The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

Scarlet, Thorns, Enemies, and the Accursed Tree:  Mt.27:27 – 37 

^27:27 Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole Roman cohort around him. ²⁸ They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him. ²⁹ And after twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on his head, and a reed in his right hand; and they knelt down before him and mocked him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ ³⁰ They spat on him, and took the reed and began to beat him on the head. ³¹ After they had mocked him, they took the scarlet robe off him and put his own garments back on him, and led him away to crucify him. ³² As they were coming out, they found a man of Cyrene named Simon, whom they pressed into service to bear his cross. ³³ And when they came to a place called Golgotha, which means Place of a Skull, ³⁴ they gave him wine to drink mixed with gall; and after tasting it, he was unwilling to drink. ³⁵ And when they had crucified him, they divided up his garments among themselves by casting lots. ³⁶ And sitting down, they began to keep watch over him there. ³⁷ And above his head they put up the charge against him which read, ‘This is Jesus the King of the Jews.’  

          In the movie The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufrane was thrown into Shawshank Prison even though he was innocent of the charges of killing his wife and her lover.  He first endured mockery, then isolation, then homosexual rape, and the abuse of the corrupt prison guards and the warden himself.  He endured every element of a nightmare prison scenario.  However, he didn’t lose hope.  Instead, he devised a plot to escape.  Over the course of twenty years, he chiseled a way through the wall with a small sculpting pick and squeezed into the sewage drain.  Morgan Freeman narrates, ‘He crawled through five football fields of sh-- smelling filth.’  As far as the story goes, that was gruesomely and literally true.  But we can also see that symbolically.  He had already gone through the putrid essence of twenty years of prison time, now crammed, in a sense, into a narrow pipe of human feces.  Crawling through that pipe summed it all up.  But on the other side, he emerged free.

          Jesus’ journey from his birth, through his life, to his death and resurrection was similar.  Especially at the end of his life, Jesus endured every element of a Jewish nightmare scenario, including the one that summed it all up.  Here are those elements. 

          First, Jesus was stripped and mockingly handed a scarlet robe.  Being stripped was shameful for Jews, ever since the day Adam and Eve sinned, realized they were naked, and felt ashamed.  Since that time, the people of God considered proper attire to be fairly important.  But the Romans stripped Jesus.  In place of his own clothes, the Roman soldiers gave him a scarlet colored robe (an inner tunic, not the same as the outer purple cloak described by Mark and John).  Scarlet was the color of sin according to Isaiah (Isa.1:18).  Ironically, Jesus, who had struggled successfully all his life to live fully in the love of his Father, had the color of sin placed on him.  But it was also appropriate in a deeper way:  Jesus had taken onto himself the sinful fallen humanity common to us all, and this scarlet robe symbolized that.

          Second, Jesus wore a crown of thorns.  Thorns were also an emblem of humanity’s fall into sin (Gen.3:17 – 19).  Thorns were the painful result of Adam and Eve’s rejection of God, as God withdrew His life-giving presence somewhat from creation.  Ever since then, humanity’s attempts to bring life and beauty from the creation were marred with thorns:  the emblem of pain and ugliness.  When Jesus wore a crown of thorns, it was not only physically painful.  He was taking onto himself another symbol of human fallenness.  He had done this his whole life.  He took onto himself the consequences of human evil and bore them in himself.

          Third, Jesus was mocked by his enemies.  For the Jews in the biblical period up until this point, to be handed over to the Gentiles in defeat was humiliation and shame.  The long Jewish history of making sinful alliances with Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon resulted in God giving them over to these powers and allowing these powers to invade Israel and shame the Jews.  Jesus being handed over to the Gentile enemies implied that he was sinful.  He was not in the personal sense of choices, but he had taken on sinful humanity into his very being.

          Fourth, Jesus was hung on a tree.  While the Roman practice of crucifixion was excruciating and humiliating on its own merits, the Jews also had an understanding of that act.  In the Mosaic Law, being hung on a tree was the expression that the person in question was accursed by God, and placed outside of the covenant. (Dt.21:22 – 23).  It was the early Jewish equivalent of saying that a person had committed so heinous a crime and was perhaps so unremorseful and unresponsive to God, that he was already consigning himself to hell.  The notorious anti-Semitic villain of the Book of Esther, Haman the Agagite, was hung on a tree (Est.7:10).  Absalom, the rebel son of David, was found hanging in a tree (2 Sam.18:9).  Moses hung a bronze serpent on a wooden pole, or ‘tree’ of sorts (Num.21:4 – 9).  And Adam and Eve should have hung the original serpent on the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Gen.3:1 – 5).  So for Jews, being hung on a tree summed it all up.  If anyone needed help seeing that Jesus had taken on the full ramifications of humanity’s fall, this was it.  He hung in the place where, either other people identified as great sinners had already hung, or where symbols of human sin hung.

          Jesus fully identified with, and entered, all the forlorn experiences of his people, Israel.  Even though he was innocent, Jesus took to himself all the experiences and symbols of his people’s exile.  Jesus drew them onto himself, in order to emerge on the other side of all that as God’s new humanity.  Here is Jesus, crawling, as it were, ‘through five football fields of sh-- smelling filth.’  This is the act that summed it all up.  But on the other side, in his resurrection, he emerged free. 

          Now, Jesus calls us to join him by faith in his death and resurrection, to meet him at the point where Jesus goes the deepest to save us, therefore admitting that we were truly lost, so that we could identity ourselves with him in his resurrection, so God would truly begin to transform us.