The soldiers led
Jesus into the praetorium yard and called the unit together. They clothed him in purple, and put on him a woven crown—made of acacia spikes. They began to salute him: “Hail, king of Judeans!” They were striking him on the head with a cane, spitting on him, and taking a knee to worship him. While mocking him, they stripped the purple off him. They put his robes on him.They led
Jesus out to crucify him.—
Jesus had already been flogged, and Pontius Pilate had just sent him off to be crucified. (In John, this bit happened before Pilate sent Jesus off to be crucified; it happened at his flogging. ) Either way, before the crucifixion, the Roman soldiers decided to have a little sick fun first.
If you were sentenced to death, and you weren’t Roman, the Roman soldiers were permitted to do whatever they liked to you—so long that, at the end of it all, you were hanging from a cross. You might not even survive till crucifixion. That just meant they’d drag your corpse out (or, more likely, force a passerby to drag it for them), and nail it up anyway.
You might remember, during the Iraq War, how some of the American soldiers likewise had a little “fun” with their prisoners. Humans tend to do evil stuff like this whenever the rules don’t prohibit it. It’s not enough to defeat our opponents; we want to humiliate them and make them suffer. The Romans weren’t satisfied with just oppressing the Jews: They wanted to hurt them for making their job so hard. And that day, Jesus took the brunt of all that rage and anti-Semitism.
It’s why we Christians should be all the more against torture. Regardless of what TV shows and movies try to claim—that it gets an unwilling person to give up information for fear of greater pain—how well it works is debatable, and really its only purpose is for one person to do horrible, vengeful stuff to another person. It’s to commit the purest sort of evil; it’s to destroy the body of the victim, but destroy the soul of the torturer.
A living game piece.
To kill time, Roman soldiers played games. One of them was the basiléus/“king” game, in which they used the paving stones on the floor as spaces, threw dice, and tried to move the “king” piece to a “tower”—so they could execute him.
With Jesus, they’d just been handed a victim who claimed to be king. So now they were gonna play basiléus with a real live victim. It appears they’d done this before: The stuff they did to Jesus wasn’t just invented for the occasion.
They called out their speíra/“unit,” a Roman manipulus, which consisted of two centuria—that’s 200 soldiers. Each of these guys would get a shot at Jesus.
They put “purple” on Jesus, meaning purple clothes. The rich, including nobles and royalty, tended to wear purple clothes, or togas hemmed with purple. Purple dye, taken from mollusk shells, was expensive. You could come up with a cheap substitute by taking a soldier’s red cloak and dipping it in indigo. But such a knockoff would still be mostly red, which is why Matthew called it red. Still, for the purposes of basiléus, it’d do.
They put a woven crown on Jesus. Honorees tended to wear olive-branch crowns in the east, ivy crowns in the west. But their crown was made of acacia branches, and hidden amongst the leaves are two-inch spikes. “Thorns” isn’t quite an adequate description. Christian art tends not to show the leaves; artists want to accentuate the spikes. It’s not quite accurate: The leaves are what make it a proper crown. Plus, dry spikes would scratch but break; fresh spikes would really dig into the flesh, which was the idea.
For a scepter, the soldiers gave him one of the canes they’d beat him with—sometimes borrowing it to beat him with it.
So till the novelty wore off—maybe a half hour—they played basiléus with Jesus, with a combination of abuse and mock worship. They were “taking a knee” to bow to him; they were hailing him like you’d hail a king or emperor. But when they got up to kiss the king, they spat on him instead. And instead of touching the scepter, they’d grab it and smack hm with it. With that many blows to the head, including (inadvertently or not) to the crown of spikes on it, Jesus’s head would have been covered in blood, and unrecognizable by the end of it.
Game over, the soldiers removed the “purple”—probably to save for the next victim they’d do this to. Commentators figure Jesus’s back was already ripped open from his flogging earlier, and assume pulling the “purple” off was like ripping the bandage off a barely-healed scab. But this assumes the “purple” was put over Jesus’s bare skin—that he wasn’t wearing a tunic, with the “purple” draped over it toga-style. It may be that the soldiers stripped him nude, but it’s more likely when his robes were put back on him, they were put on over the tunic he was wearing the whole time. Now, as for pulling his tunic off and tearing open his back again: That would came next, at his crucifixion.
A rejected God.
The soldiers’ twisted game aside, Jesus is king.
But y’know, had the soldiers realized who Jesus really was, it’s debatable as to whether they’d fall to their knees in real fear… or beat him up anyway. Part of the appeal of basiléus was how you got to kill an authority figure. An imaginary king, but with a little more imagination, maybe your king. Or general. Or emperor. You wanted to stick it to the Man, and here was a game which let you do that.
There are a lot of people in the world, in our culture, who are really, really angry at God. Given the chance, they’d join the soldiers in smacking him around if they could. Doesn’t matter if he doesn’t deserve it; they’re convinced he does deserve it. He let their loved ones die, horribly. Or he didn’t give them the prayer-requests they begged for. Or he didn’t come through for them, and they thought they had a deal. Or their lives just suck in general, and they’ve convinced themselves a good, loving God should take away all the problems in the world; not have us solve them ourselves.
So this represents that: Humanity telling God what they really think of him. Doing to him what they really want to do to him, instead of love him. Jesus said they didn’t know what they were doing, ’cause they really didn’t; those who hate God, who find him frustrating, don’t understand him. And don’t really want to. They just want to hurt him.
Some of us Christians likewise have some lingering resentments towards God. With our lips we praise him, but deep down we’d just as soon spit on him as kiss him. We need to admit it—and get rid of it. He doesn’t deserve it. Our bitterness is based on bad theology and selfishness. Add doubt, then take God’s powers away, and we’d be in the crowd with the Roman soldiers, smacking him around with them, thinking nothing of it. We’re no better than they are. We need to become better.