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SUBJECT: 09. Chapter 9: Christ Being Mocked Upon the Prophetic Mountain
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C H A P T E R N I N E
Christ Being Mocked Upon the Prophetic Mountain
Then did they spit in his face, and buffeted him, and others smote him with the palms of their hands saying, Prophesy unto us, thou Christ, Who is he that smote thee?
—Mat_26:67-68.
CHRIST has been given the death sentence. Now He is made the butt of mockery. From this is evident the decay of a period which luxuriates in the fruitlessness of its vicious circle. And from this is evident also the complete and awful character of sinfulness of any life that is lived outside of God.
Surely, to send Christ to His death is to do a very big thing. Only one response is becoming to a so formidable event: profound reverence, and a complete crushing of the judges who were condemned, yes, elected and constrained, to take the place of God for the day. For that, after all, is the role of Israel’s judges. They have their appointment from above. It was the will of the living God that placed them in the seat of the judge, and issued to them the mandate: go out and do God’s work; let God’s voice move over Israel’s threshing floor through your mouths. That is the first condition which limits them. They carry the keys of God. The are still office-bearers and, accordingly, they work under the pressure of the word: Whatsoever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven—provided that your binding and your loosing is a genuine response to the command of God from whom you have your commission.
But there is also a second reason for active mourning and for an attitude expressive of the high and awful seriousness of life. They have just sent someone to his death. That is always a terrible thing. It means surrendering a man from a life of “becoming” to a state of eternal, immutable “being.” It means the letting go of a man who still moves in a world of opportunity for improvement into a state which assures his stumbling into another world of certain evil. It means taking a man out of the range of human sight, which is still able to see in him a possible elect person of God. To put a man to death is to give expression to the certainty that this man can be none but a reprobate.
Now this sublime seriousness of the event of the day should have impressed the Sanhedrin with all the solemnity of its significance. Looking up, the members of the Sanhedrin preach a life which is forever immutable; looking down they portion out unchangeable death. They give Jesus into Satan’s hands, but before they do so they claim that their hands while delivering Him up have been tremulously placed in the hand of God. It is God, therefore, who through their agency, is delivering Him into Satan’s hands. They themselves are servants, mere servants, who, like the rest of mankind, can live by grace alone.
If Israel’s judges had appreciated the burden of their office they would have pulled down the curtains of their session hall as a token of mourning because of the sentence which God had exacted from them. But the truth reveals itself in all of its naked actuality; they literally laugh the seriousness of the occasion out of court. They make fools of themselves. Hardly had Caiaphas pronounced the sentence before the tension which the Sanhedrin has felt recedes and a gruesome drama of mockery and defiance takes the floor.
Such is their sentence . . . Had the Sanhedrin sensed the burden of the high responsibility of its office and the tenseness caused by the relationship existing between God and it, that sense of responsibility and awesome pressure would have remained after it had reached a conclusion also. For God is ever placing man in an atmosphere freighted with significance and responsibility.
But that which had made the Sanhedrin feel depressed was not, of course, the presence of God. No finger had written a sinister script upon their wall, as it had once in the house of Belshazzar. But God’s finger had once written the law on tables of stone — yes, such a story was told in the history books. However, that was long ago. Come, get up now, and have your fun at the expense of the fate of Joshua of Nazareth.
The old gentlemen do get up from their places. They have their fun, and at the expense of the Nazarene. Look: they spit in His face. A symbol of defiance, a token which spoke a language very well known to the Jews (Num_12:14; Deu_25:9; Isa_50:6; Job_30:10). Besides, they strike Jesus with their fists. For, according to the meaning of the original text of these various reports, this beating was not merely a slapping with the open hand but nothing less than brutal fisticuffing. Now to beat a man with one’s fists was in the estimation of the Jews to give expression to a token of utter scorn (see Mat_5:39). To these methods for giving vent to their mockery, furthermore, they add the spoken word by way of lashing His spirit and His soul. First they blindfold Jesus. Then the worthy gentlemen make their approach, accompanied after a while by the house-servants and slaves who are gradually growing less reticent and shy. They step up to Jesus, strike Him on the face, and then, grinning maliciously, say: Come now, prophesy unto us: who was it that just gave you the lusty blow? They dance around Jesus, mocking His prophet’s name and His prophet’s calling. They have at times observed that the Nazarene was referred to as a “great prophet arisen among us, with whom God has visited His people.” One of the titles given Him by popular usage was that of “the Prophet.” Besides, He Himself had just prophesied about His future. To all this now, to the people and to the people’s prophet, they take exception by resorting to the device of caricature. Let this latest pretender to prophecy say, if He can, who it was that just struck Him. What, you say He cannot see the fellow? But prophets are supposed to see what ordinary mortals cannot see.
You see that prophecy is being identified here with a kind of knack for making predictions. The illuminating function of God’s prophets is identified with something which amounts to little more than fortune telling. According to this pitiable notion of it, to prophesy means simply to light flickering little flames in those places which the sun never reaches. But of that misinterpretation of the role of prophecy these mockers take no note. They are not susceptible to suggestions such as these.
