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Let us continue now in worship. The second scripture reading of the evening is from the Gospel according to Matthew, the 27th chapter, beginning the reading at the verse number 26. Then Pilate released Barabbas to them, and he delivered him to be flogged and handed

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him over to be crucified. Then the governor's soldiers took Jesus into the praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him. They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and then wove a crown of thorns and set

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it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand and knelt in front of him and mocked him. "Hail, king of the Jews," they said. They spit on him and took the staff and struck him on the head again and again.

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After they had mocked him, they took off the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him. And may God bless to us this reading from his words. It is not common for the contemporary pulpits to speak much of the sufferings of Jesus.

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There are two reasons for this. First, the scriptures do not spend a great deal of time describing those sufferings. Secondly, a recitation of the sufferings of Jesus often moves people, but only in their hearts.

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A message to claim must reach the head and the heart, and too often a response to the recitation of the agonies of the Lord is an emotional response and in no sense an intellectual or volitional one. So most pulpits do not speak of the Lord's hurt.

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Yet there is a problem in that, for every minister worthy of the name has vowed not in these words, but in so many words, to say to all those who will hear him that he will speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Of course, there are some who speak the whole truth about the sufferings of Jesus.

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I remember one very hot day in July in Coimbra, Portugal. I stepped out of the heat of the street into the cool of the cathedral, there to look up at the glorious glass, and out of the corner of my eye I discerned a figure to my right. I turned.

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It was a statue. It was a statue of the beaten or the flagellated Christ. It was the most hideous piece of art I have ever seen. It was painted and it ran red with blood.

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The focus on the agonies of Jesus has always been greater within Roman Catholicism than within Protestantism, and especially so in the Latin countries, and this was an example of that. But this thinking about the hurts of Jesus is not alone in Roman Catholicism.

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I remember a few years ago reading an article in Time magazine about a fundamental Baptist preacher down south who, in order to make the crucifixion real to his people, took a living lamb and crucified it, nailed the quivering flesh of the innocent animal to a cross before his congregation, to bring home somehow the awfulness of it all.

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Now we might repudiate both of those methods, but I will confess to you I don't see much wrong with the goal. I mean, we live in a time when at Easter they make chocolate crosses filled with marshmallow, and where people in Lent talk about giving up beer and cigarettes and call that sacrifice.

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Taking up the cross doesn't mean much in a time like this. David Livingston, who went to Africa and literally gave his life there, contracted malaria and 27 times was laid low by it, yet never would he allow the word "sacrifice" to be used to describe his service of Jesus in Africa.

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He said, "Christ sacrificed." Next to that, "My offering is nothing." Maybe we would think more about heaven if we saw more of hell. The difficulty is that the preacher who comes into the pulpit to lay before his people the

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terrible wounds inflicted upon Jesus knows even as he approaches the scene that in large degree his word and he himself will be rejected. It's like that time when Jesus went to Peter to wash the disciples' feet. And you remember how as he approached Peter with the basin and the towel, Peter said,

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"You're not going to wash my feet." Why? Well, to Peter you see the spectacle of this one whom he knew to be the Christ, the Son of the living God, on his knees before him, this humbling act of Jesus.

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So shamed Peter in his pride that he couldn't bear to confront the thought of it. The spectacle of the Lord Christ washing his sweaty, dirty feet so obligated him, so shamed him, so overwhelmed him that he rejected it. And just so, when any man in any pulpit brings the hurts of Jesus with power to that place,

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the tendency and the part of many who hear is to reject it. They don't want to hear that truth. For to hear that truth, to learn of that sacrifice, to face head-on the hideous reality of that, if they've got any sensitivity at all, leaves them in shame and humiliation.

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And rather than endure that, they reject the preacher and what he's preached. So tonight I've decided to take the middle road. I want you to see some of it, but I want you to see only a little bit of it. Maybe if there's enough, but not too much, you still will hear.

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But before we look, we must pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Pilate delivered Jesus into the hands of the soldiers, and they took him to the praetorium,

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that is, they took him to the barracks. And there they prepared him to be crucified. There was a name for that, "preparatio ad crucem," the preparation for the cross. Matthew says that they gathered the whole battalion before him.

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Now today when we kill somebody, we try to be kind about it. We say the condemned man ate a hearty meal. We do it in relative private with only a clergyman and the witnesses that are required by law. It's quick.

