Pilate wrote a title also ( ). Only John tells us that Pilate himself wrote it and John alone uses the technical Latin word titlon (several times in inscriptions), for the board with the name of the criminal and the crime in which he is condemned; Mark (Mr 15:26) and Luke (Lu 23:28) use (superscription). Matthew (Mt 27:37) has simply (accusation). The inscription in John is the fullest of the four and has all in any of them save the words “this is” ( ) in Mt 27:37.

Fuente: Robertson’s Word Pictures in the New Testament

Title [] . Only here and ver. 20, in the New Testament. John uses the technical Roman term titulus, a placard or notice. Used for a bill or notice of sale affixed to a house. Thus Ovid, of a heartless creditor : “She sent our household goods under the placard [ – ] ;” i e., put the house and furniture up for sale (” Remedia Amoris, ” 302). Meaning also the title of a book; an epitaph. Matthew has aijtian, accusation; Mark, ejpigrafh thv aijtiav superscription of the accusation; Luke, ejpigrafh superscription. John alone mentions the fact that Pilate wrote the inscription.

Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews. The wording of the title is differently given by each Evangelist.

Matthew : This is Jesus the King of the Jews.

Mark : The King of the Jews.

Luke : This is the King of the Jews.

John : Jesus the Nazarene the King of the Jews.

The essential element of the superscription, King of the Jews, is common to all. It expressed, on its face, the main intent of Pilate, which was to cast contempt on the Jews. “In the sense of the man Pilate, it meant : Jesus, the King of the Jewish fanatics, crucified in the midst of Jews, who should all be thus executed. In the sense of the Jews : Jesus, the seditionary, the King of the rebels. In the sense of the political judge : Jesus, for whose accusation the Jews, with their ambiguous accusation, may answer. In the sense of the divine irony which ruled over the expression : Jesus, the Messiah, by the crucifixion become in very truth the King of the people of God” (Lange).

Fuente: Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament

1) “And Pilate wrote a title,” (egrapsen de kai titon ho Pilatos) “Then Pilate also wrote a title,” required to indicate the charge for which the accused was crucified. It was a whited gypsum board commonly used for public notices.

2) “And put it on the cross.” (kai etlaken epi tou staurou) “And he put it on the cross,” at the upper part of the erected cross, over His head, so that those who passed by might read, without asking any questions, Mat 27:37.

3) “And the writing was,” (hen de gegramenon) “Then it was written,” or inscribed and placed in view of all who passed by. Each of the four Gospel writers indicated the name of the one on the middle cross and the charge on which He was crucified, using different language, but not contradicting any other.

4) “JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS.” (lesous ho Nazaraios ho basileous ton loudaion) “Jesus the Nazarene (of Nazareth) the king of the Jews,” by which He was prophetically known, Mat 2:23; Joh 17:5; Joh 17:7.

The exact wording, that includes every word that each used is: “This is Jesus of Nazareth the king of the Jews.” For the wording used by each see; Mat 15:37; Mar 15:26; Luk 23:38; Joh 19:19, the later here given.

Apparently Pilate wrote it as a rebuff, to insult them, as a precise judgment of his own.

Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary

19. And Pilate wrote also a title. The Evangelist relates a memorable action of Pilate, after having pronounced the sentence. It is perhaps true that it was customary to affix titles, when malefactors were executed, that the cause of the punishment might be known to all, and might serve the purpose of an example. But in Christ there is this extraordinary circumstance, that the title which is affixed to him implies no disgrace; for Pilate’s intention was, to avenge himself indirectly on the Jews, (who, by their obstinacy, had extorted from him an unjust sentence of death on an innocent man,) and, in the person of Christ, to throw blame on the whole nation. Thus he does not brand Christ with the commission of any crime.

But the providence of God, which guided the pen of Pilate, had a higher object in view. It did not, indeed, occur to Pilate to celebrate Christ as the Author of salvation, and the Nazarene of God, and the King of a chosen people; but God dictated to him this commendation of the Gospel, though he knew not the meaning of what he wrote. It. was the same secret guidance of the Spirit that caused the title to be published in three languages; for it is not probable that this was an ordinary practice, but the Lord showed, by this preparatory arrangement, that the time was now at hand, when the name of his Son should be made known throughout the whole earth.

Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary

CHRISTS TITLES AND WHAT THEY TEACH US

Joh 19:19.

JESUS was dead! The worlds spite against immaculate holiness had at last found its long-sought vent! The Cross, made infamous by having taken to its deadly arms the most odious men of the East and West, kept up the appearance of its accustomed character by holding at arms length two criminals indeedone to His right and one to His left. But that day the character of the Cross was converted. From that hour in which the title of our text was fastened to its wood, this, that terrorized the criminals conscience, was suddenly changed into the sinners hope; and this, that had filled the nations in which it was used with repulsion, became the object of chiefest attraction to all the world. There was a time when to mention the Cross filled people with that same heartsickness that possessed our fathers at the sight of the gibbet, but now its name starts a song in many souls, and the problem of the ages is the possibility of planting it in every soil beneath the sun. How poorly Pilate understood the work of his own hands when he put on the accursed tree the title of our text! How little he dreamed that the object of infamy would change to the subject of love and song, because what he wrote was the truth of the agesthe one fact for which the world waited in hope, that out of Jewry a King had come.

But this title is not so interesting because its touch transformed the Cross, as because its terms fitly describe the Christ, and its words suggest lessons illustrated in His life. To bring some of those lessons is the purpose of this discourse.

BEGGARLY BEGINNINGS NEED NOT CHEAT ONE OUT OF THE TITLES OF GENUINE GREATNESS

How strange it sounds to hear Jesus of Nazareth called a King! Why associate the loftiest of earths titles with a name that is supposed to be of ordinary birth, of medium breeding, and of a despised birthplace? There are several answers to this question, and answers calculated to satisfy those who are willing to see and accept the truth.

In the first place, the truest title is not the heritage of blood. There is no need that Joseph sit on a throne in order that Jesus may be called a king. I know there are countries in which all princes are supposed to be born and bred in palaces, but that is not after Gods ordination, nor the customs of our land. When God wanted a King to sway the scepter over His own people, He went not to the home of crowns to find Him, but sent to the humble dwelling of Jesse, the Bethlehemite, to bring thence the boy whose work was lowly, whose name was unknown, and yet in whose soul the truest kingliness shone. In America, how seldom have the noblest titles been worn by those who came into their possession by way of noble birth! Occasionally some lord or count from other countries takes up permanent residence in our land, but our noblemen are those whose personal worth lends luster to their names, and whose honors come in consequence of valor in conduct, vigor in intellect, or magnanimity of soul.

Read the old, yet ever-inspiring story of Abraham Lincolns early years. If wise men had come from the East and had halted at the door of the humble cabin on Nolin Creek, Handin Co., Ky., a strange sight they might have seena young woman of sweet face, yet homely dress, sitting at eventide beside her untaught husband, instructing him in the alphabet of his mothers tongue, and by picking out and putting together easy words, teaching him to read. At their feet, all unconscious of humble birth, wearing already the names of an illustrious pair, Sarah and Abraham played. If our country had been the habitat of kings, what one passing then would have dreamed, That unwashed urchin will yet take a crown and wear it more nobly than I have done? How history despises the probable, and discovers the diamonds that are laid hid away in societys substratum, and brings the noble life to light. A stall is a mean place in which to be born, and coarse blankets are not supposed to become the swaddling clothes of an infant prince, and yet from humblest parents, lowliest birth, commonest breeding, the child that has in him the soul of a king may go straight to noblest titles and loftiest thrones, since Jesus of Nazareth was truly the King of the Jews and will yet become the King of the earth.

This leads us to add that titles are not commodities of money purchase. We know that many politicians get Hon. attached by means of a liberal expense of money; that some schools sell diplomas; that honorary degrees are often bestowed in compensation for endowment gifts, and even D. Ds are purchasable. It is alleged, and history confirms the charge, that cardinals have bought red hats, and that His Holiness has held office at times by revenue only, and yet we affirm that no honorary title can survive a sale. We talk of money kings, but what do we mean? Only that they are rulers in finance, and we use the term with little thought of their honor. The men who accumulate great fortunes are to be respected for sagacity, energy, and frugality. But the men who inherit the fathers name must win their own laurels in the race of life, or else be the more despised. Young men and women, learn this! If you ever wear the honors, you must win them. Kingliness is not possible to any purchase, save that of well-spent life. Jesus was poor, yet Pilate was right. He wrote, The King, and the Kingliness was His own.

