When I’m home, I usually watch the evening news to keep up with what’s going on. But in this age of ubiquitous real-time video capturing a world becoming increasingly loveless, violent, and tragic, I’m finding the reports more difficult to watch. These days, correspondents frequently preface their stories with cautionary statements like, “This report contains images that may be disturbing.”
And that would be an appropriate warning for the description of events recorded in John 19:1-5. It’s a brutal account. But even though most of us instinctively turn away from scenes of cruelty, pain, and misery, it’s important to resist that urge when confronting this passage. As hard as it is to take in, this disturbing portrait of our Lord’s suffering is essential for comprehending the dimensions of his grace.
With the crowd’s insistent cries of, “Barrabas,” still ringing in Pilate’s ears and his attempt to release Jesus collapsing around him, the governor ordered our Lord whipped with a scourge. It was a hideous implement of Roman punishment designed to inflict maximum damage. Made of leather straps embedded with pieces of jagged bone or metal, it literally tore the flesh from its victims and often resulted in their deaths. But Jesus survived which provided the soldiers additional opportunities to torture him. So, they pressed a crown of thorns into his scalp, dressed him in a purple robe while berating him with verbal abuse, and then used him as a human punching bag.
After that, while continuing to claim, “I find no fault in him,” the procurator proceeded to have his bruised, bleeding, and broken prisoner paraded before the inflamed crowd. Weirdly, he seems to have been trying to avoid the crucifixion of an innocent man by putting that man’s battered body on display. He apparently hoped the mob’s bloodlust would be assuaged by seeing how much pain Jesus had already endured. So, that’s why he invited them to “Behold the man!”
That plan failed. But the invitation to behold or take in the scope of Christ’s suffering is something every Jesus-follower needs to do. Each part of that abuse was a fulfillment of prophecy, woven into the divine plan for our redemption, and addressed a specific aspect of our sin-scarred condition. The ultimate sacrifice of Messiah’s death on the cross was still to come, but not before he’d been wounded, bruised, chastised, and striped as explicitly predicted 700 years earlier in Isaiah 53:5.
In that prophetic text, the Hebrew phase translated as wounded for our transgressions could be more literally rendered as pierced through for our rebellion. And bruised for our iniquities might be better stated as crushed for our perversity. When Isaiah continued by saying our Redeemer would experience chastisement, he used a word that’s most often translated as instruction or correction but can also be understood as a severe reproach. This seems to better fit the context and points to the verbal abuse and false accusations Christ faced to provide us with what Isaiah described as peace, a rendering of the word shalom which refers to a deep and expansive wellbeing. And finally, the prophet’s vision of the Promised One concludes by saying he would endure stripes or, more literally, blows that cut in by which we would be healed or made whole.
According to Isaiah, when our Lord’s scalp was pierced with thorns, he was paying the price for our rejection of God. When the soldiers bruised him with their fists, he was atoning for our evil. When he was subjected to the chastisement of their mockery, he was absorbing the impacts of Satan’s lies and false accusations (Revelation 12:10) so our souls could be at rest. And when he was inflicted by the stripes of the scourge, he was securing relief from all our brokenness.
Although deeply heartbreaking to consider, the Bible’s detailed accounts of Christ’s suffering provide us a humbling, moving, and reverence-producing vision of God’s grace. And that’s why it’s essential for each of us to regularly stop and, “Behold the man!”