The Scourging of Jesus: Love Displayed Through Suffering

Over the past few days, we have been reflecting on Jesus' appearances before Herod and Pilate. Pilate declared Jesus not guilty, but the priests and elders refused to accept this verdict and continued to demand Jesus' crucifixion (John 18:38-39). Then, Pilate offered the crowd a choice between Jesus and a notorious insurrectionist and murderer named Barabbas. They chose Barabbas over Christ, and both Matthew and John recorded that, after Barabbas was freed, Pilate had Jesus flogged (Matthew 27:26).

¹Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. ²The soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head. They clothed him in a purple robe ³and went up to him again and again, saying, "Hail, king of the Jews!" And they slapped him in the face. ⁴Once more Pilate came out and said to the Jews gathered there, "Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no basis for a charge against him." ⁵When Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, Pilate said to them, "Here is the man!" (John 19:1-5).

Luke wrote that Pilate's reason for flogging Jesus was to pacify the Jews. "Therefore, I will punish him and then release him" (Luke 23:16). Pilate hoped that the scourging of Christ's back would evoke some sympathy and mercy for this innocent Man and satisfy the mob's bloodlust when they saw Jesus. Roman scourging was called "the halfway death" because it was meant to stop just short of death and was not supposed to be paired with another punishment. The two "thieves" who were also to be crucified were not scourged. A Jewish law, the Mithah Arikhta, prohibited extending death for condemned criminals and exempted those destined to die from the shame of being scourged. Since Jewish and Roman laws were ignored in Christ's punishment, Jesus, who was innocent, was treated worse than a common criminal.

Flogging or scourging was a brutal way to inflict pain on a man. Jesus' back would have been stretched across a whipping post so He could not move, while two men on either side prepared themselves by selecting the implements of scourging. Roman scourging took three main forms. The first was the fustes, a light beating with strips of leather given as a warning. The second was the flagella, a more severe beating. The third was the verbera, a brutal flogging with a whip made of several leather thongs with pieces of metal or bone tied at the ends. Pastor Chuck Smith explains that the victim was expected to confess his crime with each strike of the whip. If the person shouted out one of his sins, the lictor (the one administering the scourging) would lessen the punishment until, in the end, only the leather strap was used. However, this easing didn't happen with Jesus, because He had no sins to confess, and just as Isaiah prophesied over five hundred years earlier, “as a sheep before its shearers is silent, He did not open His mouth” (Isaiah 53:7).

The silence of Christ and the absence of any confession of sin would have led the lictors to use the harshest form of scourging, the verbera. This kind of scourging would tear pieces of skin off His back and leave Him with bone and entrails exposed. The prophet, King David, prophetically saw this and wrote in the book of Psalms: "All my bones are on display; people stare and gloat over me" (Psalms 22:17). The Gospels do not tell us how many times they whipped Jesus, but the Apostle Paul had thirty-nine lashes on five different occasions (2 Corinthians 11:24). Tradition has it that this was so with Jesus as well.

That Jesus was willing to take our sin upon Himself and have it nailed to the cross proves His great love for us. “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). Keith Thomas.

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The YouTube teaching on this topic is on the link following: https://youtu.be/1ZQ637TPnCM

The written study #38 is found in John’s Gospel: 38. Jesus Sentenced to be Crucified