Indictment: He Is The Son of God, John 19:1-14:14; Matthew 27:22-26

We will spend the majority of our time in the first 15 verses of John 19 today because this information that is here is not provided in the Synoptics—

Matthew, Mark and Luke—and it fits after the episode with Barabbas.

Pilate is trying to get out of crucifying Jesus and he's under tremendous pressure by the religious leaders to crucify Jesus, but he can't find any fault with Him, and again and again he is coming out to them and saying, "I can't find any fault with this man." So he's trying to give them a choice with Barabbas. Barabbas is more than just a thief or robber, he is one who is been a rebel against the Roman Empire, so in some ways he was functioning in a messianic way that was how the crowds expected the Messiah to perform, not like Jesus was performing. He didn't fit their preconceived notions of how a messiah should act. Barabbas was part of what wasn't just a criminal gang; it was among many who wanted to overthrow Rome. Pilate doesn't want to release him. He doesn't think the people would want him because of the nature of his crimes, and he is a murderer. And he is stunned that they choose him over Jesus.

So he is going to release Barabbas and that occurs at the end of chapter 18 in the Gospel of John. What we have seen in our study is that in the first six trials, the religious trials, the indictment against Jesus was that He made himself to be the Son of God, to be the Messiah, to be the son of David, and by claiming to be the Son of God, He has committed in their eyes blasphemy. But He doesn't actually under the name of God so it's a bogus charge, but it's the only thing that they've been able to come up with since none of these dozens of witnesses that they trotted out could agree with each other on what Jesus has done. So it's interesting that what they are indicting Him for is actually the truth. He has made Himself out to be the Son of God and He is the Son of God, and that is going to become even more clear in this last part of this last trial, because when they first came to Pilate they came with a charge—not a religious charge because they knew that that would not impress a Roman authority at all. They don't care what anything about the religious issues in Judaism, and so they shifted and made the charge He made Himself out to be the King. Of course this would put him in a position of threatening the authority of Rome and the authority of Caesar.

But what happens here in the intensity of the moment—and this is an intense period. This is a mob that is shouting and screaming for Jesus blood—is that they do not want to be reasoned with. They are well beyond reason. They hate Jesus with every ounce of their being and they are screaming and shouting for His crucifixion, and Pilate is doing everything he can to try to placate the crowd without giving them Jesus. And when he comes out in the midst of this section in chapter 19 the Jews dropped the pretense of the political charge and once again fall back on the indictment that He has made Himself to be the Son of God. They make it clear they are charging Him for what He claims to be and what He actually is. They are rejecting God; they are rejecting the Messiah; they are rejecting salvation. It becomes clear that, even though even though they have claimed to be followers of God, they like so many religious people, really do hate God and they hate the truth. This is what comes out in these trials.

There were six trials. The first three are religious trials, first before Annas, the former high priest who is still the power behind the high priesthood, then his son-in-law, Caiaphas, and then before the whole Sanhedrin. It is that trial before Caiaphas, the second one, that is conducted before sunrise where they get Jesus to admit that He is the Son of God, and that's going to be their charge of blasphemy. And it really doesn't fit the Old Testament pattern of what blasphemy is, which is taking God's name in an empty manner or taking his name in vain. Then that is followed by the three trials, first Pilate, then he sends Him to Herod Antipas, and then Herod sends Him back to Pilate.

So at the conclusion of the episode with Barabbas Pilate says to the Jewish masses, "What shall I do with Him?" That's the question that everybody has to decide. What are you going to do with the claims of Jesus? They have rejected Jesus and are screaming, "Let Him be crucified!" It's a chance they are highly emotional and on the verge of violence. This is mob action at its very worst and then Pilate just can't understand this. He asked the question: "What evil has He done?" Of course they don't respond to that. They just continue to chant louder and louder, "Crucify Him! Crucify Him!"

John 19:1 Pilate then took Jesus and scourged Him.