One other thing. Paul studied under Gamaliel, the most princely teacher of the times. Jesus of Nazareth never enjoyed such opportunities of intellectual training and development, yet Paul was only an Apostle while Jesus was his Lord. It is difficult to tell when you confront youth what is to be hoped from the individual life.

Pastor Stalker, in a foot-note to his paragraph on The Child Jesus at Church, has truly said, No portion of a congregation is more awe-inspiring to a minister than the children. Any Sunday there may be sitting before us one who is already revolving thoughts which will dominate the future and supersede our own. No man can tell what that child will be. You dare not say, It will be Edward because his circumstances insure his culture. It will not be Walter because his poverty forbids it. It is one thing to have opportunities. It is another thing to discover that power that plucks the last honor from the stingy world. It is the man that does the latter, not the means of culture which he has enjoyed. We would hesitate to say one word against true learning. Without what few advantages we have had in halls of study, we cannot imagine what life would mean. Nothing so saddens as to meet a young woman or man who is losing the only chance they are ever to have of giving training to the mind. Education in its splendid reach is not half appreciated by the greater part of the civilized world. And, after all, the late Russell Conwells words might be sung around the world with profit to many. In an address in Chicago on what our coming university ought to be, he said, The worst fool in the world is the educated foolthe person that comes out of college with the idea that he knows everything. I remember a graduate myself who delivered the valedictory in Latin, with all the polish and scholarship imaginable, and I said to myself, If he will only make me secretary of the Treasury or something like that when he gets to be President, that is all I will ask! But years passed by, and in an interior town in New England, where I was lecturing, a man came up and said, Do you remember me? I do not. Then he explained, I am the orator, and I recognized the man who delivered that valedictory. Then visions of the White House appeared. I said to him as the panorama of mighty enterprises in every land and visions of government passed away, Where are you now? and he answered, I am at the Coopers trade. It takes more than intellectual opportunities to make of a man a king! It takes intellect itself, married to and supported by a great soul.

Christmas Evans never enjoyed any culture from the schools, and yet by natural force and spiritual power he came, under God, to move like a monarch among men. So with Dwight Moody. Titles then are not questions of how well a man begins lifes race, but rather of how well he runs it, and how nobly he comes to its end. Jesus of Nazareth was King!

Again, learn from this text this:

THE TITLE BORN OF DERISION MAY BE SO WELL WORN AS TO BECOME A BADGE OF HONOR

It appears evident that Pilate believed Christ to be an innocent man, but it is equally evident that he did not understand the full significance of the title which he caused to be nailed overhead. The sentence was as full of derision as an egg of meat. Not that Pilate meant to deride Christ, but that this sentence be caught from the mouths of the Jews who spoke sneeringly of Christs claim to be their King. Because it was their term of reproach as applied to the humble Teacher, he put it on the Cross to explain Christs offense, and reproach them in turn. How improbable it appears that a term of such ignoble birth could ever become a badge of honor!

And yet, they always so become when they are born in consequence of bravery or virtue. How perfectly that thought is illustrated in the name which, among all now worn by any man or woman, is the highest and bestthe name Christian. When the people of Antioch first applied that term to the disciples of the Nazarene, it was spoken with a sneer, and intended to convey their utter contempt for the sect. Who is now so mean as to deny the honor of the name? Protestantism is a term which has seen similar changes. When first employed, it was not the friends of reformation so much as the enemies of Gods Word and free thought. They called dissenters by that name and spoke the word with hissing. The men who were seeking to shake from their necks the yoke of papacy knew full well the reproach of the term. Now they find that it expresses what they love most and return their thanks to intolerant Rome whenever she calls them by that name. It describes character. We did, we do protest. The same change has come to the honorable term Baptist. It used to mean, The people who are eccentric enough to baptize. Now it means, The people who obey their Lord.

