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Blogger: Greg Lafferty
John 19 is full of ironies. A crown is placed on Jesus’ head to parody is supposed kingship—but he really is the King. His accusers seek the death penalty because of Jesus’ lying claim to be the Son of God—but he really is the Son. Pilate claims to have the power of life and death—but it’s really Jesus who has the power. Pilate sits on the judge’s seat—but it’s really Jesus who is the Judge.
Everything is upside down.
But maybe no statement is more ironic than Pilate’s famous line, “Here is the man!” (v. 5). Really? Jesus looks like anything but “the man.” He’s been mocked and tortured, marred and debased. Dehumanized. This is Rome’s philosophy of justice: Anyone who is not a Roman is inferior, and anyone inferior who commits a capital offense is not even worthy of being called human. By crucifixion we will obliterate them; we will wipe them from the annals of humanity; it will be as if they never existed.
Jesus is “in process.” The mocking irony is part of the recipe.
“Here is the man!” Pilate announces. Yet he speaks the utter truth because Jesus is the very embodiment of true humanity. He is the perfect man. He has no sin or flaw, but rather self-actualizes the human ideal, being the perfect image of God enfleshed. And his standing there all bloody and abused is the icing on the cake, for no one with omnipotent power would ever put up with such vile treatment. Yet Jesus does. His glory radiates in selfless humility. He is The Man!
And so he allows the drama to play out, The Man becoming The Lamb led to slaughter. He fulfills the Scriptures at every point, all the way to his death.
But the last irony is the best: Jesus, the sinless Man, is marred—so that we, the marred men and women, might be made sinless. 2 Corinthians 5:21 puts it this way: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” No joke. It’s true. Think about that today and praise God for irony!
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2 comments:
I am really enjoying this. What's next after 21 days?
Irony, so often when we see irony we are seeing truth. God himself is an irony, being three, yet one, Jesus is an irony to our minds, being fully human yet fully devine.. Often times I marvel at how little we can trully understand that such basic truths confound our minds so much that we have to have a word for them, Irony. Yet what to us is confounding irony is the most basic of truths to God. How very mighty He is! I marvel thinking that one day I might stand in His presence and all of life's ironies will be so clear that I'm sure i'll just have to laugh to learn that the real irony is that I ever thought to understand much of anything at all.
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