Humiliation

The older I get, the more I notice things in the bible I previously glossed over or discounted as less important. In my earlier readings, the crucifixion was the thing. To me, it embodied the entire betrayal of Christ, and so really, what else was there?

As I have gotten older and hopefully more empathetic, I unfortunately can see more of the day's drama. I heard in a movie once, "Dying's the easy part." Crucifixion was their death sentence, and death sentences are death sentences. That is, once assigned a death sentence, the prisoner's choices are removed, but up until that time, he can still aspire to some sort of dignity. The removal of dignity in any form is one of the most dehumanizing things that can happen to a person.

A victim of human sex trafficking and human slavery has her dignity violently ripped away from her. Starvation tears the dignity away from the starving man. The cancer patient, crying in agony and fear, has to suffer the loss of any dignity he or she might have possessed up until that time. All of us carry around a veneer of who we want the world to see us as, and that veneer is all that we possess. How we possess it is our dignity.

Christ's humiliation by the soldiers is but a few sentences of the story. But the end result is man's attempt to strip away His dignity. Imagine if every good act we ever felt happy about doing were taken and spit on in front of a crowd of mockers. It was not good enough for the Messiah to be nailed to a cross. The soldiers had to try to take the last of his humanity away from him, adding tremendous insult to the final injurious act. How did He respond? Most of us would shrink away from a slap lasting less than a second. How many minutes or hours did the humiliation go on, in its conscious attempt to remove all semblance of dignity from Christ?

I don't have much to say about this section of NT reading today. It's a section I did not pay as much attention to when I was younger. Now that I have lived a little, and seen people all over the world fight for their right to cling to just a little dignity, despite all obstacles, I know more how important dignity is, and how much of a sin was attempted that day. We all share genetics with that crowd of soldiers who did that, and for that I feel shame. The only hope is that we all share genetics with Christ, too.