But there, in that other world, Christ Himself is watchful and alert. Accordingly, all this constituted appalling suffering for Him. Again the physical and the spiritual suffering go hand in hand. Yes, He is wounded in the body; the slapping, the fisticuffing hurt Him. But He suffered especially in His soul, for Christ is being mocked while He stands upon the mountain of prophecy.
What is meant by this prophetic mountain, you ask? That can be indicated. Its contour is very clearly outlined. God, who is the Father of all illumination, had established a high mountain of prophecy in Israel. Today Christ is standing upon it. He is standing upon its peak. All other prophets by whom God spoke to the fathers stood on levels below that which He now occupies. None of these spoke the whole truth. None had succeeded in pushing the heavy load of prophecy to the very top of the hill of the prophets. True, they climbed high, very high, but none scaled the peak. They were born on the mountain’s declivity, and on its slope they were buried.
Now Christ stands in the presence of the Sanhedrin. Christ is the chief Prophet. In Him God’s speaking is fulfilled. In Christ, His prophet, God reaches the peak of prophecy. In His Son who is fully and completely man, God scaled the top.
Now as Christ stands there at the apex of that prophetic mountain, just after He has been pronouncing that full-bodied prophecy which succeeded in placing Himself and His judges under the full illumination of God’s sun, and which related the place where He stood to the Ancient of Days, and to the immovable kingdom of Daniel 7—now that highly prophetic mountain in Israel is cut down to the level of the plain of Moab. Remember, this is done not by the Romans nor by the pagans but by the chief officers among His own people. They take the tension out of the atmosphere, they release a smoke-screen to hide the sun. After all, the sun can be very annoying at times. They reduce the prophecy of the mountain top to the fortune telling in the valley of superstitious folk. They set up their establishment on the peak towards which many centuries have made wearisome progress. That establishment is nothing but a fortune-telling grotto. In it they demand that Christ prove that He is master of the trick of saying who struck Him last. Such conduct indicates that they identified the pure atmosphere surrounding the peak of God’s prophetic mountain with the dank, disgusting stench pervading the grottos of the fortune tellers and magicians of the plain.
It is for this reason that this particular piece of mockery is to he differentiated from that which overtook the Saviour later in the palace of Pilate, and also from that with which He was afflicted on the hill of the cross. True, after Pilate’s sentence also, Jesus was mocked. Simply recall to mind the crown of thorns. And He was made the butt of mockery again in Herod’s presence. You remember the gorgeous robe. Moreover, He was mocked even as He hung on the cross itself. Remember the jest-prompted summoning of Elijah, and the way in which the people abused Jesus’ maschil —His breaking down and His rebuilding of the temple.
Each time that mockery recurs, it occupies a different, a unique position in the gospel of the passion. First it is Israel that mocks Him; next the world of heathendom; then the false brother; and finally it is the company of all these together. Israel first: the Sanhedrin, judges and servants both. Heathendom next: the soldiers of Pilate, prompted to do so by Pilate himself; in other words, the servants and their patrons. After that the false brother: Herod, who traces his lineage to Edom, that is, to Esau, Jacob’s pursuer from long ago even to the present time. And finally, these all acting as a unit mocked Him, when all those who stood around the cross joined in defying the Christ.
Therefore we say that the mockery which Jesus has to endure in the presence of the Sanhedrin occupies a unique place in the account of the passion. He is standing upon the mountain of prophecy. While there He is being degraded by His own people. He was humiliated by this mockery because the prophecy which in Him reached the highest possible point of knowledge was identified with the drab caricatures which fortune tellers used in trifling with God’s name, with God’s pellucid truth, and with God’s messianic, prophetic mission. Need we ask whether Christ suffered because of this humiliation? Hardly. We have already observed that Christ Himself, even in the presence of the Sanhedrin, left His maschil unexplained precisely in order that it might never be His fault if the world should convert His most sacred mysteries into an idle game, a curiosity,[1] an entr’acte in its carnival of vanity.
[1] See chapter 5, p. 104 ff.
However, in spite of the fact that Christ, to the extent that He could, purposely kept the holy mysteries of messianic dignity from becoming the idle games of false caricaturists, He was not spared this suffering. They mocked the most awesome and most profound function of His life; they converted His office into a joke. Therefore we can say that the stinging mockery contained in the “Prophesy, prophesy . . .” is grievously painful to the spirit of this Son of man; as painful, indeed, as the nails will be presently when they penetrate His palms.
The fact that in this same hour a lost cock once crowed, and that it had to crow because God wrenched the creature’s beak wide open in order that what Christ as a prophet had foretold to Simon Peter might be demonstrated — that fact no one understood, and that cock no one heard. Nevertheless such crowing would have been a fitting answer to the brutal question-and-answer game which the Sanhedrin was conducting, for it would have become apparent from this that Christ could prophesy about heaven and about a cock under heaven. Had He not beforehand governed the crowing of that cock and had He not pronounced this prophecy concerning the cock while He was in a condition of unmistakable communion with the Almighty God? Which is the easier: to say Judah ben Zadok is the man who just struck me, or to say that in this exact hour, after this particular statement of this specific person, the cock will crow? Which is the easier: to know who was laughing just now or to control the omnipotent and omnipresent power of God which can open a cock’s beak at precisely the preappointed time? For to do this last thing is to perform a miracle greater than to cause a comet to come, or to stop the sun in its course at Joshua’s behest.
