Monday Prayer: There is an unusual event that transpires over the course of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion. After Jesus was sentenced by Pontius Pilate to be crucified, he passed him along to his own battalion of soldiers, where they brought Jesus into Pilate’s headquarters. The entire battalion was present, and they began to mock and humiliate the Messiah. They stripped him and replaced his garments with a scarlet robe. They then twisted together a crown of thorns and placed it on his head. They topped it all off by placing a reed in his right hand, sarcastically imitating a royal scepter. After this, they knelt before him, crying out “Hail, King of the Jews!” I hear the echoes of Joseph from Genesis 50, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive” (Gen. 50:20). The soldiers intended to humiliate the Messiah, but what was actually happening was that the last was becoming first right before their eyes. The carpenter boy from Nazareth was being crowned king, and everything was about to change!

Glory is sometimes found in the most unlikely of places. No one expected this type of king, a carpenter from Nazareth. He was a blue collar guy. And the truth of the matter is that we don’t expect greatness to be birthed out of the ordinary, or even sub-ordinary either (cf. Jn. 1:46). As we meditate upon this narrative, we need to pray and ask God to forgive us. We have made judgements on people because of certain societal norms and expectations. We associate greatness and inferiority with the neighborhoods people hail from, the education they’ve received, skin color, and the paycheck a person earns. But this isn’t how the Kingdom operates. This is true whether we stand in the place of casting judgement, or if we are on the receiving end of these judgements. We need God’s forgiveness for this. We need to live our lives in light of the Kingdom of God. This means we need to pray and ask God to forgive us for seeing ourselves as superior to others. It also means that we need to ask God to forgive us for allowing the judgements of others to direct our paths. “[Jesus] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men…he humbled himself by being obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6-8).