinary person into a killer? What turns a nice person into a bully? And what turns ordinary men into those who would humiliate and torture another human being? That’s the question that haunts us as we come to what, to me, is one of the worst parts of the story of Jesus’ last day: the torture of the son of God. And yet, this difficult part of the story reminds me of a truth expressed by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn many years ago: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Jesus’ story reminds us that it’s often a very thin line between good and evil.

We’ve been walking through these hours very carefully, these 24 hours that changed the world. We began, you remember, in the Upper Room on Thursday evening, with Jesus and the disciples enjoying a leisurely Passover meal. From that place, the pace picked up considerably so that, before 8:00 a.m. on Friday, Jesus has been to Gethsemane, where he prayed and where he was arrested, then he has been taken to the high priest’s house where he was illegally put on trial, and then he was taken to Pilate, the Roman governor, who somewhat unwillingly condemned him to death. But Pilate wasn’t quite done with him yet. Pilate orders him to be beaten and punished, thinking that those actions might satisfy the crowd which is demanding his death. I wonder if Pilate has any idea how thoroughly the Roman guard intends to carry out his wishes as they punish Jesus.

Many of you have probably seen The Passion of the Christ, and while it’s a hard movie to watch in general, every time I see it, this part, the punishment, is the hardest part to watch. There is still a point, even after seeing it several times, where I turn away from the screen. But Gibson’s film, if anything, may have toned down the actual violence that was done to Jesus. Without going into gruesome detail, the “flogging” Mark mentions would have consisted of Jesus being beaten by a whip that was appropriately called a “scorpion.” It was a leather lash with inset pieces of bone, stone, lead or bronze designed to do the maximum damage to a person’s body. And there were no prescribed number of lashes the Roman guard could given, so sometimes the victims died in the midst of the flogging itself. This was such a cruel punishment that one first-century historian said even Domitian, one of the cruelest of all the Roman emperors, was appalled by it (Garland, NIV Application Commentary: Mark, pg. 580). That Jesus was still able to stand after the beating is nearly miraculous.

But because he is still standing, the soldiers next take him to a courtyard, perhaps nearby, and there the soldiers proceed to play a game with Jesus. This was an ancient board game soldiers would play called “Kings.” There are pavement stones from all over the Empire, including in Jerusalem near the location of Pilate’s fortress, that display the chalkboard design of the game board, scratched into the stone by the soldiers who were bored while on duty. A piece was moved around the board—in this case, Jesus was the “piece”—until it reached the end square, at which point the winner would declare “King!” There were various points in the game where the pieces acquired a robe and a crown, but when they are using Jesus as their plaything, they play a particularly dark version of this game. Mark tells us that, at one point in the game, the soldiers place on Jesus one of their military cloaks; our translation says “purple,” but the actual word refers to a dye that came from a shellfish. It was a rare dye, hard to get, and was especially valued by the wealthy. It’s tint wasn’t so much the deep purple we usually think of, but more of a crimson, somewhere between red and purple. This heavy robe they put onto Jesus’ back, a back that has already been beaten and torn, a back that would have experienced pain from just a touch. The robe adds another level of torture. Then, as the game progresses, they would have put a crown on him. Crowns or wreaths of vegetation were particularly common in the ancient world. Emperors regularly wore a crown of laurel leaves or of withered celery (which really sounds like something I’d want to put on my head!), and so did those who were victorious at games like the Olympics. Most likely, this crown they put on Jesus would have been leafy as well, but hidden within the leaves were long, sharp thorns (Card, Mark: The Gospel of Passion, pg. 180). The branches probably came from a date palm or a thorn palm, a common enough plant in that area (Garland 580). It’s a mocking crown, a painful parody of the crown a real king would wear. So Jesus has a robe on a beaten back and thorns pressing into his brow.