However, you need ask no questions today, O Nazarene. The time has passed in which you can put those disarming questions: Which is the easier? Pray, who would take note of a cock now, crowing somewhere in the distance? The Word is within you, and is hidden there.
Things are still thus in the world. Men ask for proof of the fact that Christ is the Prophet, the preacher of truth, the great light. And indeed the proof is there; we are next to it; there is nothing between us and it — but there is none to see the evidence.
By nature there is not one who can see it. Who, indeed, would look for the will of God in the phenomenon of a crowing cock?
The one thing needful for us, therefore, in view of this, is to find the Surety for our soul. What will it profit us to condemn the world by saying that it is the equivalent of the Sanhedrin if we do not find Him who is able to consume our condemnation? What good does it do us to condemn the Sanhedrin, to exhaust our imaginations in an effort to find words fit to curse the folly of this High Council? Can scathing attack save us? Would we not be the more guilty the more we should, while scurrilously maligning the Sanhedrin, think ourselves superior to those mockers? As though, indeed, our flesh would have acted differently under the circumstances than theirs!
No, their work is ours. Hence it is unbecoming to us to throw the penetrating rays of caustic censorship upon the Sanhedrin. For we ourselves must sense and experience the criticism which God exercises upon all flesh when He issues His summons from the top of the prophetic mountain. Whoever has been made sensitive to the truth of that will begin to ask: Show me my Surety; point Him out to me, even as He is in the mockery which He must suffer on His prophetic mountain. He, then, who finds His Surety will discover Him precisely in those most excruciating of afflictions. Attend once more to the Form for the Lord’s Supper: “. . . where He was bound that we might be freed from our sins; that He afterwards suffered innumerable reproaches, that we might never be confounded.”
This points us to the essence of the matter. For Christ, having been mocked on the peak of the mount of all prophecy, in the place, that is, of perfect relevance, of perfect seriousness, of the awful tension of God and of the angels, is now to be defied. In other words, He is treated as though He stood outside of the atmosphere of high seriousness. He is dressed in the motley garb of a harlequin, the garb in which the world in its odd sense of humor puts its friends and especially its foes.
By mocking Jesus in this manner the Sanhedrin is putting Jesus outside of the pale of law. Christ against Christ the outlaw. He is placed outside of the sphere, outside of the domain, outside of the wall and of the gate of that province of law whose boundaries have been fixed by God’s covenant choice. Men may treat Him as they please. He is no longer acknowledged as having any rights in Israel.
We know that He had been thus rejected from the circumference of law before. This took place when the servant, in the presence of Annas, struck Him. Now His judges do the same thing. When the servant struck Him, he was, from an official point of view, doing so against the law, for he did it before a charge had been lodged against Jesus. But now the judges themselves attack Jesus. The charge has been filed, and now they say: Thou blasphemer of God and of the highest authorities, thou who permittest the storm of blasphemy to beat against the mountain of prophecy, we thrust thee out of the domain of law. As far as we are concerned, people may do with thee as they please. Philistine, the Samsons are upon thee.
Note that this time it is a legal act which puts Jesus outside of the sphere of ethical law. The game of mockery which ensues upon that act is its logical sequel. For what is mockery, downright mockery at bottom but the act of putting the subject of its jest outside of the domain of law? What is it but to say by word of mouth and to confirm by the act that the object of the mockery is irrelevant to righteousness, and that truth cannot assume a serious demeanor over against it?
There is an awful harmony here: on the one hand, the spitting, the buffeting, the blows; on the other, the mockery of the statement: Prophesy, and tell us who gave you that stinging blow. Observe that two elements are active here, the act and the word. The act of the jeering crowd greets Christ as the outlaw, as the man unaffected by law. And the word of that same crowd proclaims that He is the outlaw — one gasping for air, and finally dying, outside of the sphere of law. For mockery, simon-pure mockery when it is unmixed with tears, is simply a denial of seriousness.
In the whole world there is but one power which can give things the character of a high seriousness. That power is God’s Word of law, the law according to which God and the world are differentiated from eternity, but according to which God and the world are also placed in relationship to each other in conformity with His will and according to His sovereign good pleasure. In the final analysis, it is according to that law that each thing in His eternal good pleasure takes its place and has its unique meaning.
In terms of this law everything has its own meaning, yes. Strictly taken, there is no such thing as vanity. Fiction and the idol only are vain. Even idolatry is not vanity. For all that exists in reality has either preserved its harmony with the law, is kicking against the pricks of the law, or is included in the struggle of the great “Yea” and “Nay” which is going on before God, the law, and the Word. Hence, when someone begins to mock, his mockery, if it is pure, becomes an act of brutality. Mockery then becomes a cruel defiance, for it denies someone his rights over against God and the universe. Virtually one regards the person who runs the gauntlet of mockery as one who belongs to the vanities of life. One classifies him with the idols and we all know that an idol amounts to nothing.