He's attempting a compromise. What he wants to do is give them something. He's going to punish Jesus in some way, but he's trying to avoid having to crucify Him. At the time that this is written, when it says they scourged him, people knew what that meant. People today don't know what that means. It was extremely violent and bloody. The Roman scourge or flagellum is a horrible instrument designed to inflict pain. It has a wooden handle that is large enough to get maintain a good grip. There would be several leather thongs coming out from it, maybe as many as eight or nine, and woven into those leather thongs were pieces of rock and bone and metal and glass. The strips of leather might be as long as 4 or 5 feet, giving the lictor, the one wielding the whip, opportunity to whip, and those leather thongs would wrap around the torso. So he's not just getting ripped on the back, but it would wrap around and ripped the front as well. And with those various pieces of metal it was designed to tear the skin off, designed to rip through the musculature, designed to create as much damage and trauma as possible. In fact, in the flagellation that preceded crucifixion it was common for the criminal to die before he ever made it to the cross. This is what we are talking about here.

This was not the Jewish scourging. There was also a Jewish scourging that took place. The Jewish scourging involved 39 lashes. The mandate in the Mosaic Law was no more than 40 lashes, and the Jews in the attempt to keep themselves from miscounting and going beyond 40 would only go to 39. Paul talks about this several times. He had been flagellated according to Jewish flagellation a couple of times.

With this is a Roman flagellation, was much worse and designed to completely devastate and destroy the victim. Sometimes that victim would be stripped down to actually nothing. Sometimes they would just have a little bit on, tied to a pillar with their heart, arms over their head. Sometimes they would be bent over a post, different positions depending on what was what was available. But here it appears that Pilate is not intending the full force of a scourging because he will stop it after a while. It's not designed to kill Jesus; he's trying to avoid that. And so this is just enough to satisfy the bloodlust, he hopes, of the crowds.

It also involved a beating, and we know from this passage that they would were physically punching Him and slapping Him and hitting Him as hard as they could. What we learn from these passages is that when they do this, they're doing it in front of the other Roman soldiers in order to bring out all of their anger and hostility. They are professional torturers doing all that they could, not only the physical violence but also to humiliate Him to mock Him, and deride Him. They would do everything they could to not only devastate and destroy a person physically, but also to do it emotionally and psychologically.

They take a crown of thorns. There are various guesses by different people as to what plant was used. They went outside somewhere near the praetorian room and found just whatever thorn bush was available that they could weave into thorns. We don't know what kind of bush. In Israel there are a number of different plants that have some incredibly impressive thorns on them, thorns that are an inch and a half to three inches long. We don't know which one they used. They are mocking Jesus and they're going to put this on His head. This is the third mockery that we've seen in these trials.

The first mockery is described in Luke 22:63-65, which occurred after the second religious trial. These were the Jews who were mocking Jesus. The second mockery came after the fifth trial and is described in Luke 23:6-12 after the trial before Herod Antipas when they put a white robe on Him, and again mocking His claim that He was the King of the Jews. They dress Him up like a king and ridicule Him and abuse Him verbally. Then He is beaten. Here they put the crown on Him and a purple robe. John and you look at Mark use the word "purple". Matthew uses the word "scarlet". Why this difference?

The best explanation I've been able to find for this is that it was a probably a faded soldiers robe. It may have been purple to begin with; now it's faded and it looks more scarlet; the colors sort of blend together so that it could have been described by either term. They are putting this robe on him in order to simulate the robe of royalty. It may have been a good robe to begin with, but it is not a royal robe at this point. They are just grabbing a robe that is nearby, discarded from one of the one of the soldiers.

