Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

You never know when something embarrassing will happen to you.

We are constantly on guard, for we do not like to be humiliated.

Mrs.

Howard Field was walking to a near by funeral home for the funeral of an old acquaintance when she saw an Easter bonnet that caught her eye.

She went in and purchased it.

She felt it was improper to carry it into the chapel, so she asked an usher to take care of it for her.

You can imagine her dismay when she saw it being placed on the coffin with the flowers.

At the grave site she hoped to recover it, but she was too embarrassed to do anything, and so she watched her new Spring hat lowered into the ground.

She hardly knew the woman being buried, but she was weeping as sincerely as the immediate family.

Her embarrassment was real but hidden.

In other situations we cannot hide, and we are embarrassed by what is beyond our control.

The poet gives an example:

I sat next to the Bishop at tea;

It was just as I feared it would be.

His rumblings abdominal

Were simply phenomenal,

And everyone thought it was me.

Then there are the deliberate efforts to get a laugh at the expense of others.

It can be funny to embarrass others.

This is the motive behind roasts and many other types of humor.

We do this frequently as men.

It is part of our sense of humor.

Sometimes it borders on the cruel, however.

For example, Bernard Shaw was browsing in a secondhand book shop when he found a copy of one of his own books peeping out at him from a dusty shelf.

He looked at the inside cover and found it was an autographed copy he had given to a friend.

He bought his own book just so he could return it to the friend with these words on the flyleaf- "With renewed compliments of Bernard Shaw."

You can imagine the embarrassment of the friend.

The desire to humble another can be just good fun, and when people are friends it can be good for a laugh, even for the one embarrassed.

But there is also sadistic side of this that we see dominating the whole scene of the trial of Jesus.

John chapter 19 is just one embarrassing scene after another as the church and state try to manipulate each other by means of humiliation.

Pilate represents the state.

He is the power of Rome, the secular Gentile state.

In the other corner of the ring are the chief priests and officials of Israel.

They are the church, or the religious establishment in the legal conflict over the issue if Jesus is worthy of being sentenced to death.

It is one of the greatest paradoxes of history that the state tried hard to release Jesus, but the religious leaders would not let the state do what was just, but used the power of humiliation to compel Pilate to send Jesus to the cross.

Let me share with you the clear facts of this great paradox of that pagan secular state trying to do the right thing, but the clever religious people thwarted justice, and manipulated the state to join them in the evil plot to officially murder the only perfectly innocent man who ever lived.

Pilate was a pagan, but he knew when a man was innocent, and he knew Jesus was just such a man.

In fact, the Gospels tell us Pilate acknowledged seven times that Jesus was innocent.

We see three of them in our text.

In verse 4 Pilate said to the Jews, "Look, I am bringing Him out to you to let you know that I find no basis for a charge against Him."

In verse 6 he says it again, "As for me, I find no basis for a charge against Him."

In verse 12 we read, "Pilate tried to set Jesus free."

The Gospels confirm that Pilate found no fault in Jesus, and that he did seek to release Him.

Even his own wife had a dream about Jesus and warned Pilate not to sentence Him.

He tried every trick in the book to set Jesus free.

He even gave the people a choice to let Barabbas or Jesus go free.

He thought for sure they would choose Jesus rather than a known violent killer, but they did not.

The record is clear, Jesus was killed by religious people and not secular people.

The religious leaders forced Pilate to give the order to Crucify Jesus.

They embarrassed him into it.

Here were the people who had the promise of God to have a Messiah sent to them, and they demanded that the state put this Messiah to death.

There is no guarantee that in a conflict between the religious and secular that the religious will always be right and the secular wrong.

Pilate was a pagan but he was right.

Jesus was innocent of any crime.

So why did he give in and sentence Jesus to death?

It was because of the clever minds of the Jewish leaders.

They knew that Pilate dreaded the thought of being embarrassed before the Emperor Tiberius Caesar.

It would be humiliating to have Caesar get a report that he had let a rival king live when the Jews were clamoring for His death in order to be loyal to Caesar.

Caesar was touchy about rivals as most tyrants are, and Pilate would feel more comfortable standing before him naked than with the charge against Him that He was a traitor in supporting a rival ruler.

The Jews knew this and they shout in verse 12, "If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar.

Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar.

These hypocrites hated Caesar and would gladly see an opponent take his throne, but they knew this threat would be more than Pilate could defy.

They were right, and Pilate was humiliated into handing Jesus over to be crucified.

He played by their dirty rules to the end, however.

Even knowing Jesus was innocent, he had Him flogged and mocked, and presented to the Jews as a pathetic king.

He hoped to embarrass them by mocking their fear of Jesus.

In verse 5 Pilate brings Jesus out to the Jews looking so pathetic with His crown of thorns and purple robe, and he says, "Here is the man!"

He was saying that here is the man you so fear.

He is really dangerous looking isn't He?

No wonder you want Him dead so bad.

He is so fierce and threatening.

But his plan did not work.

They were too cold hearted to slink away in embarrassment.

Pilate could not embarrass them to back off their plot.

They were harder-hearted than himself, and he gave in instead.

But he got in the last punch in this battle to embarrass.

Verse 19 says Pilate had a notice fastened to the cross that read, "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews."

The Jewish leaders protested, but Pilate would not give in on this, and he said, "What I have written I have written."

They were embarrassed by the message that they were killing their own king, but they went ahead in spite of it.

Here is another paradox.

The Jews were as determined to get Jesus to the cross as He was determined to get there.

Jesus had set His face steadfastly to get to the cross, and not all the power of Satan and evil men combined could make Him swerve from this path.

But those who despised and rejected Him had the same goal, and they were equally determined.

They would not let their law or Roman law stand in their way.

Compassion and justice meant nothing to them.

They were hard as steel, and nothing could stop them from getting Jesus to the cross.

The paradox is, you have the forces of evil and the forces of good aiming for the same goal, which was the cross.

Can evil and good have the same goal?

Of course they can.

We see it all the time.

In every election we see good people and evil people fighting for the same candidate.

Even the Mafia wants a certain candidate to win, for they feel he is more likely to benefit them.

The drug dealers and pimps vote for someone too, for they feel that someone will be to their advantage.

Good and godly people can want the same candidate to win also, but for very different reasons, but both have the same goal and can be out supporting the same man.

The fight for freedom can mean freedom of religion, freedom of the press, but also freedom to use drugs, or practice anti-social behavior, and so forces for freedom to do good or evil have the same goal.

So we see Jesus and His opponents aiming for the same target-the cross.

Their motives are radically different, of course.

Jesus is going to the cross because that is the only way He can atone for man's sin and reconcile man to God.

The Jews want Jesus on the cross to get Him out of their hair so they can go on with their legalistic religion that enables them to manipulate people.