God’s Word for You
Mark 14:63-65 Blindfolded and beat up
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Saturday, March 2, 2024
63 And the high priest tore his clothes and said, “Why do we need any more witnesses? 64 You have heard his blasphemy. What is your decision?” And they all condemned him as deserving death. 65 Then some began to spit at him. They blindfolded him and started to strike him. They said to him, “Prophesy!” And the guards took him and beat him.
This is a hard scene to read. It is also hard to translate, not only because of some unusual Greek words but also because of the emotions that never fail to well up in the heart of this translator as he labors over his own conscience as well as a Greek text, all the while thinking and praying: This is what my Savior went through for me.
There is a quirky courtroom term here, “What is your decision?” On the surface, it appears to read, “How does it seem to you?”, but in this context it means something firmer than that: “What is your legal judgment?”
Without using the word “vote,” the court spoke its judgment, probably by saying the word “Guilty” (enochon, ἔνοχον) over and over again. This word appears in the translation of Moses: “The Lord does not leave the guilty unpunished” (Exodus 34:7; Numbers 14:18). And yet the same Law of Moses also warns: Do not shed innocent blood in your land… so that you will not be guilty (enochon) of bloodshed (Deuteronomy 19:10). The innocent blood of Jesus was therefore on the hands of Caiaphas and the rest of the Sanhedrin who were present.
They spat on him. This was a way of making him or showing him to be a disgrace (Numbers 12:14). Job said: “God has made me a byword to everyone, a man in whose face people spit” (Job 17:6). Jesus had prophesied that they would do this to him, saying, “They will mock him, insult him, spit on him” (Luke 18:32). And Isaiah said about the Christ: “I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting” (Isaiah 50:6). Those who truly seek God seek and desire to see his face (Psalm 24:6) would never think of such a thing—his face is the thing we desire most to see in heaven and be glorified by it! These wicked men should have fallen down before his blessed face and begged his forgiveness, but their evil clouded over all their understanding of the Scriptures as they did the unthinkable.
They blindfolded him, tying a rag around his eyes so that he couldn’t see. Luke expands on this moment, telling us that as they struck him they mocked him: “Who hit you?” But of course, it was not Jesus who was truly blindfolded, but the men who were hitting them and who were responsible for this abuse and mistreatment. “When a land falls into the hands of the wicked, God blindfolds its judges. If it is not he, then who is it?” (Job 9:23). So the suffering of Christ stands in place of the eternal suffering of all sinners: “God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me” (Job 23:16). And the prophet says: “We are disgraced. Dishonor blindfolds us, because strangers have come into the holy places of the House of the LORD” (Jeremiah 51:51).
His blindfold was an additional binding, since his hands were already tied (John 18:12). These bonds of Jesus Christ are a comfort to us, because of the many times we are bound by rules and laws that make it difficult or even impossible to share our faith. There were men who were tied with ropes or put into chains as prefiguring types of Christ, men like Joseph (Genesis 40:14-15) and Ezekiel (Ezekiel 4:8). Gerhard says: “By this he has sanctified and glorified all bonds which might be laid on us on account of the Name of Christ and the truth, so that one doesn’t ever need to be ashamed of them.” In Christ, whatever chains we might be forced to wear and tortures that Christians undergo become “a string of beautiful pearls” (St. Ignatius).
Next, Jesus was struck. Some translations reflect the meaning of the Greek verb and say, struck with the hands (or fists). “I offered my back to those who beat me” (Isaiah 50:6). The Bride of Christ, the Church, is abused and harassed, but truly Christ took this beating on himself in their place: “They beat me, they bruised me; they took away my cloak, those watchmen of the walls!” (Song of Solomon 5:7). So now, having our sins laid upon Jesus as he was so cruelly beaten up in our place, our lives are sanctified through faith in him, and our souls are collected together in a little bundle that Christ brings before his Father; the remnant he has rescued from the mouth of the lion (Amos 3:12). He has unbound our sins and let go of them, and the Father accepts this act for the sake of his Son.
They mocked him: “Prophesy!” They would not accept the words of the prophets of old, preferring to murder them instead. Jesus had preached just days before: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our forefathers, we would not have joined them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ But you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets” (Matthew 23:29-32). They would not listen to Moses, or to the Psalms of David, or to the Prophets. Instead, they did everything that they could to reject the Anointed Christ of God and to hold on to their own power, no matter who had to die in the process. For “bloodthirsty men hate a man of integrity and seek to kill the upright” (Proverbs 29:10).
And after all this, the guards of the Temple took hold of Jesus and beat him some more. It wasn’t enough for the wickedness of the world to have him beaten once or twice, but again and again he was subject to the rough treatment of physical beating, bruising his body all over, so that it would be with a bloody nose, bleeding lips and ears, black eyes, and welts everywhere, that he would be taken away to face Pilate, and the tortures that would follow.
He endured all of this for our sakes, saying to the Father, “‘Here I am, I have come to do your will.’ And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the blood of Jesus, once for all” (Hebrews 10:9-10). And so “we are those who believe and are saved.”
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.