Behold the Man in the Crown of Thorns

While Peter cried outside in the dark, the leaders marched Jesus across Jerusalem to the palace of Pilate, the Roman governor. Pilate questioned him and found nothing wrong. He offered to set Jesus free for the Passover feast, but the crowd shouted for a robber named Barabbas instead.

So Pilate had Jesus whipped.

Then the soldiers made up a game. They twisted thorny branches into a crown and pushed it down on his head. They threw a purple robe over his shoulders. (Purple dye cost so much in those days that mostly kings wore it. This robe was a costume for a joke.) One by one they came up to him and bowed.

"Hail, King of the Jews!" they said, and they hit him in the face.

Jesus stood still and did not hit back.

Pilate brought him out to the crowd, still wearing the thorns and the purple robe. "I am bringing him out so you know I find nothing wrong with him," Pilate said. "Behold the man!" (Behold is an old word for look.)

But when the chief priests saw Jesus, they shouted, "Crucify! Crucify!"

"You take him and crucify him," said Pilate. "I find nothing wrong with him."

"We have a law," they answered, "and by our law he must die, because he said he is the Son of God."

When Pilate heard that, he was more afraid than ever. He took Jesus back inside. (The leaders would not step inside a Roman's house that day. If they did, the law would count them unclean, and they could not share in the feast. So Pilate had to keep walking out to them.)

"Where do you come from?" Pilate asked.

Jesus said nothing.

"You won't speak to me?" said Pilate. "Don't you know I have power to set you free, or to crucify you?"

"You would have no power over me at all," Jesus said, "if it had not been given to you from above."

After that Pilate kept trying to let him go. But the leaders found the one thing that scared Pilate more. Caesar was the emperor in Rome, and Pilate worked for him. "If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar!" they shouted. "Anyone who calls himself a king is against Caesar!"

So Pilate brought Jesus out one more time and sat down on his judge's seat, at a place paved with stones. The crowd outside had grown bigger and louder.

"Here is your king," Pilate said.

"Take him away! Take him away! Crucify him!"

"Shall I crucify your king?"

"We have no king but Caesar!" the chief priests answered. (These were the men in charge of the temple, where God's people sang, "The LORD is King!")

Then Pilate handed Jesus over to be crucified.

The soldiers meant their crown as a joke. But thorns have a long story in the Bible. When Adam and Eve first turned away from God, God told Adam that the ground would grow thorns and thistles. Ever since, thorns have scratched farmers' hands, a mark of everything that went wrong with the world.

Now the King who made the world stood in Pilate's yard with those thorns pushed onto his head. Jesus could have walked out. Pilate's power was only lent to him from above, and Jesus knew who had lent it. He let them hand him over because he had come to carry the world's thorns away, all the way to the cross.

Pilate said "Here is your king" to mock the crowd, and it was true. Here was their King.