So with Abolition! My father came near losing his head seventy years ago for calling a score of men by that term. Now to apply the same word to the same sentiments is to honor the man who held them. Some people are greatly afraid of being derided. You must be careful by what name you call them, for with them the term is everything. But Jesus Christ was not particular about names. He had so many that we may talk about them for an hour every day in the year, yet so vary our terms that no title need receive a second attention. Many of them were once terms of reproach. But so nobly did He live, that now they whisper in a chorus of a King, for His character lent definition to the names.

The English soldiers used to call Blucher, Old Forwards. That was not an elegant nickname, but it told the truth of his leadership, and so came to be as honorable as it sounded uncouth.

If life refutes all reproach, let men call you what they please and be not distressed. The hardest thing to deride is a noble life. He is a fool to the correction of the stocks who undertakes it. The princes of Babylon can report Daniels disobedience to their hearts content, and yet Daniel will prosper in the reign of Darius while they languish in shame, as all liars must. We are wont to assign Plato a chief place among the sages of the past. We study his philosophy of life even to this hour. Among the many things attributed to his tongue, there was nothing wiser than a speech which illustrates this phase of my text. It is reported that on one occasion somebody did Plato the disagreeable service of telling him that he had many enemies who were accustomed to speak ill of him, to which the philosopher replied, No matter; I shall so live that none will believe in them. That is the best way to convert terms of derision to badges of honor. That is the explanation of the fact that in our text a sentence spoken in spite 1850 years ago, is whispered in love by a million tongues today. The life refuted the intended lie and confirmed the eternal truth that Jesus of Nazareth is indeed the Lord.

Finally,

REAL ROYALTY DOES NOT EXIST IN A NAME

There are not a few men in the world who seem to think that the end of living is to get a string of significant letters attached to their namesdoctors of this and doctors of that, Col., Capt., Hon., Lord, Prince, Duke and so on. Such titles may mean much or little. If gained by reason of actual merit, and used only to add weight to words, deeds and thoughts that are worthy, all right. But we do well to remember that titles are not always evidence of talent. It is not an unusual thing to meet men whose boast and bigotry remind One of the young man whose talents were not among the noblest, but who was often parading the fact that he had graduated from both Harvard and Cornell. An aged and wise man was present one day when the fellow delicately referred to this fact. Thereupon the old man said, My young friend, you much remind me of a story I heard of a calf that was fed by two cows. How was that? the egotist asked. Well, said the senior, it turned out to be a big calf. Office is not honor!

Honor and fame from no condition rise,Act well your part, there all the honor lies.

No life ever so richly illustrated that couplet as did His, over whose head our text first spoke. We all understand that if royalty inhered in a name, then its existence would be at an end when the last breath was out. A fame that lives after men, to effect good above that which has been wrought by life itself, would be impossible. A few years and every king would be humbled to the dust, and his memory forgotten. The eccentric Diagones was once found by Alexander the Great in the charnel house. When he asked the cynic philosopher what he was doing, he answered, I am seeking for your fathers bones, and those of my slave, but I cannot find them because there is no difference in their dust. That was true in one sense, exceedingly misleading in another. There may be no difference in the dust of the dead, but there is as much difference in a dead king and a dead serf as there was in the living ones. Magnanimity never dies! Noble deeds are as immortal as the soul that purposed and executed them ; and the most royal men wait in confident expectation for their posthumous power to vindicate and honor them. Dr. Hamilton said, A vulgar mind may thirst for immediate popularity, and very moderate talent dextrously managed may win for the moment the hosannas of the millions, but it is a Horace or a Milton, a Socrates or a Sidney who can listen without bitterness to plaudits heaped on feebler rivals, and calmly anticipate the day when posterity will do justice to the powers or the achievements of which he is already conscious. Christ fretted not, because many bemeaned Him when on earth. Full well did He know that He would yet rule in every kingdom beneath the sun.

Finally, no man can afford to think only of the titles of time when the royalty of eternity is in reach. It is a good thing to rule among ones fellows, if ones supremacy is that of mental and spiritual power. But he is short-sighted indeed who sees not the crown beyond. The cross and the crown come very close together since Christ died. He went, by a single bound, from one to the other. So we may do if in our hearts is the spirit of our King.