Inevitable, logical mockery numbers its victim among the exgods — the figurative language is taken from the Bible itself. All mockery which is unmingled with ingredients of wrath and love, and which has not sprung from the source of truth, calls its victim Belial, Belial![1] And that means: good-for-nothing, idler, one to whom God even pays no attention, taugenichts.
Now that is the way the Sanhedrin addresses Christ Jesus. On the mountain of prophecy it cries aloud: What, thou a Messiah? Thou! Nay, but thou art Belial, an empty vessel, a worthless one.
[1] Compare my Tusschen “Ja” en “Neen” Kampen, J. H. Kok, p. 32 ft
We are the ones who do the mocking. We do it; and they call us the most respectable in Israel. Know this, that our mocking is a luxury reserved for judges. It is an exaggerated but a significant mockery. We refuse to say, Hail, Messiah! We say only, Belial, good-for-nothing, unhappy caprice of the Will which for the rest created the world. We call you Belial and ask, What fellowship hath Christ (Messiah) with Belial?
Thus the Sanhedrin. And, really, what fellowship is there between Christ and Belial? Paul can ask that question everywhere and at every time. Gamaliel can. Caiaphas can. And Nicodemus. And we all.
We said a moment ago that simon-pure mockery, as soon as it places someone outside of the domain of law, becomes defiant.
Mockery and defiance are not identical. Between the two lies the dimension of law. As long as mockery is mixed with seriousness and as long as it seeks a relation to truth, consciously or unconsciously, it still acknowledges that a person resides within the circle of divine law. But defiance drives its victims outside of that circle and does this fully conscious of the fact that it is doing so.
Hence we must discriminate carefully if we are to determine whether mockery in a given instance is still compatible with God’s holiness, love and justice, or whether by approximating defiance it breaks the bond which relates it to God’s justice and law.
We can say in general that mockery as such does not necessarily represent a defiance of God or even of man. Mockery which sets itself up on the basis of reality has the merit of calling things by their real names. That frequently gives it a comic effect; this comic effect may not issue from the mockery itself, but, in part at least, from the persons who listen to or observe the mocker. Then, too, the tendency towards the comical can sometimes arise from the fact that it calls those people by their real names who have never wanted to be known by them. Mockery can present a man who is a giant in his own eyes as the puny dwarf which he actually is. A prophet presuming unctuously holy endeavor can be presented by the caricaturists in all the meagerness of his spirit and the lethargy of his intelligence within which he activistically and officiously bobs back and forth; his confines are limited, he never undertakes competition in the great arena of the spirit. Again, a man who gets up on the high pedestal of philanthropy can be revealed by the mocker as one who makes himself obtrusive as a stickler for his own precious prophet. Such people immediately become the objects of mockery. Hence, if the mocker does not distort the truth, or wrench the ratio of overstatement and understatement out of proportion, he can be of service and his mockery can remain compatible with the holiness of God. His caricaturing is then a demonstration of truth; it is a rent torn straight through the mask of hypocrisy. It is the water which seeps through the bottom of the dyke, the firm dyke which was to protect the lowland of our smug self-satisfaction or of our unpardonable arrogance against the high tide of common sense, honesty, and integrity.
On the other hand, however, mockery can just as easily become a weapon in the hands of an undeserving one. If in such cases, this weapon causes wounds which cannot be healed because the poison of the mocker has introduced gangrene into them; the fault lies not in the weapon of mockery, but in the soul of him who manipulates it. Therefore, we can still say that in spiritual struggles mockery need not necessarily be evil. We know that God is Himself presented in the Bible as a Mocker. We read that He laughs because of the folly of men. Now when heaven laughs, when God mocks, because of the feverish and activistic folly of men, His mockery always represents a holy revelation of that concealed truth which the world simply would not countenance. We shall say nothing further about these considerations because they have been discussed incidentally before this. Hence if we were to pass judgment upon this or that instance of mockery, we should not be governed by whether or not it gives expression to the truth. It is not enough for the mocker to call things by their true names. The only important question is whether the mocking arises from a heart which is itself in direct relationship to truth. In this consideration, surely lies the difference between the mockery of God and the defiance of men. Among men the difference between mockery and defiance can never be exactly designated. Neither is found in a pure condition in the human heart. Human mockery is always mixed with other ingredients. Hence it will always be fraught with danger — especially with danger to the mocker himself. Yes, he will often, while mocking, be speaking the truth. But if the sin which dwells in his own heart has not yet been consumed he is, to the extent that such sin in his bosom still contributes to the mockery arising there, in principle like the devil. The devil also tells truths about others. But he himself is not in the truth. We know that he does not desire it but despises it. He is that devil who refers the standards of law to others but not to himself. Hence he does not always maintain the whole of the relationship of all power and of all created beings to the law of God. He uses the law arbitrarily. He plays off the idea of the lawless one against the word of the lawgiver, and vice versa, and he does this in whatever way pleases him most. Accordingly, his diabolical mockery may be a sneering declaration of “a” truth, but it can never be a complete maintenance of “the” truth. He never draws up his position together with the victim of his mockery under the arc of the holy justice of the Lord.
