Our Lord's Disregard of Appearances

“...Our Lord was not content to die a painful death merely, he would die in ignominious circumstances. Imagine yourself a visitor to Jerusalem that day, with no knowledge of what was going on—how the demonstrations in front of Pilate’s tribunal would have impressed you! A mob, though it be only a few hundreds of hired men, looks impressive; and there is a kind of herd-instinct in us which disposes us to think they must be right. If everybody wants to have a murderer reprieved, sooner than the Man they dislike so, depend upon it they must have good reason for such dislike. And so he goes to his death, in the company of two thieves; people stand round and ask, ‘Which is the Galilean? Oh, that one’. A notice has been pinned up over his head; what does that say? THE KING OF THE JEWS—a joke, obviously, though perhaps not in the best of taste. And the whole point of the joke is to annoy the Jews by pointing to a broken Visionary as their King! ‘Is it nothing,’ asks the prophet, ‘to all you who pass by?’ In heaven’s name, why should it be anything? An innocent man sent to the gallows in first-century Judaea, there’s nothing to be surprised about in that.

No, appearances were against him, if you didn’t know the inside of the story. And if you did? Then you marched up and down in front of the Crucifix, mouthing out slogans. ‘He saved others, he cannot save himself. If he is the King of Israel, he has but to come down from the cross, here and now, and we will believe in him. He trusted in God; let God, if he favours him, succour him now; he told us, I am the Son of God’. It was a kind of victory parade, a good way of blowing off steam before the sabbath. But at last you grew tired of it, and with one defiant ‘Let God succour him now’, you turned to go home. And out of the darkness, as if it were an echo of your own taunt, came the sudden cry, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’

Incredible, if our own ears had not witnessed it! He has recanted, he has owned himself in the wrong! The Gentiles who stood there could make nothing of the cry; they thought it was an appeal to Elias. But everybody who understood the language of Palestine must have accepted it as an admission of defeat. And, worse than that, wherever this gospel was preached in the whole world, those words would be a stumbling-block to the enquirer. ‘I don’t understand’, he would say, ‘about this Christ of yours. He seems to have abandoned his position in despair at the last moment. I don’t wonder, after the barbarous way in which they had used him. But—can this be the Son of God?’ So neglectful of appearances to the last, he would throw down that challenge to our faith, and be content with the homage of such as would accept him still.

...One thing we were meant to see, written on the Crucifix as large as life, as large as death—that we must remit the judgement of all our action entirely to God. To do otherwise, to fortify ourselves in human opinion, is a kind of constructive idolatry. I am not thinking of that headstrong obstinacy which rejects all advice and then, finding the world critical, throws itself back upon God in a passion of hysterical self-righteousness. I am thinking of people who have to drag along, looking after difficult cases, relations of theirs, superiors of theirs, and get nothing but a scolding for their pains; I am thinking of people who honestly and humbly try to do good in the world, but, through some unconscious fault of manner, only succeed in making themselves unpopular. For these, there is no peace until they learn that only the Divine award matters. ‘See how the eyes of servants are fixed on the hands of their masters, the eyes of a maid on the hand of her mistress! Our eyes, too, are fixed upon the Lord our God.’ It is from his grave and kindly judgement that we look for that final verdict of ‘Well done’, which will make all earth’s praises look so foolish, and all earth’s prizes so trumpery.”
~Ronald Knox