There are not many titled, not many noble in the earth, but the New Jerusalem is a city of kings and priests unto God. You never expect to be even a lord here, but you may be above earths dukes there. When the eldest son of the Duke of Hamilton was wasting with consumption, he was visited and prayed with by two ministers. When they had finished, he put his thin hand beneath his pillow and drawing out his Testament, read,

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course,

I have kept the faith:

Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, snail give me at that day; and not to me only, but unto all them also that love His Appearing (1Ti 4:7).

As they drew nearer, he called his younger brother to his bedside, and after having bade him an affectionate farewell, he added, And now, Douglas, in a little time you will be a duke, but I shall be a king. Glorious hope for every man in whose heart the image of the King of Glory is being fully formed!

Fuente: The Bible of the Expositor and the Evangelist by Riley

EXPLANATORY AND CRITICAL NOTES

Joh. 19:19-20. This was also one reason for the title written (, titulus, the technical name) by Pilate for the cross of Jesus. His alone would need it. For people might be inclined to ask (those who were not mere tools of the Jewish rulers), Why was this man, who had been declared innocent, and who during His life among the people had gone about doing good, thus treated? But the title was also indicative of Pilates scorn of those Jews, and part of his revenge for their having forced him against his better judgment, his will, and his conscience to condemn Christ. The reason why the title was written in the three languages chiefly in use in Palestine at that period is evident; but it seems also to give an indication of Pilates eagerness to let the accusation be widely known. Hebrew.No doubt the current Aramaic (Semitic) dialect. Greek.The language of culture. Latin.The language of imperial Rome.

Joh. 19:23-24. Took His garments, etc.St. Johns is the more full account of this incident. Joh. 19:23-24, explain why the soldiers cast lots. This is merely mentioned generally by the Synoptists, as if it applied to the garments as a whole.

Joh. 19:25-27. Now there stood by the cross, etc.Are three or four women mentioned here? The evidence on the whole seems to show that there were fourthat the sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus, is not Mary of Clopas (Alphus, Mat. 27:56; Mat. 10:3), but Salome (Mar. 15:40), the mother of Zebedees children. The reason why her name is not mentioned is that John in his Gospel does not mention his own name, or the names of his kindred, except by circumlocution. If this explanation be correct it throws a clear light on the incident of Joh. 19:26-27. It would also explain in a measure why the mother of Zebedees children ventured to make so bold a request for her two sons on one occasion (Mat. 20:21).

Joh. 19:28-30. Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished (for accomplished read finished, ), that the Scripture might be (accomplished) .These words are from the same root. By His life and death He had fulfilled the purpose for which divine revelation was given, the purpose to which it all pointed, i.e. the redemption of men. Therefore, knowing this, He called out, I thirst (thus fulfilling the prophetic words regarding the suffering Servant of Jehovah, Psa. 69:21); and when His parched lips and tongue were moistened by the drops of sour wine, He was able to lift the cry of victory, It is finished (again ). Bowed His head.All the narratives show clearly that our Lords death was a voluntary death.

MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.Joh. 19:19-30

Joh. 19:19. The title on the cross.

I. We should have an interest in the details of the crucifixion.

1. If we believe that the death on this cross was borne for our sakes, we cannot but take an interest in every detail connected with it.

2. A wonderful and well-known picture, at which many have loved to look, presents to us the mother of the Crucified being gently led away from the awesome scene by him who was now her son, broken-hearted, crushed by what she had gone through. The face is something to look atso grief-stricken, so heart-pierced and yet with some strange, quaint ray of faith lighting it up! And the painter has given this touch. In the poor, feeble, quivering fingers is claspedwhat? The crown of thorns. Unconsciously, instinctively, Mary had unfastened the cruel thorns from her holy childs head. They were no more hurting then; but it was nature in a mothers hand to tear it off. And now she clasps it, keeps it, dear, precious. It was with Him, part of Him, and it is sacred, not to be parted with now! But it will be saidand truly in a measurethat is merely natural sentiment.