Not so the living God. In Him, to mock is always more than to tell the truth; it is also a full maintenance of the truth. God’s mockery in every respect acknowledges the law which He has laid down for man and for every creature. The arc of that law is never bent in such a way as to put anyone, even though he be the devil, outside of its circumference. We can say, therefore, that God never recognizes such an entity as the “outlaw.” That is the great, the infinite, the fundamental difference between divine mockery and human defiance. Why do the heavens laugh, and why does God mock? Because He places over against the false front of sin the truth of reality, and this He never does without simultaneously proclaiming and maintaining alongside of the contrast between appearance and reality that other and abiding antithesis between good and evil. God’s mockery never sees its object as being independent of law. Hence it is never satisfied by merely pointing out the pigmy stature of a man who had counted himself among the giants on the earth. At that point human mockery generally stops. It delineates the contours of folly in its victim, but it does not raise the issue of guilt either in itself or in him. Such human mockery is conceived and born independent of a clear vision of the great lawgiver and outside of the circumference of the revealed law. Very often the person mocked escapes in the eyes of the mocker, and very often the mocker in the eyes of God escapes from the absolute demands of God.
Now you can see our purpose in raising these considerations. We want to point to the fact that the mockery carried on by Israel degraded itself to the diabolical level when it placed Christ, who is the lawgiver, and who Himself bears the law in His bowels, outside the sphere of law. Ecce homo, behold the man. Thus said Pilate. Ecce exlex, behold the man for whom God would not trouble Himself to place a finger upon a stone tablet, or to write down one memorandum in His journal. Thus say the Jews.
In this way, then, their defiance becomes diabolical. They change the boundaries of the domain of law in order that they may escape from the terror of the thought that to do so is utterly impossible. They manipulate the law as they please; for he who plays with law makes himself the target of its arrows. He who thrusts another outside of the domain of law, places himself above it. As if he could . . . This is the last resort of a man who is defending himself against the Chief Lawgiver, but who is unwilling to admit even to himself that he is merely toying in his effort to escape from his dread.
In this, accordingly, inheres the difference between the mockery of the Jews and that of God. God too knows what it is to laugh, to laugh a holy laughter, but God in His laughing never recognizes such a thing as an outlaw. He does the opposite. He makes the law binding upon every object of His sublime mocking. Even though all heaven seems to rock with raillery because of our derailment, still that very same sublime laughter of God (Psalms 2) points us to the fact that the signals of the two tables of law which God gave could have kept the coach of our life from meeting with this disaster. God’s mockery always brings the law to bear upon the matter, is ever reaching out for the law, never intervenes unless accompanied by the law. He is, to the extent that He reveals Himself to us, the last remedy: He seizes upon the emasculator of law for his life’s sake: He brings the law to bear upon him. Yes, God’s mockery may be a prediction, sent by way of warning, of that macabre accompaniment with which the heavens will greet the vaunted arrogance of sin, and of the sinister prophecy presently, of the destruction and of the catastrophe-ridden guests at the banquet of unrighteousness. But God maintains His law withal. He does so now and He will do so eternally. He does it here and everywhere. Even in the regions of hell, He lets the echo of the law resound against the wide walls of every human soul, and of the entire community of hell. God’s laughter is His deliberate maintenance of the law, just as the intercession of Christ is the maintenance of the Gospel.
Human mockery is not satisfied simply to take a position below the exalted laughter of God. By moving in the direction of the satanic, it puts itself in opposition to God’s mockery.
To such mockery, to such defiance, the taint of sin necessarily clings. Hence it in turn immediately becomes the object of God’s sublime laughing. The defiance of the people who beat, and spit upon, the Christ, and who degrade His prophetic office to the level of the meanest fortune telling, strikes truth full in the face, refuses to call Christ by His right name, and if it can, tries by ignoring it to put Christ’s work to death. But the chief thing is that their mockery, which turns into defiance at last, places Christ outside of the sphere of law. The soldiers of Pilate at least threw a mock-garment around Jesus, but Their Eminences, the Sanhedrin, let the outlaw stand outside of the sphere of justice altogether. They let Jesus wander around through the universe naked. They do not bring the law to bear upon Him. Even though He is called the arch-liar, they do not call Him to repentance. They do not call upon God. In fact, they do not even surrender Him into Satan’s hands.
If only they had done that much: if only they had given Christ up to Satan, for — this may seem strange to some — delivering Christ up to Satan is quite different from defying Him. Had Christ, in a formal session, after God’s name had been called upon and full cognizance had been taken of all the incisive words of the law, been delivered up to Satan by the Jewish authorities, He would at least have been subjected to a process which recognized the magnitude of the event. Then His sentence and everything which followed it would have remained a part of that great synthesis of binding seriousness and of the eternal, infinite, and weighty dispensation of the law. Then the soul and spirit of the judges would have been moved equally by and their attention concentrated on death and life, hell and heaven, Satan and God, world and church, falsehood and truth, eternal woe and eternal weal, absolute yea and absolute nay — just as the soul and spirit of Paul were moved when in an hour of prayer he and the church at Corinth were united in spirit and purpose, even though he was absent from them in body. Yea, just as Paul and the church at Corinth were when, together with the church, he sent out the energies of prayer to God and delivered into Satan’s hands the hardened sinner of that church (1 Corinthians 5). Had the Sanhedrin, after struggling with God in just this way, delivered Christ up into Satan’s hand, their sin would have been less severe. Their act, then, would at least have been taking cognizance of law. They would have been able to say with trembling lips: O God, here we stand; we cannot do otherwise. God help us. Amen.
