BEFORE Jesus was nailed to the cross, they had first taken off His garments.
This shame the Lord has felt very keenly.
He had felt this already in anticipation, before yet He had come in the flesh. Already from David’s lips He sang by the Holy Ghost: “They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture!” (Ps. 22:18).
For long centuries, before it came to it, Jesus has tasted in advance the disgrace in all its bitterness, which with this removal of the clothes from His body would overtake Him, the Lord of glory.
To take off one’s garments himself in the sacred privilege of seclusion and of the privacy of the home, even for the poorest upon earth. But to see one’s garments taken off with violence by others; to have one’s clothes publicly removed in the street; not alone the upper garment, but all your garments; till finally the nude body appears and every curious eye can stare at the most hidden parts of your tenderer life, has been the disgrace of condemned malefactors in all ages, but never has any criminal suffered so terribly under this shame as the holy Jesus.
That plaintive moan: They have taken off my garments! was already in the psalm the bitter anxious cry, as though Immanuel supplicated, that it might not come to this extremity.
Also strip before all eyes my clothes from off my body! O, Father, if this cup might pass; except I drink it.
In garments lies man’s modesty, the venerableness of his self-perception. Before a little one is born, his little dress lies waiting for him, and when man dies, he yet goes with his garment into the grave.
Alone the little child Jesus awaited no garment at His coming into the world. He was “wrapped in swaddling clothes”. And when He was carried out to the grave they “wrapped Him in a clean linen cloth, with the spices”, and thus they laid Him away in Joseph’s garden.
But also in the days of His sojourn on earth Jesus was seen in human garments, and His garment was so closely and tenderly wrapped up with His body and thereby with His person, that virtue went out from the hem of it, when touched by that poor sick woman, who though for shame she dared not speak, yet believed.
Also when He was transfigured on the mount, His robe did not fall from His shoulders, but His raiment shared in the indescribable glory that shone out from Him and with which He was drenched; for as we read: “His raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white them” (Mark 9:3).
And when finally He ascended up to heaven, we do not read, that in ascending His raiment fell off from Him, but in those, meanwhile certainly vanishing garments, He went up into the heaven of heavens.
Three times we read that Jesus laid aside His garment.
The first time of His own accord at the footwashing, when He laid aside His garments, and in the form of a slave went in among His disciples. It was in the form of a slave, for a slave had no honor, and therefore went bare-headed and naked down to the waist. The modesty, the venerableness of the human was only for the free!
The second time His garment was taken off by Herod, when his soldiers made a rough-shod mockery of Jesus, and in wilful presumptuousness and with blasphemous contempt they played king with Him.
Then, however, He received His garment back again. The red mantel was taken off from Him, and in His own raiment again the Lord Jesus has stood trial before Pilate.
But the third time His garments were taken from Him for good, and were declared at a good price by the executioners. And when the cross was ready, and they took hold of Jesus, to nail Him, our precious Savior, to it, the ruffian hand touched Him first at His upper garment; drew it off; and after that also took His other garments from His body; and in the shame of nudity have they lifted up the Savior, and so before the eyes of all have they nailed Him to His cross.
One reads so easily about this seemingly trifling incident. And yet there lies in it such an incomprehensible depth of sorrow and of shame for Him, Who for our sakes has suffered it.
That once we shall not be found naked, but clothed upon, or, as in the Revelations of Patmos, that once in the new Jerusalem the fine white raiment should be given us, did Jesus allow Himself to be stripped naked, and His garments to be divided among His executioners, not after His death, but while still living He hung on the cross and saw it!
O, that human raiment has so much to say to us!
God Himself put the first garment on His human children, when in Paradise with “coats of skins” He covered the nakedness, which had become the cause of shame to the heart lapsed into sin.
Gratefully man wore that garment, as long as sin did not get too bitterly the upper hand.
But when sin exercised its power and wine heated the man, Noah casts his clothes aside, and lies down to sleep naked before the eye of his children. And then Ham mocks. But Shem and Japhet pick up the garment of their father and cover his nakedness.
When presently the high priest appears, his garment is the sign of his sacred office, and hence he must change his garments on the day of Atonement. “Still life” is what art calls a garment that is found in an unlooked-for place, and as it lies there, betrays that with the man whose garment it is, something must have happened. And so Jacob weeps in despair, when the coat of Joseph sprinkled with blood is brought him, and Potiphar kindles into towering rage, when he finds Joseph’s garment on the bed of his wife.
That raiment is a part of man’s personality.
When from Bozra one comes “with dyed garments and blood on his apparel”, the blood stain on the garment shows how strenuously and how terribly that lone combatant has fought, before he overcame.
When Elijah goes up into heaven, his prophet-mantle falls down upon Elisha, and to him it is the symbol of the descent of two parts of Elijah’s spirit upon the prophet of the Lord.
He who is bereaved clothes himself in sackcloth; for the glad glistens the apparel of praise.
There are garments of salvation, which are put on the redeemed.
And so by Jesus, in His suffering, our clothing also is sanctified.
Sanctified, that man should hold high the modesty of his dress. Sanctified, that in vanity he should not make dress a sin. Sanctified also as a symbol of that white garment of righteousness, that shall be put about him, who altogether leprous knows what it is to be naked.
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