3. Well, again there are those who think that could they but hold in their hand, while kneeling in prayer, or engaged in holy, devotional thought, a piece of the real, true wooden cross of Golgotha, how good, how happy that would make them. And now it will be saidin a measure trulythis is superstition.
4. But is there not solid ground on which Christians who are given neither to sentiment nor superstition may stand? We love Him who died for us (would we loved Him better!). We love to think of the death He endured. All our blessings, all our hopes, spring from it. The Bible has given the story of the cross in full detail. We wish to look at, think about, and understand everything, even the incidental details and circumstances, connected with the cross of Calvary.

II. Here, then, is what is called the title on the cross.

1. We should neither in mere sentiment nor in superstition, but as common-sense and honest readers of the Bible, look at and think of this incident in the story of the cross.
2. There it hangs (nailed no doubt to the cross) in large, legible, official characters, telling in the three languages there in common use the name of Him who was put to death, where He came from, and His crime.

3. We know the namea name dear to many a heartto many who love it better still to-day beyond. And Nazareth. Ay! bless God, He lived, for our sakes, the common village life of poor Nazareth! And what about His crime? King of the Jews. A bitter taunt which the Roman governor, in writing it, flung at the priests and rulers and the Jewish mob they led. We know how this came about. They forged a story which Pilate no more believed than theythat this man had harboured claims of kingly dignity, dangerous to the Roman rule. So in one of the feeble efforts Pilate made to save the life of Jesus, he said, This is your king: shall I crucify your king? So anxious were priests and mob to have this man crucified that they were willing to renounce their very national history, as it were, and lay their necks under the foot of Rome: We have no king but Csar. And when Pilate still hesitated, the last touch that spurred him to the leap was the threat, Let this man off, and it will be told at Rome, thou art no true friend to Csar. And so, later in the day, Pilate sat down to write the official title; and one can fancy the bitter smile that crossed the Romans face as he said, They shall have no king but Csar! And it shall be told at Rome that Pilate was so true to Csar and ruled the Jewish people with so stern a hand that he crucified before their very faces the man whom they dared to call their king. The title was nailed up, in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, that all men of all nations might read: The King of the Jews.

4. The priests and rulers read it, and gnashed their teeth when they saw themselves entrapped by the wily Roman. They would have him to soften or explain his phrase. But the haughty ruler said, What I have written, etc. Thus this title was just one more of the many words and tones of bitterness and hate and mockery with which men surrounded that day the cross of the Saviour.
5. They were all of a piece, these surroundings of His cross! The mocking of Herods men, Pilates soldiers, the robe and crown and sceptre, all in ribald scorn; the brutal scourging, and hellish hate of priests and Pharisees, and the yells of the fiendish mob! The mocking title with its bitter gibe between Rome and the Jews was quite in tone with all the rest.
6. Only from Him (the central figure of the throng) throughout the fearful scene came that day what was calm and true in tone, and tender. From Him comes the gentle prayer, Father, forgive them, etc., and the brief message, and the last lookthe one word to His dearest earthly friend, and the one word to her and the last look to her! Even the weary sigh, as all was over, was of heaven and peace! All around was hate and mockery and hell.

7. It mattered little what they wrote above the drooping head, or what bitter scorn might pass between the Jews and Rome, or that it baffled them to say why He was put to death. Why He died was known in heaven, amidst the angels joy and wonder.

III. Application.

1. We can take the Romans words of mockery and read them calmly, truly for ourselves. Little did Pilate dream how true were those words of his! He is King, Sovereign, Ruler in a higher, wider, greater realm than ever Rome or Israel dreamed of!

2. Let it be our prayer that He would make us true and loving subjects in His realm, to be owned in the new heavens and the new earth, as having followed His banner and upheld His kingdom.

2. And scattered Israel shall yet be gathered, and the land of His birth and lineage, whose tongue He spoke, whose homes He blessed, whose prophecies He fulfilled, will yet know Him as its King.

3. The mocking title may well remind us of many things concerning Himthe love He bears us still, His kingdom here, His kingdom coming.
4. To think of it may also help us, when we have to bear from others things hard to be borne, to remember the patient, silent Sufferer amidst all the insults that were around His cross, to breathe of His spirit and to be His followers.Rev. Thomas Hardy.

