John 19:1-5
Then Pilate had Jesus taken and whipped. 2 The soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and dressed him in a purple robe. 3 Over and over they went up to him and said, “Greetings, king of the Jews!” And they slapped him in the face.
4 Pilate came out of the palace again and said to the Jewish leaders, “Look! I’m bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no grounds for a charge against him.” 5 When Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, Pilate said to them, “Here’s the man.”
“The Gospel Gone Viral: If the Bible Had
Been Written Online,” Week Five
It
sounds silly, really, that this time of year, huge NFL fans will show up to
exhibition games and first practices and training camp. That behavior isn’t limited to us, though—European
soccer fans do it, too, but this time, it meant a little bit more. Here’s how England’s Daily Mail told it:
A terminally ill Feyenoord fan was given
the greatest surprise of his life when he turned up to watch his side being put
through their paces ahead of the new season.
Fans of the Dutch side traditionally turn up in numbers to watch the club’s
first pre-season training session, but this time there was a difference.
Lifelong fan Rooie Marck was told he had
terminal cancer and had days to live, and his dying wish was to see Feyenoord
again.
His friends brought him to the training
session in his bed, but little did he know that the huge crowd would be
chanting his name, lighting flares, and unleashing a huge banner of him. In floods of tears, Rooie met his heroes
before being helped to meet the crowd, who were singing, “You’ll Never Walk
Alone.”
Now,
it is difficult to describe the banner itself, but if you can imagine a swath
of material stretching from the very front row all the way up to the upper deck
of the stadium, and now imagine that banner with a colossal, uncannily accurate
likeness of a man who, though dying, was portrayed as a superhero—cape and all—by
friends and strangers alike, you could see how such an image would move a dying
man to tears. They saw him not as the
feeble young man wheeled into the grounds on a hospital bed, but as a hero for
courageously enduring his illness.
Imagine if you were dying, and your friends saw you not as what you
looked like at the moment of death, but what you looked like in your prime. That’s what happened here.
Three
days later, Rooie Marck died.
This
is a sermon series designed to take us through to this point: the end of
August, and it has been a slightly different series from many of the sermon
series we have had here in the past, which often revolve around a theme, a
chapter of Scripture, or a book by a contemporary author. This sermon series isn’t about a substance so
much as it is about a style: the style of communication that has taken the
world by storm within the past 15-20 years via the internet. And I adamantly believe that online
communication and social media represent a tremendous opportunity for us to
offer the Good News of Jesus Christ to a lot of people. Which is exactly the same way, I think, that
the writers of the New Testament viewed their Gospels and Epistles. With that supposition, we will be spending
these five Sundays tackling how we might write the message today, with our
modern-day tools, and we began with perhaps the most basic: email and text
messaging, before graduating last week to Twitter, and the we turned to a
platform that I know is familiar to many of you because I am friends with you
on it—Facebook. Last week, we arrived at
blogging, and this week we conclude the series by moving from the realm of
words into the realm of images: pictorial blogs like Instagram, and video blogs
like Youtube channels.
And
I promise you—especially if you feel overwhelmed by all the digital jargon and
technical terminology I have been throwing at you the previous four weeks—things
like Instagram are very similar to the tools you already use, because,
essentially, we are talking about online photo albums here. Only instead of taking pictures with a
traditional camera and taking the negatives to be developed (and yes, I am old
enough to remember such a thing, don’t tell me I’m just a whippersnapper!), you
take the pictures with a digital camera that works basically the same way—trust
me—and then you post those pictures to your online photo albums, the way you
would arrange film photographs in a traditional album or scrapbook.
And
videos like those on Youtube work pretty much the same way, but instead of
traditional cameras and digital cameras, we’re talking camcorders and media
players. You film something with a
digital recorder—which you can find on most smartphones, or even digital
cameras now—and you upload it to Youtube as though you would pop a videotape
into your VCR.
And
these two technological advances really have done incredible things for the
world, and for the church, because for every person out there like me, who is
completely word-oriented and a verbal thinker and who absolutely loathes having
his picture taken, there is another person who thinks not verbally but
visually, who thrives off of visual stimulation, and who loves being able to
see, in the most literal sense, whatever is being spoken of at the moment.
