If Only They Know Him the Messiah

If Only They Know Him the Messiah

Matthew 27.11-54

Peacetime soldiers have always had a difficulty time fighting boredom. Peacekeeping forces about last decade, such as the NATO troops in West Germany, the American troops in Japan, and the English troops (between flare ups) in Northern Ireland, have been plagued by boredom.

If we read a novel like James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, we are likely to be appaled by his description of what the peacetime soldier in the South Seas did to fill up and foul up his spare time in the 1940s. After reading Jones’s novel we may be prompted to read the New Testament in order to counteract some of the slime of fornication, drunkenness, sadism, and profanity Jones portrays. We open to the Gospel and what do we find? We find the peacetime Roman army, Pilate’s praetorian guard, going through some of the same antics as the American soldiers in Jones’s novel. They are plagued by boredom.

The praetorian guard pulled his kind of stuff because absolutely nothing exciting ever happened in the first-century Jerusalem. When we read the account of Jesus’ trial and execution, we the 21th-century people somehow feel that this must have been a great big event in the history of Jerusalem. It wasn’t. The Passover pilgrim was bored too, and hungry for some excitement. Without that boredom and the resulting crowd pressure, Jesus’ trial and execution might have taken place without any fuss at all. The pilgrim mob made a big noise but was more interested in Barabbas the thief than in Jesus the Messiah.

When we enter the story at this point, it is well to mention that Jesus had been up all night enduring three separate trials. Pilate and Herod had been trying to pass the buck to each other. Then, after the final appearance before Pilate, Jesus was taken into the praetorian barrack and flogged. After the flogging, the soldiers had little to do until the march to Golgotha, so some insolent, bored soldier probably began the satire with a mock bow before Jesus, as if to a king, and off they took, creating a sham royal court, complete with horse-blanket robe, bamboo scepter, and a crown of thorns.

The crown of thorns has made it big in Christian art down through the centuries. Plenty of sentimental tears have been shed over that prickly crown and those minor adorned their chancel crosses with scourges and with horsewhips, not with crown of thorns.

The pain was not the thorns but the mockery. On that day a real King was treated like a pretender; the King of kings became for those soldiers the joke of jokes. It happened because they were bored.

Boredom doesn’t sound like much of a motivation for anything. It isn’t often used as a legal defense. Kids never really use boredom as an excuse, but when we ask them, “Why did you do that?” and they say, “I dunno” or “Just for kicks,” they are saying that they were bored. Ghetto kids, youth in general during time of high unemployment or national unrest, middle-aged husbands and wives who have reached a comfortable financial plateau, college students on weekends, all are potential victims of boredom and the old saw, “Idle hands are tools of the devil.”

Members of our congregations can fall into this trap too, so we had better be conscious of it. When worship is ho hum, when we do it that way because we’ve always done it that way, when useful and engaging programs of helping and reaching out are not available in the congregation, we soon find our people—maybe even ourselves—with crowns of thorns and reed scepters in hand, waiting to mock our Lord.

The song “Were You There” fits nowhere so well as in the praetorian guardhouse. We are there, scrutinizing the King of kings who asks to rule our time, our billfolds, even our inner thoughts and attitudes. We are apt to respond with the mockery of boredom. It seems that Jesus wants to spoil our fun. His ugly cross and his sticky blood are all over every watch and clock with which we regulate our days, on even golden latch of every Christian purse and billfold, in every daydreamed delusion of grandeur, behind every mirror in which we see our trumped-up selves.

We were there! We are there! Every time we squander time and money; every time we feature “me” at the expense of others; every tome we devour our lives in the stuff of boredom, we are back in the praetorian guardhouse, playing games with the King of kings.

But just as sure as there bored thorns weavers, there are active thorn eradicators. Weavers can even change into eradicators. They need only hear and heed the warning and admonition of Galatians 6.7, “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked.” We reap what we sow. Sow thorns and reap thorns. But thorns can be killed also. They can be cut down, burned, poisoned, rooted out. Thorns of boredom are rooted out by the active, involved, caring life of the forgiven sinner. Leading our people toward all manner of stewardship involvement offers them a part in a gigantic and important enterprise, and that involvement—playing the part, taking part—brings joy. There are no beasts of boredom among Christ’s active troop of forgiven sinners.