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It's as painless as we can make it. But it was not so then. Then death was a spectacle. So the whole battalion was gathered to see the preparation for the dying.

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And the battalion in the Roman legions consisted of 600 men. Now it is quite possible that there were not 600 in the battalion at Pontius Pilate's disposal. He would have needed a smaller guard. So it could have been a smaller number.

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They were probably not Romans. They were most likely Syrians. The Syrians used provincials in their various governorships. And the very fact that they were Syrians made the matter worse.

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If you know anything about affairs in the Middle East today, you know that there is no greater hatred than that exists, which exists between the Syrians and the Israelis. There has been for 3,000 years an unending enmity between these people. You can imagine then the delight of the Syrian mercenaries when they had put into their hands

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the one called the King of the Jews. Now these were hard men. They were used to all the agony of the battlefield and also all the blood and brutality of the gladiatorial arena.

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So there was in them already that which was cruel. But they had this special cruelty. They were underlings. Jesus said to his disciples once that servants are always much more cruel than their masters.

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That's almost invariably true. When you have someone over you who is severe with you, there is in you, if you are like everyone else, a tendency to look for someone lower still with whom you yourself can be severe.

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Have you ever watched little children with a wounded animal poke them and tease them and torment them and drag them about? Why do they do that? Because they're little children.

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Because so many times in their defenseless little lives they feel poked and teased and dragged about. So here is something they can poke and tease and drag about and they do it. Whenever we ourselves feel hurt, we look around for somebody else to hurt.

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Pause a moment to analyze your own anger. And we're very used to talking about Jesus in the swaddling clothes in the manger, and we sometimes talk about the robe without seam that was raffled off by the soldiers at the time of his crucifixion.

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We don't often think of a nude Jesus. The very thought offends us. John the Baptist said on seeing Jesus, "I am not worthy to unlatch the thong of his sandals."

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And they, with cruel and calloused hands, tore off all his clothes. And the garden of Eden, after the sin of Adam and Eve, God made for them clothes to cover their nakedness and their shame. Now we behold the second Adam with no garments to cover him.

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We give the gift of our nakedness to people we trust. We do not hesitate to be naked with those whom we love, with those with whom we feel safe. But there was no love or trust or safety here.

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And he stood there before them. This rose. I remember a number of years ago seeing a television show which concerned a young man who was injured in a mining accident.

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He sustained a blow in his head which rendered him blind. His family sought a special teacher for their blind son. They brought one from San Francisco, and much to their surprise, they discovered that the teacher was herself blind and had been blind from birth.

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She said she would take the task of teaching their blind son on one condition, and that was that they would never tell him, that is, the son, that she, that is, the teacher, was blind. The blind boy must never know that he has a blind teacher.

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And so she began to teach him. And she would have to correct him. And she would have to insist that he do this and that. And he would rail at her in anger.

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And he would cry out, "You don't know what it is to be blind! You don't know what it is to live in the darkness! You don't know what it is to be like I am! You've got no sensitivity, no pity!"

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And so he would reject her again and again, but she persevered until he learned. And then one morning he wakened, and his sight was returned. He could see. And he jumped out of bed and pulled on his clothes and ran through the house looking

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for her. And at last he found her, recognizing her by her voice, and he ran up to her and threw his arms around her and said, "I can see! I can see!

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Look!" But when he looked, he saw that she could not see. And overwhelmed with the memory of all the things that he had said to her, "You don't know what it is to be blind!"

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She fell to his knees and clutching her feet said, "I love you. I love you." And I think of my sin. I think of my greed, my selfishness.

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I think of my intemperate speech. I think of my overindulgence. I think of the things that I do not do that I ought to do, and I think of the things that I do that I ought not to do.

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And then I confront a naked Jesus, who is as he is because of my sin. And all I can do is fall to my knees and putting my arms about his naked feet and say, "I love you. I love you."

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And then they beat him. Christ predicted that this would happen. He said, "The Son of Man they will deliver to the Gentiles to be mocked and scourged and crucified."

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They beat him in a certain way. They would take the naked victim and bend him over a stone post, using manacles to fasten his wrists and his ankles together. And then in that totally vulnerable, indefensible position, he was beaten by a lash that had

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nine tails. In each leather tail were embedded bits of metal and bone. As a result of the lashing, most victims went into unconsciousness. It is recorded that some went insane.

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It is also recorded that many died. Some have said that the fact that Jesus is not recorded as becoming unconscious or becoming insane or dying indicates that he was not lashed severely. But that is not so.