Then they began to come up to Him and beat Him. John 19:3 and they {began} to come up to Him and say, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and to give Him slaps {in the face.}

The verb there is in the imperfect tense in the Greek, which means it's continuous action. They're just pummeling him, beating Him over and over again, and they're not holding back. It was a violent form of punching and a result of this was that His face would have become bruised, with the crown of thorns force down on His head and blood was running down, His head the beatings, would've produced more bleeding and, as most of you know, whenever you have any sort of cut on your head— and it can just be a very small scratch—you will bleed profusely. So there's a lot of blood and bruising and Jesus' face would be swelling and He would become unrecognizable.

At that point Pilate goes out to placate the crowd again in the hopes that he can convince them of Jesus innocence. This is his fourth declaration of Jesus' innocence.

John 19:4 Pilate came out again and said to them, “Behold, I am bringing Him out to you so that you may know that I find no guilt in Him.” Again and again he is stating there is no fault in Jesus.

John 19:5 Jesus then came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. {Pilate} said to them, “Behold, the Man!”

This is a dramatic scene. Jesus is bloodied. He's covered in bruises; He's covered in blood and spittle. His hair is wet, matted and caked with blood. His body has been has been whipped—of course, covered by the robe. He is almost unrecognizable. The saying of Pilate at this point, "Behold, the man", is a phrase that has come down to us in Latin, echo Homo. If you walk the traditional site in Jerusalem, coming in from the Lion's Gate or Stephen's gate you will walk along the Via Dolorosa there, and then you will come to a plaque on the wall that says "Echo Homo". This is not where I believe it occurred, but much of the older view was that the praetorian was located on the northwest corner by the Mark Anthony barracks, by the fortress Antonio, and that this was where Pilate had to brought Jesus out. I don't think it was there. I think it was on the west side of the of the of the city of Jerusalem at that time.

He is making a fourth attempt to release Jesus and again refuses to pass a Roman sentence on Him.

John 19:6 So when the chief priests and the officers saw Him, they cried out saying, “Crucify, crucify!” Pilate said to them, “Take Him yourselves and crucify Him, for I find no guilt in Him.”

Pilate knows that they need his permission to crucify him. And so when he says this you take him and crucify him there's a heavy level of sarcasm there because he knows, and they know, that they cannot do that. They get very frustrated at this point:

John 19:7 The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and by that law He ought to die because He made Himself out {to} {be} the Son of God.”

An interesting and fascinating point here is that today you have so many people, liberal theologians, who say Jesus never really claimed to be God. What is very clear from what is stated in the Gospel accounts is that the reason that He is crucified is because He claimed to be the Son of God. And the chief priests, the Pharisees, the Sadducees all understood that He had claimed to be God when He made statements such as in John 10:30: "I and the father are one". It was clear to the to the religious leaders that He was claiming to be God. In other passages in the Gospels, such as where Jesus said: "Before Abraham was, I AM", using the present tense of that word, that indicated deity because the root verb of the name for God, Yahweh, comes from the verb to be. And the name Yahweh means, "I am who I am". So for Jesus to say before Abraham was, not I was, but I AM, He's making a claim to deity. They understood that and immediately reached down to pick up stones to stone Jesus.

They understood this, and that was the reason. Now the veil comes off and what they are rejecting is Jesus as Messiah. They are rejecting God's offer of salvation; they had rejected the offer of the kingdom, and this shows the evil that is in the soul of unbelievers. They are resisting God. They hate Christ; they hate the gospel; they are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness, and one classic example of this evil in the Bible is Saul of Tarsus. He hates these followers of Jesus so much that he gets a commission from the Sanhedrin to go, execute, and to kill Christians, to arrest them and bring them back to Jerusalem. And while he is on that mission to Damascus is when Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus. It is at that point that he became saved when Jesus confronted him with what he was doing, saying, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" It was clear that this is the point, this is the issue; this is the question for everyone to answer: Do you believe Jesus is the Son of God who came to die on the cross for your sentence? If you believe that then you are saved and you have eternal life. If you do not then you are not saved and you are under eternal condemnation.