But what comes next is perhaps even worse. As Jesus “wins” the game by making it to the final square, the soldiers begin to bow down and mock him. They cry out, “Hail, King of the Jews!” (15:18). As they do this, they are not only expressing contempt not only for Jesus, but also for the entire Jewish people. The Jews in Israel had had no official king since Herod the Great, the one who was king when Jesus was born. For thirty-some years, Rome has exercised direct control with governors and such. By mocking Jesus and calling him “King of the Jews,” the soldiers are telling the people, “This is just the kind of king you deserve. You’re pitiful and weak, and so is your king.” These moments of mockery are aimed at more than just one man. This is a statement about how the world and its power structures view God’s people, and how God’s people have been viewed throughout history, even down to today (cf. Garland 580).

So, there are several things happening here all at once. For one, there is the physical torture. Jesus’ body goes through the kind of extreme treatment that very few would survive. Beaten, bruised and bloodied, strength lost to the point that, according to Mark, he was unable to carry the cross by himself all the way out to the place of crucifixion. Another man, Simon of Cyrene, had to be compelled to help. Jesus was at or beyond his physical limits on this Friday morning. He is the word made flesh (John 1:14), the very son of God come to live in human form (cf. Philippians 2:7-8). In some way we can’t understand fully, the Christian faith has affirmed that Jesus was fully God and fully human. He did not just “seem” to suffer as some came to believe; he really suffered. He was human, and this torture would press (maybe even in some ways surpass) the limits of his physical body. God himself became flesh—and this is what we did to him.

But part of me thinks that worse than the physical torture was the emotional humiliation that came in the midst of the game of “Kings” and the mock coronation that the soldiers carried out. And it wasn’t a small group of soldiers, by the way. Mark says they called together the whole “company” or, more literally, “cohort” of soldiers; that is a group that could number anywhere from 200 to 600 soldiers. This is a huge group that joins together to mock Jesus (Hamilton, 24 Hours That Changed the World, pg. 82). Somewhere between 200 and 600 men hurling insults, perhaps hurling other things that struck Jesus, mockingly calling him “king.” Can you imagine it? Jesus had all the hosts of heaven at his command, and yet he chose to endure the very worst humanity could throw at him. And before we say, “Well, he was Jesus. Surely none of this got to him,” I ask you to remember how just someone making fun of you affects you. No matter what is said, even if you know it’s untrue—when someone makes fun of you, or when they tear down something you’ve built, or when they attack your character, you don’t walk away unaffected. It’s cruel. A piece of you dies inside. When we see the soldiers mock Jesus, we learn something about the human condition. Again—God himself became flesh, and this is what we did to him.

Underlying all of this is a large amount of spiritual abuse, spiritual humiliation. The mockery of Jesus as “King of the Jews” shows a general contempt for these Hebrews, and for the God they worshipped. The Roman soldiers would be people who worshipped many gods, or whatever gods seemed to appeal to them. They would have been encouraged to worship the emperor, for sure, and would have had to swear their loyalty to him to be part of the military, the “peacekeeping force” that occupied Israel. This land they served in was full of religious symbolism and theological debates, but worst of all it was all dedicated to one God, a God who would allow no others to be worshiped. By taking Jesus and doing what they did to him, they show their contempt for this old-world religion. This is what they’ve always thought ought to be done to a “king of the Jews” (cf. Wright, Mark for Everyone, pg. 211). “See what happens to you Jews, to your king? He’s nothing! He’s being beaten by Rome! Where is your God now?” Because if their king could be beaten, so could their God. Faith is on trial here, and in the eyes of the soldiers, they have a grand chance to show the superiority of their civil religion to Israel’s faith. Again—God became flesh, and this is what we did to him.

There are a couple of questions I want to ask about this incident, the first being the obvious one: why did Jesus go through this? With all the power of heaven at his command, why let these soldiers do to him what they did? The answer we want to give immediately is something like, “Because he came to save us. He had to die to save us.” And that’s true, powerfully true, but it’s still rather a surface answer. Jesus came to show that real power is found in sacrificial love. As far back as the prophet Isaiah, God had been telling us that salvation would not be found just in the savior’s death, but in his suffering as well. Isaiah foresaw it this way: “He [the Suffering Servant] was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed” (53:5).

