Good Friday 3: Our head and the crown of thorns

John Chapter 19 starts with the words, ‘Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. The soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head. They clothed him in a purple robe and went up to him again and again, saying, ‘Hail, king of the Jews!’ And they slapped him in the face.’

     The Palestinian thorn differs greatly from our English thorn. Our thorns — for example on a rose or a teasel — will hurt if we touch it. Dust and pollen on the surface of the thorn can infect a wound and prevent its healing. If allowed, the wound will itch then fester. If nothing else, the wound is a bit of a nuisance.

     The Palestinian thorn is very different. Its spikes can be 3 or 4 inches in length. That’s the same length as the diagonal across the palm of my hand and longer than any of my fingers. The Palestinian thorn is as hard as tempered steel and as sharp as a stiletto. It will have required some skill on the part of the Roman soldiers to have plaited a crown of these thorns without hurting themselves during its construction. But a Roman soldier was trained when administering pain and death. If he did not cause extreme pain and massive death, he would himself he executed. He had to be good at his job.

     Imagine a crown made up of sharp steel spikes, and imagine it being forced onto a man’s head. Incidentally, also forget and idea derived from Victorian stained glass of Jesus head adorned with long locks of hair acting like a cushion. He would have had a haircut of very short hair to prevent lice and to avoid anyone mistaking him for a woman. Now imagine the crown of thorns being rammed onto his head. These spikes pierce his skin extremely easily. Actually, they could readily enter the bone and we have records of them passing through the plates of bone that comprise a human cranium. These spikes could have entered the brain of the victim, though its safe to guess that didn’t happen to Jesus because he remained lucid to the end.

     Jesus was crowned with excruciating thorns because he claimed to be a king, or at least the description of his crime above his head says so: ‘INRI: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jesus’. The purple robe points in the same direction. But now remember that Jesus actually said his Kingdom was not of this world, but tyrants don’t understand irony or subtlety. Pilate and Herod heard the word ‘king’ and felt the fear of competition. Crowning Jesus with a crown of thorns was intended to address the absurdity of a Palestinian peasant claiming to be a king. How could a runt of a peasant occupy a palace? To prevent the common people having such ideas, it was necessary to make an example. The crown of thorns was therefore a piece of political theatre, saying something like, ‘This is what happens to people who have ideas above their station. He warned!’

      Today as we watch Jesus being tortured to death, we are invited to have compassion — to share his passion … or are we? We are invited to look at his kingship and the way we are his willing subjects. We’re invited to look at the way our thoughts make kings of ourselves rather than subjects of the King of Heaven. 

Good Friday 2: Compassion and sharing the passion: our sense of at-one-ment

We come before Jesus on the Cross. We look at his body while the political elite torture him to death … and we’re being invited to share his passion. To be sure, we’re neither being asked to die on a cross nor take on our souls the sins of others. But we are asked to identify with this man on a cross. As far as we’re able, we try to understand what he is going through for us, and to share something — however little.

     Our English word compassion has two parts: ‘com’ and ‘passion’. We know about the passion bit. The ‘com’ part means together: think of other words starting with ‘com’: complete, complementary. So to have compassion means quite literally being asked to share the passion of Jesus; to be at one with him.

     As we learn compassion, we realise that we’re being invited to ponder the passion as a means of achieving Christlikeness.

     As Jesus dies on the Cross, his soul is polluted with our filth and with the sins of all the in-penitent. His soul was once clean and pure (and therefore in perfect communion with God) but it’s now polluted and can no longer even sense God. That’s why Jesus cried aloud, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ In our com-passion, we analyse why our own souls struggle to sense the presence of God.

     The reason why we —all of us —struggle to sense God is because our sins form a smothering, suffocating blanket between us and him. We’re insulated. But if our sins were to be removed, forgiven and dealt with, then we could come into a better sense of who God is. We would become at-one with Him.

     One of the first people to translate the Bible into English was William Tyndale in the 1500s. He struggled to find the right word of expression to describe that process of removing the barrier and entering God’s presence more fully. He gave up looking for an existing word and, instead, made up a new word of his own. He spoke of ‘at-one-ment’ — Jesus on the Cross won for us the at-one-ment. And if you take those three syllables and force them together, we get atonement. The atonement on the Cross is a means of us getting closer to God.

     And in proportion that we repent, we are atoned for. And in proportion that we are atoned for, we can sense God. And in proportion that we can sense God we can identify with Him. And in proportion that we can identify with Him, we can truly talk of com-passion. The two are connected.

    Today as we watch Jesus being tortured to death, we are invited to have compassion — to share his passion.

Introducing Good Friday: passion and pasch and pesah

Today is Good Friday and we’re talking about the passion of Jesus.

     The word ‘passion’ ultimately comes from an ancient Latin root patior, which means ‘to suffer’. That word itself may itself come from the Greek pathos. By the Middle Ages, this Latin word had become passionem which itself fed into medieval French. By the late twelfth century, there was a new French word passion, which meant the sufferings of Christ. That’s why in most European languages, Easter is called something like ‘pasch’.

     Later, the sense of the word ‘passion’ extended to include the sufferings of the martyrs and thence suffering in general. By the early thirteenth century, the word was being used to mean ‘a strong emotion or desire’—think of the phrase, ‘passionate embrace’.

     In our thinking about the Passion, we will be using the word within the sense of Jesus’ suffering and death.

     The season of Passiontide started nearly a fortnight ago on Passion Sunday. It marked a change of liturgical gear: we stopped looking at renunciation and introspection, and start looking at the public events of the first Holy Week: Jesus enters Jerusalem, cleanses the Temple, teaches and heals. We think of the private or more intimate events: the Last Supper with its New Commandment. And we think of the passion itself: Gethsemane, the show trial; the crucifixion and suffering on a Cross, and death.

     The passion of Christ started the day before the Passover; and his crucifixion and death occurred on the day of Passover itself. It’s appropriate that Jesus died on the day of the Passover because the whole point of the Passover was atoning for sin. To the Jews of Jesus’ day, Passover was first a remembrance of Moses leading the chosen people from slavery in Egypt, but it soon led to a sense of a spiritual new start and spiritual release. It was about escaping the slavery of sin. On the day of Passover, the High Priest prayed that the sins of the people would transfer to a lamb without defect or blemish — ‘the lamb of God that takes away the sins of the people’.

     Jesus engineered the date of his own judicial murder to coincide with the Passover. He wanted to emphasise (in case we’d missed the point) that he was the new Lamb of God. He was taking our sins. He was enabling our forgiveness.

     As we come before the Cross this Good Friday, we first think of our sins that Jesus took and then (in our mind’s eye) we transfer them onto Jesus. Note how they transfer from us to him. Note that with our sins in his soul, we are made sinless, forgiven, enabled to start afresh. The lamb of God has taken our sins.