Joh. 19:23-24. The soldiers divide the garments of Jesus.It was the custom among the Romans that the executioners at a crucifixion should divide among themselves the raiment of the criminals. The raiment was taken off before the sufferer was nailed to the cross. Jesus endured even this humiliation. There was not one drop of the bitter cup He did not drain. But this indignity too was foreseen. The action was retrospectively a fulfilment of the prophetic word: it told of the Saviours present condition; it pointed symbolically forward to one chief end of His redemptive work.

I. It fulfilled prophecy.

1. It was done that an ancient scripture might be fulfilled (Psa. 22:18). How wonderfully was this ancient psalm fulfilled on Calvary! The very words, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? etc., are those recorded. How graphically do such verses as 6 and 17 of the psalm describe the utter humiliation of the sufferings of the Saviour!

2. And in this incident the rude Romans were Gods agents in fulfilling His prophetic word. They knew nothing of it; the Jews would not urge them to do anything to connect Jesus with prophetic Scripture; and therefore all were used as unconscious instruments in carrying out the divine purpose.
3. As the whole of prophetic Scripture points to the Messiah and in Him finds its fulfilment, we should be careful of wresting its meaning lest we lose the divine instruction it is intended to convey.

II. It testified to the poverty of Jesus and His utter humiliation.

1. Though He was rich, for our sakes He became poor, etc. We read of no money. (Judas kept the bag. He had made sure of securing it; and what was it to him now?) No gems or jewels bedecked His person. His garments were of a simple fashion. The headdress, sandals, outer robe, and sash were all probably of the simplest, and the large outer robe could readily be divided. But the tunic, fitting closely to the body, and probably finer than the rest, as it was seamless, etc. (Joh. 19:23), the soldiers (there was a quaternion engaged at the actual crucifixion) did not divide.

2. All this shows how poor He was in earths possessions, and how great was His humiliation. The rude soldiers were unmoved by the silent majesty with which He suffered. They thought only of the spoils, and left Him naked and exposed to the burning sunshine of the late Syrian spring. He drank the cup of sorrow and shame to the bitter dregs.

III. It may be viewed symbolically.

1. For our sakes He became poor. He was made naked that we might be clothed (Rev. 3:18). The seamless garmentlike the high-priestly robe (Rev. 1:13)He allowed to be taken off, that we might be clothed in garments made white in His precious blood (Rev. 7:14). It was symbolical of His perfect obedience (Rom. 5:18, etc.).

2. And on His cross, through His sufferings and death, another garment has been woven for His believing people. His suffering unto death satisfied and vindicated the broken law. Hence

Jesus, Thy blood and righteousness

My beauty are, my glorious dress (Isa. 61:10).

3. The simple garments which He wore on earth the callous Roman legionaries divided and cast lots for. But the heavenly dress, glorious in everlasting beauty, which Jesus provides, is given to all who, feeling their nakedness, the insufficiency of their own poor moral rags to clothe the soul, come in faith to Him. Then He endues them with that which will protect them from the fiery heat of divine wrath against sin, and insure them a welcome entrance to the heavenly feast (Mat. 22:12).

Joh. 19:26-27. Mary at the cross.It was eternal Love incarnate that hung on the cross on Calvary. And it is in accordance with the nature of that love unspeakable, which embraced all ages and races, that it should care especially for those most moulded to its likeness. And as at the death-bed of those dearest we treasure up the words spoken, so the loving friends of Jesus would treasure up the words they heard fall from His lips during those hours of suffering on the cross. To the writer of this Gospel especially none of those words would appeal more than those in which Jesus honoured him with the care of Mary. Notice:

I. The bitter grief of Mary.

1. Simeons words in the temple to Mary now received their utmost fulfilment. A sword truly pierced through her soul that day. Was this to be the end of all those hopes which she had treasured up in regard to her wonderful Son? Did the strange events which accompanied His birth, and which she kept, and pondered in her heart, lead to this and nothing more?
2. None can estimate the suffering of Mary as she stood with her weeping friends and John at the foot of the cross. She and they bad been prepared for struggle, for conflict, in His progress toward His Messianic throne. But what a throne was this blood-stained cross, what a crown was that which lacerated His brow!
3. Not only would the bitter grief of shattered hopes fill her breast; the pangs of maternal love would be more bitter still. What true mother could stand unmoved whilst seeing her son suffer untold agonies? And the maternal affection of the heart of her who was called blessed among women would not be less but more keen. How then must that heart have been rent during those awful hours!

