The Shaming of the Saviour
Maurice Roberts
It is hard to find anything in the annals of human history which equals the shameful treatment which was shown to Jesus Christ in this life. We must be right to think that the accumulated hate and spite heaped upon our Lord at the close of his sacred ministry exceeds even the worst excesses of human cruelty. It must surely have for its terrible explanation the still darker forces of hell acting in concert and with full fury. The piteous words of the prophet come, in the sorrows of Christ, to their highest fulfilment: "Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me" (Lam. 1:12).
There is very good reason to believe that the time of our Lord&Mac182;s great agony was the moment for which Satan and all his infernal accomplices had waited and prepared since their first knowledge, probably at the fall of Adam, of the coming Saviour of mankind. Satan and his fellow demons were well aware of the prophecy addressed to the serpent, "It shall bruise thy head" (Gen. 3:15).
For many centuries they had prepared their resources therefore and amassed their weapons to attempt the destruction of mankind&Mac182;s great Redeemer, when at last he should appear on earth. With what baleful and venomous eyes the devils in hell had watched his birth and followed his course till Jesus began his great public ministry! With what terror and hatred they had shadowed his every movement during the three and a half years of his preaching and his miracles! The closer the cross came, the clearer it was that he had almighty power to cast out all demonic spirits and that here was the One who would at last crush the powers of hell in the "head" (Gen. 3:15). The exorcisms performed by our blessed Lord were, most assuredly, acts of great compassion from the standpoint of our poor oppressed human race. But from the standpoint of Satan they were acts of alarming and irresistible spoliation. Christ was here in person, and he was come to "spoil principalities and powers" (Col. 2:15). The supreme act by which Jesus was to do this was by his death and propitiatory atonement.
Never in all the previous millennia of time had anything so devastating struck the kingdom of hell as when our Lord and Saviour began to "cast out devils by the finger of God" (Luke 11:20) and to set in motion those mighty processes by which at last he would crush Satan in the head and so "destroy him that had the power of death, that is the devil" (Heb. 2:14).
We cannot suppose that Satan was ignorant of the identity of Jesus from the moment of his coming into the world. The attempt first made on Christ&Mac182;s life by King Herod the Great was doubtless inspired by Satan. This was the first, but by no means the last, attempt of our arch-enemy to thwart and destroy the blessed Son of God who had come to save the world. There were repeated attempts made by the powers of darkness to quench the life of Christ before his work was done. That these attempts were all unsuccessful is great comfort to believers of all ages. It is the visible proof that "the gates of hell will not prevail" against our Lord or against his true church on earth.
It is very clear that behind the scenes recorded for us in the four Gospels a vast cosmic conflict was being fought in high places. It could hardly have been otherwise. Now that our Emmanuel himself was here in person it could not but be than that the forces of evil should do their very worst. Just as in war the enemy puts forth his uttermost efforts when the general of the allied army appears in person on the field of battle, so did the legions of Diabolus summon up their deadliest stroke when they saw Jesus, the Lamb of God, coming close to his Cross. It should be no surprise to us to see that then, if ever, they must show themselves at their most diabolical and deadly. Our Saviour himself certainly expected to be struck with their onslaught, and he informed his hearers to that effect: "This is your hour and the power of darkness" (Luke 22:53). Now the devils would behave most devilishly. Now, as Jesus faced his last and greatest work on the Cross, would all hell be stirred up to oppose, defame, insult and attack him. It was to be expected; and our Lord did expect it, even if others did not.
A statement made in a familiar passage of Scripture informs us that Jesus "despised the shame" (Heb. 12:2) connected with his death on the Cross. We are apt to overlook this aspect of Christ's sufferings and to move on in our minds to the physical and spiritual sufferings. But we ought not to pass hurriedly over this "shame" to which this text makes reference. Shame is a very powerful factor in human life. Men will do many things to avoid shame. We all know very well what pressure is exerted on our minds by the fear of being exposed to shame. It is a force which few can resist and almost none can "despise". This despising of shame on the part of Christ is yet one further proof of his moral perfection. He loved God with all his soul, and no degree of shame could deflect him from his resolve to glorify God by perfect obedience.
It was not the least of Satan's cunning devices to subject our blessed Lord to multiplied shame and indignity as he drew near to the Cross. As we read and re-read the Gospels we come to appreciate that even before he was crucified he was baptized, as it were, with almost every imaginable form of disgrace. The Word of God does not hide from us the manner in which Jesus was treated.