C. S. Lewis depicted this marvelously in his classic children’s book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which Aslan (the great lion who stands in for Christ in the story) willingly gives himself to die in the place of Edmund, one of the children who has betrayed the land of Narnia to the White Witch. Aslan dies to set Edmund free, but in a short time, he is alive again. Aslan explains it this way: “Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time started, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead…Death itself would start working backwards” (pg. 132-133). And from that moment in the story, Aslan sets out to heal the wounds of the land of Narnia. By his wounds, we are healed. There is power in sacrificial love, and the witness of the Scriptures is that God always redeems suffering. God does not cause the suffering, but God can and will use it in some way. Sometimes we may never see how or why (sometimes we might), but there is nothing that happens that God can’t use.

I was reminded of that again this summer. Adam Hamilton, in the 24 Hours book that many of us are reading for this study, mentions going with his daughters to the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. (Hamilton 90). We went there, as well, this past summer when we were in D.C. When you walk in, you’re given an appointed time to leave the lobby and be taken upstairs to the top floor. From there, you move through the pictures and videos and displays as you experience the Holocaust in Europe from the perspective of someone who was there. The biggest problem with the museum is that there is so much as you work your way back down to the ground floor. It’s fairly impossible to see it all really well, because you become overwhelmed by the magnitude of what happened, or at least we did. Near the end, we found ourselves hurrying more than we intended to and when we finally exited, there was a time where none of us said very much. And you look at that event in history and wonder how that can be redeemed. Yet it is redeemed every time someone decides in their hearts, “Never again. Not on my watch. Never again.” That’s why museums like the one in D.C., or the one I’ve been to in Jerusalem, or our own CANDLES museum here in Terre Haute are so important. God does not cause the suffering, but he will redeem it as his people become convinced that the greater way to move forward in human history is by the way of Jesus, the way of love. I’ve said it over and over again in this series, and I never grow tired of saying it. Jesus told us: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35).

And that brings me to the other question I want to explore. What happened with these soldiers, these ones who tortured and humiliated Jesus? Or, maybe more to the point, what kind of a person could do such a thing? I wonder what happened to them after this day of beating and humiliating the Son of God. Some of them, probably, lived in the barracks, but perhaps some of them had families to go home to. Either way, they probably went back to where they lived, ate dinner and moved on with their lives. If you had asked their friends, I doubt anyone would have singled any of them out as evil people. So what would cause them to do this? This takes us back to Solzhenitsyn’s statement. A more complete version of his statement goes like this: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

So the question comes to us like this: where are we in this story? As I mentioned earlier, it’s easy to point to those “out there” as evil, as willing to do horrible things. We look at groups like ISIS and we think they are severely misguided in their religious devotion, and while I am not making excuses for them, they are simply an example of how “sincerely held religious beliefs” can lead people to horrible actions. In other words, what we believe matters. Or we point to those who engage in shooting sprees or parents who kill their own children or people who steal from their company for their own gain—we can all find so many examples where evil flourishes and sin abounds. The thin line between good and evil does run right through the human heart.

But that’s not us, right? I mean, we haven’t beaten anyone with a whip or placed a crown of thorns on their head. We haven’t killed anyone or stolen anything. We haven’t abused anyone. But very often, in smaller and less noticeable ways, we can easily hail Jesus as king on Sunday and mock him in our words and deeds on Monday. We say one thing in church and behave or at least think in other ways the rest of the week (cf. Hamilton 94). And that brings me back to the question Private Ryan asked: “Am I good person?” Last season, on one of my favorite shows, Doctor Who, the Doctor, a time-traveling alien, asked his human companion just that question. “Am I a good person?” And Clara, the companion, was taken aback, but then replied, “I don’t know.” Well, I do know the answer to the question for me. Left to myself, I am not a “good” person. I can’t be good enough, and neither can you. If we could be “good enough” all on our own, God would not have needed to send us a savior. I can’t be good enough, which is why I need Jesus.

