Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1168
“And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon His head.” Matthew 27:29.
BEFORE we enter the common hall of the soldiers and gaze upon “the sacred head once wounded,” it will be well to consider who and what He was who was thus cruelly put to shame. Forget not the intrinsic excellence of His Person, for He is the brightness of the Father’s Glory and the express image of His Person. He is in Himself God over all, blessed forever, the eternal Word by whom all things were made and by whom all things consist. Though Heir of all things, the Prince of the kings of the earth, He was despised and rejected of men, “a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” His head was scornfully surrounded with thorns for a crown. His body was bedecked with a faded purple robe. A poor reed was put into His hand for a scepter, and then the ribald soldiers dared to spit upon His face, and worry Him with their filthy jests—
“The soldiers also spit upon that face Which angels did desire to have the grace, And Prophets once to see, but found no place. Was ever grief like Mine?”
Forget not the glory to which He had been accustomed, for before He came to earth He had been in the bosom of the Father, adored of cherubim and seraphim, obeyed by every angel, worshipped by every principality and power in the heavenly places! Yet here He sits, treated worse than a felon, made the center of a comedy before He became the victim of a tragedy. They sat Him down in some broken chair, covered Him with an old soldier’s cloak, and then insulted Him as a mimic monarch—
“They bow their knees to Me, and cry, Hail king. Whatever scoffs and scornfulness can bring, I am the floor, the sink, where they’d fling. Was ever grief like Mine?”
What a descent His love to us compelled Him to make! See how He fell to lift us from our Fall! Do not, also, fail to remember that at the very time when they were thus mocking Him, He was still the Lord of All and could have summoned 12 legions of angels to His rescue. There was majesty in His misery! He had laid aside, it is true, the glorious imperial pomp of His Father’s courts, and He was now the lowly Man of Nazareth, but for all that, had He willed it, one glance of those eyes would have withered up the Roman cohorts. One word from those silent lips would have shaken Pilate’s palace from roof to foundation—and had He willed it—the vacillating governor and the malicious crowd would, together, have gone down alive into the pit, even as Korah, Dathan, and Abiram of old!
Lo, God’s own Son, Heaven’s Darling and earth’s Prince, sits there and wears the cruel chaplet which wounds both mind and body at once—the mind with insult, and the body with piercing pain! His royal face was marred with “wounds which could not cease to bleed, trickling faint and slow.” Yet that “noblest brow and dearest head” had once been fairer than the children of men and was even, then, the countenance of Immanuel, God with us! Remember these things and you will gaze upon Him with enlightened eyes and tender hearts—and you will be able, the more fully, to enter into fellowship with Him in His griefs. Remember from where He came and it will the more astound you that He should have stooped so low! Remember what He was and it will be the more marvelous that He should become our Substitute.
And now let us press into the guard room and look at our Savior wearing His crown of thorns. I will not detain you long with any guesses as to what kind of thorns He wore. According to the Rabbis and the botanists, there would seem to have been from 20 to 25 different species of thorny plants growing in Palestine. And different writers have, according to their own judgments or fancies, selected one and another of these plants as the peculiar thorns which were used upon this
occasion. But why select one thorn out of many? He bore not one grief, but all—any and every thorn will suffice. The very dubiousness as to the peculiar species yields us instruction.
It may well be that more than one kind of thorn was platted in that crown—at any rate sin has so thickly strewn the earth with thorns and thistles that there was no difficulty in finding the materials, even as there was no scarcity of griefs with which to chasten Him every morning and make Him a mourner all His days. The soldiers may have used pliant boughs of the acacia, or shittim tree—that unrotting wood of which many of the sacred tables and vessels of the sanctuary were made—and, therefore, significantly used if such were the case. It may have been true, as the old writers generally consider, that the plant was the spina Christi, for it has many small and sharp spines. And its green leaves would have made a wreath such as those with which generals and emperors were crowned after a battle.
But we will leave the matter. It was a crown of thorns which pierced His head and caused Him suffering as well as shame—and that suffices us. Our inquiry, now, is—what do we see when our eyes behold Jesus Christ crowned with thorns? There are six things which strike me most. And as I lift the curtain I pray you watch with me and may the Holy Spirit pour forth His Divine illumination and light up the scene before our wondering souls.