But no trace of such spiritual trouble is perceptible in the Sanhedrin. They do not surrender Christ to Satan. They go farther: they thrust Him outside of the domain of law: they buffet Him, beat Him, spit upon Him, they laugh, they grin, and they do it in unison, master and servants together.
In doing this they become guilty of what can no longer be called mockery. This is not mockery but defiance, poisonous and demonic. This is not giving a condemned man to Satan, the giving accompanied by a broken heart, and the whole done in the name of God. There is no summoning of the law here, no asking the law to set up its walls on all sides of this meeting of judges and of accused. No, Christ is being surrendered into the hands of any or all. Satan may have Him, the angels may have Him; even timid angels if they wish to, may still hurl a wilted flower at His feet, some little vestige of their heavenly banquet. Nothing matters in reference to Him any more. Law does not affect Him. Never will evangelical grace summon this evil one to repentance, or any teacher of the law speak pleadingly with Him by way of inspiring Him to prayer before He gives up the ghost. No father in Israel will ever plead with the Nazarene and say: My son, give honor to God.
Plainly, then, their mockery becomes the opposite, the very opposite, of God’s mockery. Even as God’s wrath is the other side of His love, and is always the highest conceivable form which the maintenance of His justice, of the justice of His love in all of its tendencies and decrees takes, just so the mockery of God is simply the other side of His infinite passion for truth, and is a maintenance of truth in all of its holinesses and sublime tendencies.
But that which men are allowing to come upon Jesus here is not love, and consequently is not genuine wrath either. Truth is no part of it, and consequently this mockery has nothing in common with the mockery of God.
Therefore Jesus suffered terribly. Mockery runs up the side of the mountains of prophecy and, having arrived there, becomes defiance.
These are unattractive because they are diabolical contrasts. If there is one place near which defiance should never come that place is the mountain of prophecy. For such mockery dares to develop the theme of an outlaw, is indifferent to right relationships, and never measures with an accurate rule. How different this from what God, the Father of the spirits of all flesh, does on His mountain of prophecy. There He puts everything under the most searching of beacons and teaches us to discern very discriminatingly. Prophets can feed upon those discriminations and flourish only because of them.
But Israel’s judges, standing upon the very top of the mountain, distort the truth and make it obscure. This according to the laws of a simple and inexorable logic must lead to the direct degradation of their official rights as prophets. The defiance hurled against Christ, the chief Prophet, by Israel’s mentors in the concluding act of their last official session deserved God’s rending of the veil of the temple later, God’s destroying their credentials, and His letting the spirit of discrimination and prophecy move into Jerusalem. Into Jerusalem, but past them. For it comes with a quivering echo into the hearts and heads of Galilean fishermen. The mountain of prophecy was eternally defamed by its own last sons. Then God called the unanointed to His mountain — unanointed, yes, but bearers of His own pure spirit. His doing so was an act of justice as well as an act of grace.
Meanwhile we must not forget that this mockery constituted awful suffering for the Christ. When defiance thrust Him outside of the domain of law, His true, His mysterious being as it is basically and essentially, was being ignored. The secret meaning, the hidden logic, the logos in the life of the incarnate Logos — all these were brutally negated. One hesitates to touch on these things, for these hands tremble only when the lightning visibly strikes here and there with a thundering report. But it was most excruciating suffering to Christ, when He who bore the law in His bowels, was ejected from the pale of law.
Nevertheless — to this point was He come. Necessity demanded it. Had Christ been condemned for anything which was peculiar or characteristic of Himself as such, He would not have been in His person what He had to become: namely, the falling and rising of many in Israel. Christ as a living person can never be separated from His work. Either the whole Christ is condemned by the “flesh” or the whole Christ is appropriated and embraced by the “spirit.” Therefore we can say that the defiance hurled against Him on the mountain of prophecy was not an accident. It is precisely in this defiance that the denial of Christ reaches its bottom. It placed the Lawgiver outside of the law; it removed the Preacher of Truth from all problems of truth; it removed the Bearer of judgment far from all serious and whimsical issues.
The world must necessarily arrive at an outlawed Christ at last. This diabolical invention is but the continuation of the old folly of sin which once worked in the dark at the door of God’s house and took the lie for granted in the God of truth.
This was the keenest edge of Christ’s acute pain. In the very moment in which heaven must laugh because of the folly of men, of men, that is, who name their lawgiver an outlaw, Christ Himself may not laugh. The clear, uninhibited vision with which God is able to see the mountain of all prophecy, and the high vantage point which God enjoys, are not possible to the man Christ at this time. This time afflictions engulf Him from below. In Gethsemane there was a resting point; in the garden His irony discovered the equilibrium; there His groping soul could find itself again in order that, after being reinforced by God, He might continue on the way. But now He is again being driven away from that resting place. The drama of His passion has reached the second act and it moves on without interruption. There is no respite here; instead a perturbation continues the battle in His soul. The same Jesus who in Gethsemane could triumph and express His triumph in the confident utterance, Sleep on now, and rest, cannot at this time say: Have at me, buffet me to your heart’s content. For feverish restlessness drives Him on. Judgment strikes him. Besides, they whom He sees around Him here, and whose foul breath is blown into his blindfolded face are not disciples, but enemies.