And it’s why I need forgiveness. I mess up. I don’t always get it right. But neither do you, but the good news is that we can find grace and mercy and forgiveness in Jesus. By his wounds, we are healed. Thankfully, unlike Private Ryan, we don’t have to earn it, though. Grace is unmerited favor. Grace means we get what we don’t deserve. Grace means the one who owes us nothing gives us everything. Jesus died for us not because we’re good enough or smart enough or strong enough. He suffered and died for us because we’re none of those things. He came for us because we aren’t good enough.

Some here this morning may have experienced abuse as Jesus did—not a beating by Roman soldiers, but abuse nonetheless: physical, emotional, spiritual or maybe a combination of all three. Statistics tell us that the tendency is for abused people to become abusers, at least in part because it’s the only life that is known. You may not lash out in the same way as you were abused, but you still lash out. Hurt people tend to hurt people, and the only way out of that loop, the only way to break the cycle, is to practice forgiveness. First and foremost, forgiveness needs to be directed toward the abuser, but very often you will need to also forgive yourself for some misguided idea that you were at fault somehow. Maybe it’s an ex-spouse, or a parent or another relative, a pastor or another authority figure—whomever it is, have you brought that person before the throne of God and asked God to help you forgive them? Jesus already suffered in your place—you no longer have to.

Even if your broken places are not on the level of abuse, there is still room and need for forgiveness toward those who have wounded you. I think at least part of the struggle comes because we have this idea that forgiveness is letting someone off the hook. They get to go free and not suffer like we have. But forgiveness really has to do more with our own spiritual health than it does someone else’s. Forgiveness is not saying to someone who has hurt you, “It’s okay.” It’s not about condoning the other person’s actions; it’s about letting go of our right to fight back, our perceived right to retribution (cf. Hamilton, Forgiveness, pg. 77). Even if that other person never admits or realizes the harm they have caused, forgiving them is necessary for us to be able to move on and grow spiritually, to fully receive the salvation Jesus came to give. After all, the same Jesus who was beaten and crucified also prayed for those who had hurt him while he was on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

I know this is hard. As many times as I’ve preached sermons on forgiveness, I still find myself praying about it every day. Just when I think I’ve gotten there, I find my mind wandering back to that thing that someone else said or did, and the hurt surfaces all over again. And then I have to work on releasing that hurt once more, on giving up my right to fighting back because I want to be like Jesus. Though he was God, though he had all the resources of heaven at his command, he didn’t speak back to Pilate and he didn’t fight back against the soldiers who humiliated and tortured him. Jesus knew that the thin line between good and evil runs through the heart of every human being, and when the world was throwing its worst evil at him, Jesus was forgiving them. He was doing his best work in the face of the greatest evil. He was forgiving them, and us, and all who would call on his name. He was erasing the thin line and enabling us to be not “good people” but to be God’s people—children of the heavenly father (cf. John 1:13). This morning, as we prepare to go to prayer this morning, I want to invite you to consider who in your life needs forgiveness—even if it’s yourself, perhaps especially if it’s yourself. There are writing utensils and notecards here on the front of the stage, and I invite you to come forward as we prepare to pray, write a name or a situation on the card. If you’d like to spend time praying for that person or situation, you can do that, and then leave the cards here in front of the crown of thorns as a reminder that Jesus already took our punishment. He went through the torture so that we could be forgiven, for by his stripes we are healed. So I invite you this morning, in the name and power of our Lord Jesus, to receive the healing that comes from releasing the people and situations into his care, to move from trying on your own to be good people to being who Jesus wants you to be. When we do that, Jesus’ suffering is redeemed, for by his wounds we are all healed.