Mocking Jesus Of Nazareth

Mankind generally seeks an easy way to practise religion. Perhaps they can perform some duty, or attend to some particular service, or even recite a prayer, and that will suffice to appease the righteous demands of God Who is Holy. However, Jesus was quite specific that only a new life would please the True and Living God; and new life invites opposition.

Moreover, people seem always to seek an excuse for behaviour. The Bible declares we are sinful, but we endeavour to excuse our actions. In that vein, I’m intrigued by the effort to find a genetic basis for our choices. We have heard in recent years of a “gay gene,” though no one is actually able to find it. Recently, we have been hearing of a “warrior gene” that makes people aggressive; though some who have the supposed genetic code are actually rather relaxed in their interactions with others and some who don’t have the gene tend to be quite combative. We’ve heard of a “criminal gene,” though some who have this supposed genetic predisposition to criminality are law abiding, and many who are criminals don’t have this genetic marker at all. Ultimately, we are driven back to the teaching of the Word that we choose to sin and thus bring upon ourselves condemnation.

Because one cannot hide behind a façade of niceness or self-righteousness, he is angered by the one who exposes his sin. This correlation is implied by Jesus’ assessment of those who refuse to be saved. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God” [JOHN 3:16-21].

CHRIST’S PERCEIVED WEAKNESS IS HIS STRENGTH — On a wall near the Palatine Hill in Rome, is one of the earliest known pictorial representations of the Crucifixion of Jesus. The image, now in the Palatine Antiquarium Museum, depicts a human-like figure affixed to a cross. The figure possesses the head of a donkey. To the left of the image is a young man, apparently intended to represent Alexamenos, a Roman soldier or guard. He is represented as raising one hand in a gesture that suggests worship. Beneath the cross is a caption written in crude Greek. Translated, it reads, “Alexamenos worships (his) God.”

To the Roman mind, the fact that one was crucified was degrading. That anyone would honour—much less worship—one who had been crucified, was insulting, virtually unimaginable. The so-called Alexamenos griffito is consistent with the ridicule heaped on early Christians. Tertullian, writing in the late second century or early third century, reports that Christians were accused of worshipping a deity with the head of an ass. He also mentions an apostate Jew who carried around Carthage a caricature of a Christian with ass’s ears and hooves, labelled “The God of the Christians begotten of an ass.” The mockery that began as He was providing the infinite sacrifice for fallen mankind did not end with His death.