Which
is why this passage from John’s accounting of the Passion narrative is so
striking. At this point in the story,
Jesus has been “tried” (if perfunctorily) by Annas, the high priest Caiaphas,
and the Sanhedrin, and they have bound Him over to Pontius Pilate because only
the Roman prefect can issue a death sentence.
But
bear in mind that this is the Passover festival as well, and the Pharisees are
fastidious for upholding their laws regarding ritual purity. As such, they cannot actually be present in
the Roman viceroy’s residence whilst he questions Jesus. They bring Jesus to Pilate, but after that,
they must sit outside the palace gates and wait…which, with Jerusalem being a
packed public city and all, is quite a visible gesture. And so the trial of Jesus, much like
prominent trials today, takes on a massively political dimension, one that
Pilate is keen to emerge victorious from.
And
so Pilate has Jesus beaten. He has Jesus
mocked, slapped, and crowned with thorns.
And THEN he has the cheek to step back outside to the Jewish leaders and
say, “I find no grounds to charge him with?”
Well, yes, but that isn’t really the point from Pilate’s
perspective. The point for him comes in verse five, where Pilate
declares to the assembled Pharisees, in Greek, “Idou ho anthropos,” in Latin, “Ecce
homo,” and in English, “Behold the man!”
It
is one of the most famous images in all of Christianity, with artists as talented
and renowned as Caravaggio painting portraits of the scene, of Pilate
proffering a beaten Jesus and screaming out, “Behold the man!” And it was done in Scripture because…do you
remember what charge was, in fact, brought against Jesus? That He was the King of the Jews. And Pilate is saying to the Pharisees, “Look…I
am so powerful that I can do this to your “king,” with impunity.” And he is right, in a sense—the Pharisees cannot
do a damn thing about it (even if they wanted to).
But
it is that image, along with the image of Pilate symbolically washing his hands
of Christ’s blood, that consigns him to the dustbin of the loathed in
history. Pilate won the battle but lost
the war: he used imagery and theatricality to score a short-term PR victory
over the Pharisees whom owed him their positions, but in the long term, Pilate
would be rightly villainized, for, as it is written in the Apostle’s Creed,
Christ “suffered” under Pontius Pilate.
Not under Caiaphas, the high priest, mind you, or Annas, or Herod, or
any other of His political enemies.
Under Pilate.
That
is the true power of imagery. That is
the true power of the visual sphere. We
can take an image, witness it, have it register in our minds, and be inspired
by it or be repulsed by it. And just
like with words, we can be touched by fiction and non-fiction alike when it
comes to images and art and video. The
banner of a young man dying of cancer, depicted instead as a caped hero, need
not be nonfictional for its commentary to deliver a simple, powerful truth: we
are, in many senses, what we see ourselves to be.
If
you see yourself as a hero, you can act heroically. If you see yourself as worthless, you might
give up on yourself. And if you see
yourself as a Christian, you can work to act Christ-like.
And
this isn’t me trying to get all New Age-y on you, either. I’m a pastor, not a life coach. But this is me saying that what you might see
in the mirror is not what everyone else sees, that your image is not the same
as other peoples’ images of you.
Because
that is the underlying lesson behind this part of John’s Passion narrative:
that even as Pilate and the Pharisees engage in this very public tug-of-war in
which Jesus is the rope, who they see Jesus as is quite plain in Pilate’s “Behold
the man!” exclamation: they see him only as a man, and a dangerous man at that.
But
we know better. Because the images and
portraits of Jesus do not stop with the “Behold the man” scene. They continue, with the march out to Calvary,
the Crucifixion, the final words, being sealed in the tomb, and finally, with
the tomb being discovered empty on the third day.
The
images that others have made of Jesus Christ throughout the centuries are part
of what move us in our own faith, because they depict the story that we have
already been redeemed by: that there was a man to behold, but not just any man:
a man who was more divine than any other who has come before or since, one
whose divinity threatened everything about the established order of things that
had led to the hurt and oppression of the vast majority of Israel’s people.
And
so God decided to do something about it.
He sent His Son.
And
how we tell that story—in word and in image alike—still matters a great deal. Precisely because it can, and does, still
move us to new heights.
Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
August
25, 2013
