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We have been looking at the symbols of the cross during this season. Like the symbols of the rest of the Christian message, these symbols are cumulative. When we put them all together, we see something of the full message of Jesus. The first symbol is the palms which represent the fickleness of the crowd whose Palm Sunday commitment became dry and dead like the palm branches on our cross by the end of the week. The money bag symbolizes on one level greed and on another level the attempt to manipulate Jesus into a different role as Messiah than the one which Jesus understood his role to be. The third symbol, the towel, represents the idea of service. Today we take up another symbol, the crown of thorns and the mockery of Jesus.

In addition to the physical pain and suffering of the cross and the events leading up to the cross that Jesus faced, he also had to endure the rejection, hatred, and mockery of others: Peter denied him. Judas betrayed him. Some disciples fled and others kept their distance. The religious leaders through Caiphas expressed their venom toward Jesus by orchestrating his arrest, trial, and conviction. The political establishment through Pilate played head games with him. And the soldiers mocked him. They formed a crown out of thorns, placed that purple robe around him, and gave him a reed as a scepter. Then they said, "Hail, Jesus, King of the Jews."

What is involved in the act of mockery?

Mockery is a way of dealing with boredom on one level. Mockery can lead to great mischief. Much inhumanity and injustice has been perpetuated throughout history because of boredom. I can imagine that the Roman soldiers found themselves with a great deal of time on their hands waiting around for things to happen. A Roman soldier assigned to the land of Palestine was on the edge of the empire and had a lot of time on his hands. The soldiers played games while they waited for something to happen. In this case the Roman soldiers filled their boredom with mockery of Jesus. It was just one more game they were playing.

Mockery is one way of keeping the truth at arm's length. We mock what we don't understand. And mockery keeps us from understanding what we ought to understand. And if we don't understand, we don't have to deal with that which we mock. We protect ourselves. We can stay away from life-changing truth. The Roman soldiers certainly did not want to deal with some of the deeper issues of life with which they were confronted by the very presence of Jesus and the claims about him.

Mockery is a way of showing off one's supposed superior status. We are trying to place ourselves in a superior relationship to those whom we mock. Often we do this when in the secret recesses of our lives we actually feel worthless or inferior. Bullies taunt others because at their very heart, they don't feel that good about themselves. They put others down to raise themselves. The Roman soldiers who were assigned to the Palestine contingent were at the bottom of the pecking order. They made themselves feel higher on the ladder by putting down this man Jesus who stood before them. How could he be any kind of king? They'd show the rest. Hail, Jesus, King of the Jews.

Putting a crown of thorns on Jesus was an act of mockery on the part of the soldiers. They acted as if they could make Jesus king as long as they wanted him to be king, and then just as easily take his kingship away. Notice that the soldiers put the crown of thorns and the purple cloak on Jesus and they put the scepter in Jesus' hand. Then they took them all away, as if they had the power to enthrone and dethrone Jesus.

But the interesting thing is that they were right about Jesus in spite of themselves. He was a king, but not the kind of king they were thinking of. He was a king, but not the kind of king they could make or break as they desired. Jesus' kingdom is a kingdom that encompasses this world but also transcends it and a kingdom that operates by a far different set of rules.

We make a mockery of Jesus' kingship in our own lives when we assert Jesus' kingship with our lips but deny his kingship with our lives.

We have a hard time imagining that we could join the soldiers in mocking Jesus. We say to ourselves, we wouldn't have done that. We wouldn't mock Jesus by putting a purple robe on him and a crown of thorns on his head and cynically calling him king. But don't we do something very similar by asserting Jesus' kingship with words but denying him with how we live?

That's what makes walking through this season of Lent with Jesus to the cross so difficult. We think we're rather good people, we're nice people, we don't harm anyone, and we try to do all the good we can, but the goodness of Jesus stands before us and mirrors our lives in such a way that we see how short we have fallen. But the message is not to end on a cynical note. The message all along the way is that we see ourselves in these symbols. We see how we are fickle, and how we too are greedy and would like Jesus to play a different role than the one he has come into our lives with. We see how we would like to avoid the servant role and how much in one way or another we mock Jesus in our own lives by the disparity between what we claim and how we live. The message is that once we see this and admit where we are and who we are, then God's grace can begin to operate in our lives. It's serendipitous once in a while that God's grace and love do break into our lives and we do things that naturally we would not do and we hold back from doing the things we should not do. May God's grace come to us fully through the symbols of the cross so we are empowered for the ministry to which he calls us. Amen.