John 19:1-5 says:
Then Pilate took Jesus and flogged him. And the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head and arrayed him in a purple robe. They came up to him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and struck him with their hands. Pilate went out again and said to them, “See, I am bringing him out to you that you may know that I find no guilt in him.” So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Behold the man!”
Has there ever been a more profound, spiritually rich statement uttered from the mouth of a godless man? Pilate is minutes from giving in to the desires of the mob and condemning an innocent man to death, and he seems to realize it. In John’s account, it seems as if Pilate is hoping that by scourging Jesus so severely, the Jews might relent on their request to put Jesus to death.
So he brings Jesus out from the Praetorium to where his accusers wait, presents a bloodied and battered figure – the same one who just a few days earlier had ridden through the city streets to the cries of “Hosanna,” but even more so now a man who would never be confused with a potential king of Israel.
“Behold, the man.”
John 1 opens with the premise that “the Word WAS God” — that Jesus who came into this earth was God incarnate. John states that the “Word became flesh and dwelled among men, and we beheld his glory, as of the only son of from the Father.” And throughout the book, John emphasizes that the glory we see in Jesus is a result of his willingness to do everything that the Father commands — and nothing beyond that. His full focus in life was glorifying God.
In the process of revealing God to man, he exposed the darkness by shining his light of truth on the world. He caused the superficial righteousness of the day to melt away and reveal vain and hypocritical worship, utter hatred of true righteousness, and a refusal to submit to the will of God. Jesus exposed the darkness to the point that darkness determined to extinguish him from the earth.
And he did all of this in a human body. God taking on the form of man, while still holding the power to grant eternal life to anyone who wished it. I don’t know that we can ever comprehend how that worked, or what it was like for Jesus to live with that dual nature. And yet he proved conclusively that he did just that, by raising himself from the dead and ascending to the Father.
So now we see Jesus, the man, rejected in every possible way by his own creation, the people with whom God had authored a covenant relationship more than a thousand years before. The promise of Abraham fulfilled before their eyes (John 8:56-58) – the one they had longed for generation after generation – and they rejected him. And they rejected him so fully that they were willing to send him to the cross.
“Behold, the man.”
When we look at Jesus, we may not see what we’ve been waiting for. Jesus isn’t going to fit a worldly ideal of what a king should look like – or in some cases even what we think a MAN should look like. But he is THE man (1 Timothy 2:5). He is the ideal man, what God desired that all of us would be – full of grace and truth, righteous, devoted to God’s will and love for our brothers and sisters. And he stands before us ready to bring us to God as our sacrifice, our savior, our advocate with God (Hebrews 7:25).
What are we going to do with that? We get to decide whether we put Jesus back on the cross (Hebrews 6:6), or we fall at his feet begging him to let us follow him wherever he goes – for him to cleanse of our sins, to give us life, to give us truth, to give us hope. To “show us the Father,” as Philip asks him at one point. (John 14:8)