John 19:8   Therefore when Pilate heard this statement, he was {even} more afraid;

When Pilate heard this saying he comes under further conviction, and he is afraid. Remember that in the middle of his interchange with Jesus, there's a pause and his wife came out. John is the only one who tells us about that. Pilate's wife comes out and she says you need to be careful with this guy. He is a just man. And there is a tradition in history. I don't know if she was saved or not, but there is a tradition in history that she became saved, that the wives of many Roman soldiers in that period became believers. It's possible that at this point she came to understand that. I don't know, but we know from some biblical examples and also from historical examples in literature that that there were many among the Roman aristocracy where the wives became believers. Nevertheless, she understood that there was something different about Jesus.

Once she says that to Pilate he is already at a point where he is uneasy about this whole situation, and now that the religious leaders of said that he claimed to be the Son of God, he becomes more afraid. I believe there is a testimony that God has placed in the soul of every person that, according to Romans one, everyone knows that God exists, because God placed that knowledge, Scripture says, with in them, and He made that knowledge evident to them. On the basis of that general revelation witness and on what is happening in front of him, Pilate is very clear. He's becoming clear in his soul. There's something more going on here.

I think that that is important. The statements of Scripture show that he is just as culpable, and just as guilty for the death of Jesus as the Jewish religious leaders, and that's important for understanding this question of who is to blame for the crucifixion of Jesus. And sadly throughout the history of the church there have been too many who have thought that the Jews were to blame, and have used that as a justification for anti-Semitism.

Pilate is just as guilty. Now he goes back into the Praetorium and now he wants to have another interrogation of Jesus. He begins to talk to Him and he asked Him three basic questions here to clarify who Jesus is.

John 19:9 and he entered into the Praetorium again and said to Jesus, “Where are You from?” But Jesus gave him no answer.

Jesus has already determined Pilate is negative. He's not going to respond to the truth. He had sarcastically said in a previous interrogation: "What is truth?" He has rejected truth. So Jesus is not going to answer him, because there's no real desire on the part of Pilate to know the truth. So Jesus gives him no answer.

There are times when we are talking with unbelievers or we are giving the gospel, we are presenting truth, when we have to know to shut up, not to say anything because they're not responsive; they really don't want to hear. Maybe they just want to have little intellectual engagement. Maybe they just want to be stimulated a little bit, whatever it is. I've known people like this. They talk to you about Christianity and the Bible over and over again, and our optimism is, oh we just hope; maybe they're positive. But after 20 or 30 years they're not positive, they just want something else. And so there's comes a time when we just don't give an answer.

Jesus didn't give an answer. His whole demeanor and response to this interrogation is so different from anyone else. Any other person who is unjustly indicted is going to react in self-defense. They are going to say that's wrong; that's a lie, they shouldn't say that. They're going to become angry as fear mounts in their soul. They get angrier and more frustrated and more defensive.

None of that comes from Jesus. He's calm; He's relaxed; He's in control of the situation, and He knows that nothing He says is going to change the situation so He keeps silent.

Pilate's response: Can you begin to imagine this? You are the procurator, you are the governor, and the issue here is life or death, and you not getting any response from Jesus. He just can't comprehend it. Why are you not speaking to me? I have your life in my hands is what he is saying: "Don't you know that I have power to crucify you and power to release you". He is saying, I can end all this right now; I have this authority.

Then Jesus says this, and the tone here is important. He's relaxed. He's calm. He is stating a basic fact and probably the way He says it is as convicting to Pilate as it can possibly be. He's not saying this in a threatening manner; He's not reacting in anger. He is just going to state a simple basic fact.

John 19:11 Jesus answered, “You would have no authority over Me, unless it had been given you from above; for this reason he who delivered Me to you has {the} greater sin.”

What He is saying there is that that you have power, "…but the one who delivered me …" that could be referring to the religious leaders, or it could be referring even to Judas "has the greater sin". They are the ones who trumped up these charges, but you're the one who's been given of this power from above to be able to do this, it doesn't come from you. So He focuses on this spiritual authority that He has set forth and that God is one who's really in authority over Pilate.

