“I offered my back to those who beat me and my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard. I did not hide my face from mockery and spitting.” – Isaiah 50:6
“But many were amazed when they saw him. His face was so disfigured he seemed hardly human, and from his appearance, one would scarcely know he was a man.” – Isaiah 52:14
“Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged.” – John 19:1
“Then the governor’s soldiers took Jesus into the governor’s residence and gathered the whole cohort around him. They stripped him and put a scarlet robe around him, and after braiding a crown of thorns, they put it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand, and kneeling down before him, they mocked him: “Hail, king of the Jews!” They spat on him and took the staff and struck him repeatedly on the head. When they had mocked him, they stripped him of the robe and put his own clothes back on him. Then they led him away to crucify him.” – Matthew 27:27-31
During my tour of Israel, two sites, in particular, at least at the moments I saw them, broke me. I shared the first one a couple of days ago (Legion).
The second site was what you see in the photos at the bottom of this post: the exact place Jesus was beaten, mocked, and spat upon by the Roman soldiers following his flogging.
I’ve include a couple of photos of the acacia tree near the Temple Mount. We were told this type of tree is most likely the tree from which the Romans fashioned the crown of thorns and drove it like nails into Jesus’ head. You can imagine how much damage those thorns did to Jesus’ scalp.
Although you can’t see the carvings in the floor, the lighted frame on the floor shows carvings into the stone where Roman soldiers would play games, of sorts. David prophesied of this event a thousand years earlier in Psalm 22:18 –
“They are dividing up my clothes among themselves;
they are rolling dice for my garments (John sites this prophecy in 19:23-24)
As you read in Isaiah’s prophecy at the beginning of this post, by the time Jesus is standing here, he was unrecognizable. He’d been beaten and tortured to the point that the skin that had been torn away from his body coupled with the volume of blood covering his body made it difficult for others to even be able to tell it was Jesus.
I stood there. We all did.
In the video clip you can hear our pastor reading a section of the story from scripture as we sat and stood in silence.
I couldn’t stop looking at those first century stones in the floor. In my mind, I could see something and hear something.
What I “saw”: I imagined Jesus’ blood covering that area. It must have been everywhere. This was not a modern-day politically correct execution. This was unmitigated torture of an innocent man, intended to publicly humiliate him, and to cause him excruciating pain through slow and calculated torture.
What I “heard”: Certainly, suffering from hypovolemic shock due to massive blood loss, having not had any sleep the night before while railroaded through a kangaroo court, and literally beaten within an inch of his life, Jesus must have been in a state of mindless survival mode right? Wrong. At that moment, as he was already beginning to feel the cold grip of death, he had a name on his mind: Nick Watts.
I gasped when I considered that.
But that’s not the only name. He was thinking about YOU. Right then. Right there.
This is what the author of Hebrews meant when he wrote,
“looking to Jesus,…who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame,…” – Hebrews 12:2
The “joy” that was set before him, giving him reason to endure the torture was US.
Even as I write this I am overcome by his relentless love for someone as flawed and messed up as me.
Oh, Jesus loves you. So much. nw
