THE HOUR OF DEEPEST HUMILIATION

 

I have always been amazed at the humiliation that the Saviour must have suffered at the hands of His captors prior to the crucifixion.

Mark records that after His arrest, Jesus was brought into the palace of the high priest (Mark 14:53,54) where a mockery of a trial was conducted condemning Him to death and where His accusers ‘began to spit on him, and to cover his face, and to buffet him….and the servants did strike him with the palms of their hands’ (v 65).

Luke records that ‘the men that held Jesus mocked him, and smote him, and when they had blindfolded him, they struck him on the face and asked him, saying, Prophesy, who is it that smote thee? And many other things blasphemously spake they against him’ (Luke 22:63-65).

Imagine a God who creates worlds, controls the elements, performs miracles, and has the power to subdue all enemies under His feet, allowing and enduring such humiliation at the hands of pathetic, weak and sinful humans. That’s godly self-control and godly focus without which He could not have submitted himself to the greatest act of mercy ever.

The treatment that Christ endured at the hands of His captors was nothing compared to Gethsemane from which He had just come. The experience of the Garden was ‘the hour of His DEEPEST humiliation’ (Jesus the Christ, p 611).

In that hour of anguish Christ met and overcame all the horrors that Satan, “the prince of this world”, could inflict’ (Jesus the Christ, p 613). Imagine a man who would NEVER do anything wrong, to any degree, taking upon himself all the existent sins as if He had committed them Himself.

The spiritual anguish He suffered was no doubt due to all the corroding feelings associated with sin such as guilt, shame, embarrassment, lack of esteem, self-hatred, fear of God’s wrath….indeed, deepest humiliation for one so sinless. Following the humiliation of Gethsemane, would any other be worse???

But then there is Golgotha…..where like a criminal He was nailed to a cross on the side of the road for all to see His nakedness and His suffering. And as the Roman custom demanded, a plaque nailed to the cross outlining all his crimes, only He had committed none…..so what would have been on His plaque? My sins, your sins, our families’ sins, our nation’s sins, the world’s sins and the sins of all mankind from Adam to the end of the world.

 

Will the sinner for whom you suffered,

Who rejected and reviled Thee

Weep in the end for Thy pain and Thy sorrow?

Will his heart understand

When he kneels before Thee

The debt he owes for the existence

Of his merciful tomorrow?

- CATHRYNE ALLEN 

(Art: Behold the Man by Christopher Young)