The Crown is Made of Thorns

Daily Gospel: Matthew 27:24–31

The Set-Up

“So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.’”

Pilate, the Roman governor, has the unilateral authority to release Jesus. He knows Jesus is innocent, but he also knows that standing up to the religious mob will cost him political capital.

This is the ultimate failure of the state: Pilate literally issues a state-sanctioned death penalty, and then performs a little ritual with a bowl of water to declare himself morally pure. The Empire loves to build bureaucratic systems that allow people at the top to crush the vulnerable while legally washing their hands of the violence. Pilate claims the "cheap grace" of innocence without doing the actual, costly work of justice.

“Then the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’ So he released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified.”

Let’s take a second to acknowledge a point: This single verse has been weaponized for centuries by the church to justify violent, systemic anti-Semitism. It has been falsely used to claim that the Jewish people are universally cursed… and that is a toxic theological lie.

The cooperative Kingdom, the literal Prince of Peace, is standing right in front of them, offering a way out of the cycles of violence, but the crowd has been manipulated by the gatekeepers. 

They choose Barabbas (a violent insurrectionist) over Jesus, because they would rather gamble on the machinery of the world. And within 40 years, that exact choice to embrace violent rebellion against Rome would lead to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. 

“Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor’s headquarters... they stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on his head... They spat on him, and took the reed and struck him on the head.”

After scourging Him with a flagrum (a brutal Roman whip designed to tear flesh), the soldiers drag Him into the barracks, put a fake royal robe on Him, shove thorns into His scalp, and mock Him as the "King of the Jews."

Why the elaborate theater? Because the Roman military machine is built entirely on the ego of domination. So when they are presented with a King who refuses to fight back, they mock Him,  because a God who suffers in solidarity with the marginalized makes absolutely no sense to a system built on crushing people.

The Takeaways

• The most dangerous political systems are the ones that allow leaders to authorize violence against the marginalized while hiding behind bureaucratic procedures that keep their own hands "clean."

• Any theology that uses verse 25 to curse the Jewish people is a violent perversion of the Gospel. Jesus, His mother, His disciples, and the earliest church were all Jewish.

• When humanity rejects the cooperative, non-violent Kingdom, we inevitably end up drowning in the violence of the Empire we chose instead.

• The world will always parody and attack a love that refuses to dominate.

• Jesus took the spitting, the beating, and the humiliation. He exhausted the Empire's violence by letting it break upon Himself. 

The Good News

The Good News is that God's power looks absolutely nothing like Rome's power.

If you have been crushed, mocked, or discarded by the world, the Creator of the universe is not disconnected from your pain. Jesus is standing in the middle of the barracks, bleeding, wearing a crown of thorns, absorbing the absolute worst the Empire has to offer. 

God does not save us by becoming a bigger bully; God saves us by walking directly into the violence and dismantling it from the inside out.

The Table Question

Where do we see modern political or religious systems "washing their hands" of systemic violence while actively allowing the vulnerable to be crushed, and how do we actively disrupt our own complicity in those systems?

(Artwork: “Jesus Before Pilate” - GeorgesRouault)