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Jesus was a strong man. He was, you will remember, a carpenter. Carpenters in those days not only built things, they carried the lumber and the trees from the woods, the place where they were building them.

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Jesus had strength enough to do that, but after this beating, he was unable to carry his own crop. The thing that fascinates me about this beating is that there is no indication that at any point in it that Jesus cried out in pain.

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Any minister who has spent a great deal of time in the pastorate knows a lot about pain. You see it in all kinds of ways in all kinds of places. Some people handle their pain with great courage. Other people wave their pain about like a banner.

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I remember hearing a woman say to me on one occasion, I asked her how she was feeling. She said, "I am feeling good, but I always feel bad when I feel good because when I feel good I know that I soon will feel worse." There are people, you know, who make a small pile of thorns and then sit on it and squirm.

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And then there are people like that one described by the great Lutheran pastor, Walter Luthe, who tells of a woman in his church who suffered a stroke and was bed-fast for many, many years. And she gave herself in her bed to a ministry of prayer. And she prayed for the suffering and the hurting of the world.

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And she would always end her prayer with this phrase, "And may she be silent before him. And may he be silent before him." In other words, may this one who is suffering even in the midst of his or her pain so grasp the fact that Jesus knows what pain is and bore it silently.

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They too, depending on the same God and the same present Spirit, will be able to be silent. "Please turn your cassette to the other side." Jesus according to the record said nothing while he was beaten. And remember, please, that this beating he was taking was an act of service, of costly

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discipleship. He took this not because he had to, but because he was willing to and wanted to. That stops me. I know how quick so many are to run from the first challenge to the faith, to flee the

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first attack of unbelief, to back off when somebody begins to dispute the claims of truth. For these people, service is an act of retreat when it's challenged. For Jesus, service, even when it involved this kind of flagellation, was born in silent strength.

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That's the kind of service the world most needs. There were some ships that managed to get out of the Netherlands when the Nazis took over. They became the Free Dutch Navy.

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There was a tugboat of that Dutch Navy commanded by a man named Jan Hartog that was part of a convoy taking supplies to Murmansk, the only warm port for the Russians. This was during the Second World War, of course. The tugboat was sunk by a combined action of Nazi sub and aircraft, and only seven of

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the crew, including Hartog, got away in a lifeboat. And as they were pulling away from the settling ship, they saw in the water a young German sailor boy, his little life being put out in the midst of all the vast ocean. And he was crying out for mercy.

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He evidently had fallen off of the submarine during the battle. And the Dutch crew began to row toward the boy. And as Hartog, the captain, reached down and pulled the sailor lad up into the boat, a Nazi fighter swooped down on them to strafe them.

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And he grabbed the boy and threw him down into the boat and fell on top of him, shielding him with his own body. And he held the youngster's head right up next to his own so that he could hear the young sailor saying, whimpering, "Mutti, mutti, mutti, mommy, mommy, mommy."

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When the seven Dutchmen and the young German sailor boy made it to shore, a newspaper columnist wrote, having heard the story, that that boat carried the glory of Holland. He was wrong. That boat carried the glory of all the world.

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The noblest thing in life is to suffer for what is right, and to suffer for what is right with the courage of a great silence, as Jesus did. And then they ridiculed him. I was reading an article last night about Theodore Hesburgh, the great president of

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Notre Dame University. And he was asked a question in the article, "How did you feel when Notre Dame was made from a men's school into a coeducational institution?" And he replied, "I felt very good about that, for I have noted that when men are alone together,

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they tend to become raunchy." That's what happened here in the barracks. There was an old cloak there used to polish armor. Rough une it would have been.

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They threw it over the shoulders of Jesus, that rough cloth against those bleeding wounds, it must have hurt. And then they had a game they played. It looked somewhat like hopscotch, lines and patterns drawn on the stone, and they would

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throw dice and move this prisoner from space to space, betting on where he would go. Who would win? Oh, I know this is not on the record, but the archaeological evidence is indisputable. I have myself walked across those stones.

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I've seen the lines. They are still there. They prodded God around the board, throwing the dice. They forced God to do their will.

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They pushed God. They shoved God, manipulated him with the dice of their opinion. "Stand up lively, God!" And they still do that today.

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The student who says to me on campus, "I do not choose to be a Christian, for I know that if I become a Christian I will have to change my way of life, and I'm unwilling to do that." There it is. "If God will agree with me, my terms, acceptable.

