Behold the Man--Station I of the Cross

(The Church has called the Stations many different things through the years. Cia Crucis, Via Dolorosa, The Way of the Cross, Stations of the Cross. These stations are 14 in number. All the way through Lent we will stop beside one of these Stations and ponder the mystery.)

(See Matthew 27.15-26; Mark 15.6-15; Luke 23. 17-25; John 18.38-40, 19.4-16)

If you ever saw the film,” The Passion of Christ” you will remember the most wrenching parts of that movie were the terrible scenes of Jesus being beaten. I had to close my eyes at the brutality and the suffering. But afterwards, still reeling from his pain and abuse Jesus was dragged before Pilate the Roman Governor. He soldiers had mockingly placed a crown of thorns on his head, they dressed him in a purple robe filled with holes and smeared with dirt. The soldiers kept hissing, “Hail, King of the Jews.” They spat on him and great blobs of spittle ran down his face onto his robe. Then they dragged him back before Pilate. It must have been a terrible scene for this Governor who did like messes. Pilate. He knew that gentle man had done little or no wrong. Surely he did not deserve this. Jesus stood there and Pilate turned to the crowd and said, “Behold the man.”


The crowd went wild as bloodthirsty crowds do. Pilate told them eh found no fault in Jesus. But the crowd roared: “Crucify him! Crucify him.” And Pilate, politician that he was, turned to the crowd and said, "Then take him and crucify him. For there is no case against him.”


But before they dragged him away Pilate was not quite finished. “Where are you from?,” he asked. “ Do you know the power I have to set you free or sentence you to death? “ Jesus answered. Pilate thought it was arrogant. “You have no power over me unless God gives.” With that Pilate threw up his hands. He had tried to release this Galilean but this bleeding man gave him no recourse. What else could he do but give him over to the bloodthirsty crowd?


I keep coming back to those words of Pilate. “ Behold, the man.” And these words are still with us. Sometimes in church we talk so much about Jesus that he seems ten feet tall and like Abraham Lincoln far away. But the first Station puts Jesus in perspective. We are to look and behold the man.


Joseph Conrad begins his book, Lord Jim like this: “My Jim is not a type of wide commonness. But I can safely assure my readers that he is not the product of coldly perverted thinking. He’s not a figure of Northern mists either. One sunny morning in the commonplace surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass by—appealing—significant—under a cloud—perfectly silent. Which is as it should be. It was for me, with all the sympathy of which I was capable, to seek fit words for his meaning. He was ‘one of us.’”


The one standing before Pilate was one of us. Whoever has felt pain or injustice or stood before a judge or known betrayal or despair so deep and dark that one wonders if you can go on—behold the man. Truly he was one of us. Ponder the mystery the word really did take flesh in all its beauty but more: all its horror of cancer and Alzheimer’s and mental illness and grief ad whatever hurts that seem to be unending. Conrad was right. He was one of us.

“At de feet o’ Jesus

Sorrow like a sea.

Lordly, let yo’ mercy

Come driftin’ down on me.

At de feet o’ Jesus,

At yo’ feet I stand.

O, ma precious Jesus,

Please reach at yo’ hand.”

--Langston Hughes