He was buffeted, punched, slapped, spat upon, partly unclothed, dressed as a mock monarch, struck on the head with a reed, blindfolded and commanded to prophesy who struck him. He was most cruelly taunted, mis- represented by false witnesses, subjected to men wagging their heads at him, obliged to see his own clothes parcelled out before his very eyes to irreligious strangers and to see coarse men gambling for his coat. He had to carry his cross, to endure thrashing, to have a board above his head on the cross proclaiming to all the world his "crime", to wear a crown of thorns, to be surrounded in his sufferings on the cross by men who gloated over him and to be crucified between two thieves. He was compelled to go outside the gate of the holy city (Heb. 13:12) as one unfit even to die within the wall, lest he should defile it. He had had his beard torn from his face, and in his extremity of thirst he had been given vinegar to drink.
This picture given in the Gospels is made up of so many details of shame that we cannot fail to see more than the hand of man in it. It is a shame so extreme in its proportions that only the cunning craftiness of hell can explain it. There is no spectacle of shame in the Old Testament to compare with this. There is nothing in the rest of the New Testament to compare with it. Even the catalogue of suffering in the lives of the apostles (2 Cor. 11:23-27) cannot be set beside the enormity of disgrace heaped upon the head of our great God-Man Redeemer.
Never was insult more completely added to injury than in the manner of our Lord&Mac182;s ill-treatment at the hands of these men who hated him without a cause. They thirsted for his blood and, not content to invoke the guilt of his innocent death upon themselves, they even called for it to come down upon their posterity: "His blood be on us and on our children!" (Matt. 27:25). Could they only have seen through the mists of time to the sad and wicked persecutions of anti-Semitism, to the ghettos, the pogroms and the infernal holocaust of recent memory, their tongue would have frozen in their mouths. But religious fanaticism is blind to coming judgments. This was "their hour and the power of darkness".
It is certainly not true to suggest that the external sufferings of Jesus Christ were the deepest sufferings which he bore. The soul of his suffering was the suffering of his soul, as we often say. His becoming sin for us and his being exposed to the naked flame of God&Mac182;s holy wrath and curse for our sin are unquestionably the deepest aspects of our Saviour's agony, even as they are the highest summits of his glorious obedience.
But these deeper and darker agonies need to be remembered in the context of all the rejection, malice and contempt which he experienced at the same time from the hands of men. The death of the cross was a shameful death, and our Lord could only Œdespise&Mac182; this shame because he could look beyond it to the glory and joy that was to follow it. He suffered and died in faith, knowing that the outcome of his "disgrace" was to be the salvation of a lost world. He would "bring many sons to glory" (Heb. 2:10) and restore paradise to mankind.
No crime committed on earth could be so great as that of crucifying the Lord of glory. Those who were the principal actors in this fell drama, let us remember, did only what we all would have done if left to ourselves. The hatred of God with which we are all born would lead us all to do what they did. If we were not there in person at the shaming and mocking of the Son of God, we were there by proxy. We would all have crucified him if we had been left, as his crucifiers were left, to the influence of our unregenerate human nature. We may be profoundly and eternally thankful to God that we were not personally there to add to this spectacle of shame by any words or deeds of our own.
It belongs to the wisdom of God that the way for Christ to enter into his glory was by the door of shame. It is a lesson which all true believers must call frequently to mind. The gospel is placed in peril as soon as the followers of Christ begin to desire respectability. The lust for respectability is powerful in us all, but it is fatal to the well-being of the Christian church. The desire for intellectual respectability and a good reputation from the lips of the world are the kiss of death to a lively Christianity. We inherit Christ's burden of shame in this world, and we must be content to carry it all our lives till we enter into his rest. Satan, in his subtlety, still wields this weapon of shame against us as Christ's people. How many of his professed followers are ashamed of his virgin birth and his bodily resurrection! How many are ashamed of the blood of his Cross! How many shrink from boldly preaching the whole counsel of God in case they suffer reproach! How timid many scholars are to tell the world that Jesus is the one way to God, or to affirm that his Word will stand when heaven and earth pass away!
O let every Christian enter more consciously into an identification with our Lord Jesus Christ in his suffering of shame and ignominy! Let us be content to be reviled for our adherence to every work of God, every doctrine of the Bible and every duty of our discipleship! A crucified Saviour cannot have respectable followers in this world. But all who suffer shame for his name will share in his glory when he comes at last. If we are not ashamed of him now, he will not be ashamed of us in that day.