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If he will not, then I'll have none of them." Or the man who said to me one day, in the utmost seriousness, on this ground, "I became a Christian as soon as I found out that God was a Republican." God agrees with me, I will therefore acknowledge God.

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Or the father who lost a son and sat here in my study with me and said one day, "Where was God when my son died? As if somehow God had failed in his job, had not done his duty." And I replied, "Why, when your son died, God was exactly the same place he was when his

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own son died." How dare we order God, twist his words to suit our theologies, bend his truth to conform to our prejudices. I listen to some people talk about discipleship, and I wonder whether Christ is their disciple

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or they are his. So they played their game, and they bowed down low before him, mocking him now, and said, "Ave Caesar, Victor, Imperator." Those are the words given to Caesar by his troops.

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And they took a reed and put it in his hand, mocking a scepter, and then, then they spit on him. And somebody had an idea for us, a final touch. They took some thistled reeds, and they handled them very carefully, of course, because of

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the thorns, and they wove them into a kind of wreath. And then they jammed it on his head. It was intended to be an act of ridicule, but physicians tell us that of all the pains inflicted upon Jesus, the pain of these festering thorns would have been amongst the worst.

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You remember in Genesis, when Adam and Eve were forced to leave the garden because of their sin, God says to them that from that time on, the earth will bring forth thorns. The thorn represents the curse, you see, whether you see it cold and black against the snow in winter, or whether you reach out for a flower or fruit and find it hiding beneath

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a leaf. When it tears into your skin and begins to burn there, you understand how it can be used to symbolize the ugly gone wrongness of life. So they made a crown of thorns and put it on his head.

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It was intended to be an act of cruel ridicule. The strange thing is that if we look at it from two thousand years later, it seems somehow fitting. Have you ever noticed how there are some people that no matter what they wear, they look good?

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You can put them in rags and they still look good? The spectacle of Jesus wearing those thorns, bearing upon his brow the symbol of man's curse. It's right, for that is what he came to do.

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Have you noticed how they hurled insults at him and he turned them into tributes? They called out, "He's a friend of sinners!" One of the greatest things ever said of him. He saved others himself he cannot save.

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And we thank God for that. So he took this crown of thorns, this thing representing all the evil and gone wrongness of man, and wore it like a noble wreath and said, "By Rarius, I bear in my own body all the hurt of this plundered planet."

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There's a shocking picture by an artist that pictures Mary and the other women returning from the cross. And what's daring about it is that the artist puts into the hand of Mary the crown of thorns. And at first you think to yourself, "Why would she have brought such a thing into her home?"

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But don't you see? It was in itself testimony to all he came to do and be. And every time she would look at it, she could not help but think of his love and his bearing upon himself the stain of a whole world's sin, and she could not help but remember that

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even in the midst of wearing it, he so loved her that he could look down and say to her and John standing beside her, "Woman, behold thy son, and son, behold thy mother." So we see him pass, still wearing his crown of thorns. And if we're sensitive to the truth, we would ask him to wear no other diadem.

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And they took him out to crucify him. The demand of the Jews and the duplicity of Caiaphas and the decision of Pilate and the deeds of the soldiers never managed to take away his dignity. Isaiah says, "All we like sheep have gone astray and we have turned each one into our

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own way and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all." And the hymn writer more recently put it like this, "He died that we might be forgiven, he died to make us good, that we might go at last to heaven, saved by his precious blood." Gentle Jesus, blaspheming in a barren land.

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Well, I can see the tire of my talking about it. I've seen three in the last minute look at their watches, and there's a couple back here on this side who've been talking for the last two or three minutes. It is hard to listen to too long, isn't it?

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We don't want to spend too much time focusing on the scene, do we? After all, there's McDonald's and there's Mr. Donut, and then of course there's the Pizza House and Pizza Villa, and there's the dorm lounges, and it's a nice night for walking, and there's a test tomorrow.

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I mean, after all, can't we kind of hurry up and get out of here? Had we had enough of this? Sure, let's all go. But maybe sometime before we sleep, if we're brave enough to be quiet for a moment, we'll

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hear the whine of the whip and the slap of the lash, and hearing it, we'll say what Luther said, "My God, my God, for me, for me." Let us pray. O God, in the face of such love, how can we not love thee and live like it?

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And the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, be and abide with you both now and forevermore. Amen. (wind wind wind wind)