John 19:12 As a result of this Pilate made efforts to release Him, but the Jews cried out saying, “If you release this Man, you are no friend of Caesar; everyone who makes himself out {to be} a king opposes Caesar.”

The idea here is, he's going to go out and try to negotiate few more times with the religious leaders. But he's met with anger; he's met with a stone wall. They're not going to talk. They're not going to negotiate.

Now they're reminding him of the political charge. This is Pilate's fifth attempt to release Jesus and once again they are unwilling to negotiate this. The reason that he is so intimidated is because he is now in a position where he no longer has a protector in Rome. This is in 33 AD. One of the powerbrokers in Rome was Sejanus, who is the head of the Praetorian Guard and he and Pilate were friends. Sejanus was elevated to a critical position in Rome when Tiberius basically retired, and at that point Sejanus had all the actual de facto power in Rome. As he use that he became ambitious and desired to take over complete rule. He conspired with some others to against the Emperor to take control and that conspiracy was discovered and Sejanus and his co-conspirators were all executed. Anyone who was close to them would be under suspicion, so Pilate was very concerned about his position and his safety and being able to maintain his job, and this was indeed a real threat. He knew that he was possibly being watched and under investigation and so the last thing he needed was for the word to get back to Rome that there was someone who claimed to be king and he did not shut down that conspiracy.

John 19:13   Therefore when Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus out, and sat down on the judgment seat at a place called The Pavement, but in Hebrew, Gabbatha.

So this is where Pilate would make his ruling

John 19:14 Now it was the day of preparation for the Passover; it was about the sixth hour. And he said to the Jews, “Behold, your King!”

This is the day of the Passover, and this is an important term because it indicates timing here. It is the preparation day of the Passover, the day that the sacrifices would be made for the for the Passover lambs, and so it is early on that particular morning. This would've been on the 15th of Nisan.

Pilate presents Jesus as their king, but they have totally rejected this and now he is giving into their pressure to crucify Jesus. And they react.

John 19:15 So they cried out, “Away with {Him,} away with {Him,} crucify Him!” Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.”

Pilate then asked, "Shall I crucify your King?" There is sarcasm there, because they have rejected Him. He knows He's not really a king, and he is as it were poking fun at them through this sarcasm.

John 19:16 So he then handed Him over to them to be crucified.

One thing I want to go back to here is a statement that is made earlier, prior to this, by the Jews, as Barabbas is being released, and again they're asking for crucifixion. This is before this final stage of this trial. In Matthew, we are told, that the people answered Pilate and said, "His blood be on us and on our children".

This is a verse that has been taken out of context and been grossly abused in church history. It is a verse that has frequently been used to support the claim that the Jews alone are responsible for crucifying Jesus, and are thus guilty as a race and deserving of the hatred and the punishment of Christians because they are the Christ killers. This view came into prominence towards the midpoint of the third century (between 200 to 250) and it begins to gain ground in Christianity. Prior to that many of the Christians were ethnically Jews. In fact, a religious sociologist at Baylor University has done a lot of work on this, just from a totally demographic standpoint, and along with others he cites a number of sources on this.

The claim is that by 200—100+ years after the apostles—probably no less than 50 per cent of Christians in the Roman Empire were of Jewish ethnicity. And it may surprise you but when you look at the apostolic period, and you look back to, especially those first days following the day of Pentecost, thousands upon thousands of Jews became Christians and they would have taught the gospel to their children and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. When Paul and others went to various synagogues are various places it would start the synagogue giving the gospel. Peter is writing in first and second Peter two Jewish background believers. James is writing to Jewish background believers. Hebrews is writing to Jewish background believers. All of those mid first-century Jewish background believers would have had children and grandchildren, great-grandchildren. They were ethnic Jews, but they were raised in Christianity. And they used a lot of documentation to emphasize that.