However, Christ may not allow Himself to succumb to this passion in a passive way. His suffering must ever be a laboring, and He must persevere in the labor. We should like to characterize the labor of Christ’s soul which is prompted by the defiance which is hurled against Him as the labor of prophetic discrimination and also the labor of a mediator’s love.
In the first place He must suffer the labor which is caused by trying to keep things clearly discriminated. Yes, the eyes of His body have been blindfolded, but those of his Spirit have not. Who, indeed, could blindfold the eyes of Christ’s spirit? No, He sees, He discriminates, He remains the spiritual man, and thus He preserves Himself and us. “Prophesy, prophesy,” they tell Him. And to themselves they say, “He cannot, He will not succeed today.” But they do not know that it is precisely as a prophet that He is laboring heavily. For prophecy is much more than a knack for guessing the names of the people who happen to be blessing or cursing one. To prophesy is to see God’s name, to hear God’s name, to preach God’s name, and to clearly discern God’s being.
And in this sense, Christ prophesied. His prophecy in this particular hour inheres in the concrete ability to “distinguish the body of the Lord” even in the face of the man Jesus who is being spat upon at this time.
Prophesy, O Christ: who is he that struck thee? Now note this. He knows very well who it is that struck Him. Repeatedly He answers: It is God. And again the reply comes: It is God who smites me. Thus does Christ distinguish the great God who is doing this buffeting in the presence of these milling Jews. Christ has continued in the maintenance of His Holy Supper. He distinguishes the body of the Lord though it be covered with spittle. Praised be He who stood at the table of the communion of the New Testament, distinguishing the body of the Lord. Besides, in His incomparable forsakenness He does not drink judgment unto Himself nor does He eat judgment unto Himself. “For he who knew no sin, him hath God made sin for us.” And God asks Him: “Canst Thou not see me?” Yes, Father who art in heaven, He sees Thee; the bandage which is blinding His eyes proves to be a favor; to the extent that He is not distracted from the outside, He is better able to look inside and to set His soul in search of God.
To see God means to see distinctions, to see discriminatingly. To see God means to discover differences, to have perspective, to see distance, to stand and to remain standing erect on the mountain of the prophets. Thus does Christ discriminate sharply and lucidly. He labors and labors. His struggle is carried on while He is mute, but it works profoundly and intensely, ever distinguishing. These by their scurrilous attacks upon Him are trying to drive Him from the prophetic mountain; but He climbs it and scales the peak.
Lord, art Thou seeing clearly, art Thou making sharp distinctions? Ah, see on now, for Thy own sake; see on, lest we perish with Thee. Discern the fact that the judge is there seeking Thee because He is seeking us.
Yes, I know that now. He tells us gently—I know that too: Do you be still. I hear Him saying that He has distinguished between the second and first cause. Because He has He is my Saviour, my Surety, He who paid my debt. Let no one tell me that His bearing the defiance, that His absorbing the spittle and the slime suffices to pay that debt. That is but the passive obedience. The active obedience must also be satisfied. By it the second Adam kept His prophetic spirit awake and alert over against God. Adam hears God and sees Him in the soughing of the winds through the trees of Paradise; the second Adam hears and sees God even in the coiling and hissing of snakes.
Yes, He is great and He is obedient in discriminating between the “ultimate” and “approximate” cause. He knows that these members of the Sanhedrin are doing the distinguishing in their way and with evil intent. But God has determined that it should take place in His way, and He does it and intends it all for the good.
He makes distinctions: Blessed, therefore, is He who mutely prophesies within the house of His own sublime soul, and who does it in the name of the Lord. Very lucidly He distinguishes between the second and the first cause, between human defiance and the sublime mockery of God.
Men say: Aha, that good-for-nothing! They are wrong. God says: Aha, that worthless one! And He is right. For Christ stands in our stead, “He who knew no ‘worthlessness’, Him hath God made ‘worthlessness’ for us.”
Praise be to God: the Prophet and Teacher He has sent to me has made careful distinctions. No bandage put on Him at the impulse of impetuous wrath could detract from His holy mind. Sharply He discriminates; and then He meditates. To His own soul He says, “Wait on the Lord, Thou pious soul. Take courage, for God is rejecting me from the domain of law, hallelujah. Through me, therefore, God is maintaining His whole law, hallelujah amen.” To Himself He says: “True, these defy me with evil intent; but God mocks me for good. It is good, it is a benefit of grace; grand, consuming seriousness of God . . .”
He admonishes His soul saying: “These are they, indeed, who hurl me from the top of the mountain of prophecy without asking where I will come down. These give me up as one cut loose from every norm; they surrender me to any who is willing to put me to death. But God delivers me only into Satan’s hand, and God is right in all His doings. God’s Spirit, drawn up against their polluted spirits, has already decided to give me directly into Satan’s hand. What He does He does with justice. He it is who does this. The heavens laugh, but in their laughing, they mourn. O great necessity — all the heavens exercising their irony for the sake of the grief with which I am afflicted because of my Suretyship. But I can believe still, Father, for I know that irrespective of Thy sublime mockery all Thy counsel ‘treasures up wrath’. Lord, my God, I praise Thee, and I believe in the justice of that mockery which preserves the wrath and the law unimpaired. I have seen my judge; I do not stand outside of the domain of Law. I move in a medium of seriousness. This great, fearful heart is not beating in vain. Thou art not hanging me between time and eternity as a curse, as those who mock and defy me. But Thou dost suspend me as a curse in time, completely in time. Completely, because driven by the pressure of eternity. Accept my thanks, Father: there is still seriousness for Thee and me. Father, I thank Thee for not thrusting me outside of legal relationships, for now I can redeem my people and can tell Thy name to these men who are drunk with blood now and will be drunk with wine later ...”
A Christ who could labor as hard as this· and discriminate as keenly as this never failed of being the Surety and Mediator. He finds reconciliation for us with God. He suffers the mockery in our stead. It is in our place that He endures the mockery of God and the defiance of Satan.
The mockery of God and the defiance of Satan, yes. For we have deserved God’s grand mocking. We are the dwarfs who kicked against the throne of God. We ordered our expensive seven-league boots for our violent attack against God’s throne — but the throne does not budge. We call our names great; and we are incomparably small. We call our sin virtue, though it represents folly and enmity without. We present our wiles and our lies as though they were serious and indicated a passion for the truth. However they are but the generation of vipers. Then comes God’s mockery; then comes His sublime laughter. He humiliates us even though as He does so He brings salvation to us. The mockery of God may be very terrible, but it makes no man an outlaw. It cuts the soul in two, but it does so in order that the divided soul can be united in the fear of God’s name. Only if in this earthly life we remain God’s enemies essentially will God put that deplorable condition on display in the cracks and crevices of the perfect house of sorrow. And even then He will not cut us loose from the law, but will keep it binding for us eternally.
We have earned the mockery of God, for we have earned the punishment of hell. But Christ wanted to take our place. The fact that in the Mediator’s progress to the stage of God’s mocking He never once lost the proper distinctions, spells our salvation. A Saviour who can keep His eyes upon God can also discover His people among those who spit and scoff; He can include us in His strong will, in the plan of His redemption, and in the deed which, at any moment now, will fulfill that plan.
We must say more, however. The defiance of Satan was also deserved. By our sin we have subjected ourselves to the master of our own choice. The master is Satan. We who thought we could remove God from His own litigation by sinfully opening a case against Him, have as our punishment been given to Satan by the justice of God. Then — it had been our will — God’s mockery delivered us up to Satan’s defense. In Satan, mockery is demoniacal. True, he caustically calls things by their right names. And to that extent He differs from the people who in their mocking distort that truth, in part at least, and who cannot, therefore, name the victim by His full, real name. But Satan never keeps his spirit pure. Although he is himself subjected to the mockery of God, nevertheless he carries on his own defiance over against others who share his condemnation. Although he is himself related to sin, he demonstrates its ludicrousness and never ceases doing so. On this banner hell continues to embroider all its maxims. Just as a Satan hurls his defiance at those in hell, so every person there who is steeped in sin hates every other person. The one curses the other and mocks his afflictions. Hell is so perfectly sustained by the principle of dissolution, of separation, that it is comforted by the fall of those who arrive there. Thus hell becomes the comfortless world of defiance, as well as the deep abyss of God’s dismissed prophets. Dismissed prophets, indeed. For seeing distinctions clearly is a gift which returns to everyone as soon as the vain banquet of his revelry in sin has ended. Hence the defiance of every man in hell, of every other man there is but its sinister business. It is the continuous laughing out of court of seriousness, of infinite things, by the grim byplay of desperate defiance. And yet it is at the same time a vain pretense at seriousness, inasmuch as it tried to measure every small norm by the great standard of God.
It is a comfort to us to know that Christ was defied in our stead. He was tried on the mountain of the prophets. There, back of the curtain of death, He tasted of the hellish terror which exists in the deep abyss of all dismissed prophets. The Sanhedrin has a world-wide significance. The judgment of God makes its last members top-heavy. Then they fall against Jesus Christ. As soon as their mouths opened Satan’s laughter rent the air. But Christ Jesus continued to stand erect.
He had noticed the mockery and He sang a song in God’s honor. He had borne the defiance, and He sang a hymn of love for His people. Because and since this took place in the world, no one can ever be an outlaw again. Now everything has significance. None will ever escape from the extended arms of God, of the God who carries a table of stone in each hand.
Lord, preserve me, or I shall perish.
A voice replies: Ecce homo, go out to meet Him. Lookup to the prophetic mountain. There is great seriousness of life, evangelical and gracious in the insult which wounded Christ even unto death. By His stripes we are healed, and by the insult heaped upon Him we have our reward.