But by 200 you start to see a split between the Gentiles and the Jews. And with the rise of allegorical interpretation, there becomes more and more of a split that occurs within the church. Early testimony that in the 100s indicates that a lot of Jewish Christians—without sacrificing the doctrine because they were comfortable, there was no split or antagonism, would be in synagogue on Saturday in church on Sunday. So you didn't get the rise of anti-Semitism. There are elements of it that are coming up in between 100 and 200, but it begins to coalesce in the early two hundreds with the rise of allegorical interpretation, departure from literal interpretation, and culminating in the legalization of Christianity by Constantine, in the Edict of Toleration in 315. That sort of ends that transition, and from that point on you just have a full bore hostility between the Jews and the Christians.

This became a foundation for what is one of the largest blights on the history of Christianity, and that is Christian anti-Semitism, and it is known as "replacement theology"—that's what undergirds it. That is the claim that when the Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah God rejected them as His people permanently and totally, and they are now under a curse.

To properly understand this—and we will trace this through some other things that happened as we go through the end of Matthew's Gospel—is that there is a judgment on this generation that is made by Jesus in Matthew chapter 12. By rejecting Him as Messiah He says that the religious leaders have committed the unpardonable sin and blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Now the unpardonable sin is not rejecting the gospel. Rejecting the gospel is something that can happen today.

Paul rejected the gospel dozens, if not hundreds, of times before he finally accepted the gospel. So rejecting the gospel isn't unforgivable. Christ died for every sin. The sense of unforgivable is that they reached the point of no return in that generation; that once they rejected Jesus' offer of the kingdom it wasn't to be offered anymore, and it would set in motion the judgment of God on Israel that would culminate in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in AD 70. Their unforgivable sin is not unforgivable in that you can never have eternal life. It was unforgivable in that it would set in motion a course of discipline in time for the Jewish people and that was the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. This is the judgment that they are taking on themselves. In verse 25 is what, "we and our children are responsible", and they and their children would suffer the judgment of AD 70. This is all historical. It's not national; it's not ethnic; it's not racial.

We see the same thing comes up in from what Jesus says when Jesus is carrying the cross on the way to Golgotha. There are the wailers, the professional Jewish wailers from Jerusalem who are following Him, weeping and wailing, and He turns to them and says, "Daughters of Jerusalem don't weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children." See, you and your children are the ones were going to bear the divine discipline for rejecting the Messiah. "Indeed, the days are coming, in which they will say, Blessed are the barren wombs that never bore and breast, which never nursed." Why would that be? Because the suffering that was going to come on people's children when the country was overrun and so many were killed. It was their children who are going to bear the brunt of that discipline.

Luke 23:30 “Then they will begin TO SAY TO THE MOUNTAINS, ‘FALL ON US,’ AND TO THE HILLS, ‘COVER US.’

Luke 23:31 “For if they do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?”

In time, "Then, they will begin to say to the mountains fall on us into the hills cover us. For if they do these things in the Greenwood. What will be done in the dry?" Now that seems a rather cryptic statement. It is actually based on a passage in Ezekiel 20:47. The Greenwood is that which is good and growing and productive, and Jesus is the Greenwood. The idea is that if they're going to do this to a just man then when they are in full of sin and injustice, how much worse it will be. It's a fortiori type of argument. Jesus is saying, if I suffer this much when I am innocent, how much more are you going to suffer who are guilty?

So Christian anti-Semitism has nothing to do with this situation, it has to do with what the consequences are in time and in history for the Jewish rejection of Jesus as Messiah. And what we know is when an individual rejects Jesus as the Savior he is condemned already because, the as John says in John 3:18, they have not believed in Jesus the Son of God. That is the issue in the gospel. It's not good works, it's not how religious you are; the issue is simply belief in Jesus Christ as Savior.

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