II. The loving sympathy of Jesus.

1. Even in that hour of unutterable agony, when dread portents were showing natures sympathy in the sufferings of the Son of God, Jesus showed that He was truly humanEmmanuel, God with us. In the midst of His terrible sufferings, in the conflict He was waging to bring redemption to our race, we could not have wondered if Jesus for the time had forgot all of earth.
2. Yet even in that awful hour He did not forget those nearest to Him as the Son of man. He saw the group of weeping followers, but His glance rested especially on twoon His mother and the beloved disciple. He remembered her widowed condition. He saw the traces of her bitter grief. He knew the desolation caused in her heart through the fading of hope in consequence of imperfect faith. And even in that hour when the awful sense of desolation was stealing in upon His own soul, which issued in the mysterious cry, Eli, Eli, etc., His filial heart flowed forth in sympathising love to her who bore Him.
3. Even in that hour of suffering He remembered her deep affection, her tender care and solicitude, the strong yet gentle bonds of a mothers love. This we may believe was dear to the human heart of Jesus; and as He gazed on Mary, now standing with tear-bedewed countenance near the cross, waiting heart-broken for the inevitable end, His filial sympathy and love welled up and overflowed in thoughts and words of tenderness.

III. The filial care of Jesus for Mary.

1. Whilst Mary and her friends stood weeping, wondering, the Saviour spoke to His mother, commending her to the care of the disciple whom He loved.

2. Why was this? Had faith in Jesus brought with it the inevitable division even into His mothers home, so that harmony between her and His unbelieving brethren no longer existed, though it was afterward no doubt restored (Mat. 10:36; Act. 1:14)? But in any case nothing could be more appropriate than that those two, who loved the Saviour with the deepest, purest affection, should thenceforward occupy one home.

3. We are not to think that the term Jesus used in addressing MaryWoman, i.e. Ladyimplied any diminution of His filial affection. But it certainly does imply (as it did to a less extent in Joh. 2:4) that the relationship cannot thenceforward rest on the same basis. Mary, too, must look to her Son as the Redeemer. And as the Saviour must now depart, His filial duty, so far as earth is concerned, must devolve on another; although we must believe that He had still a special interest in and care for her whom He called mother on earth.

4. The disciple to whose care Mary was confided proved himself worthy of so honourable a trust. From that hour Mary was tended with filial care and reverence, until she was called to see in His glory Him beside whose cross she had wept in the hour of His deepest humiliation.

Lessons.

1. Our Redeemer is our example in the doing of relative duty. This is one of the laws of the Christian life (1Ti. 5:8). Even the awful position in which He was placed did not make Jesus as the perfect man forget the duty of care and consolation toward His mother, even though that relationship was now to be merged in a higher.

2. The honour and dignity of being trusted by the Saviour with the care of His loved onesHis disciples (Mat. 12:49). John entered most deeply into the Saviours thoughts, etc., and was rewarded with a special love, showing itself in this special trust committed to him. It is an honour to be thus trusted by kings and potentates; how infinitely greater is the honour when we are thus trusted by the King of kings, and His needy brethren committed for temporal or spiritual things to our care!

Joh. 19:28-30. I thirst.The hot Syrian spring day was waning toward afternoon. True, from the sixth to the ninth hour darkness had fallen over the face of nature. The sun had been eclipsed; but as an earthquake was near most likely the air would be still and heavy, oppressive and hot like the siroccos breath, as it frequently is before an earthquake. Jesus had stood on Calvary weak and faint, and hung on the cross through the hot morning hours from between the third and sixth. No refreshing draught had passed His lips since the last cup in the upper chamber. And now His exhausted physical frame, though of most perfect mould, craved for refreshment, and He cried out, I thirst.

I. In this word from the cross we have an expression of the true humanity of Jesus.

1. It was a word uttered in order to gain an assuagement of the awful suffering of thirst. Dwellers in the East know well, either from personal experience, or the experience of those who have felt it, how awful it is under the burning sun to endure the agony of thirst, when there is no water near to slake it, whilst the mocking mirage, with vision of lakes and streams, maddens the tortured traveller.
2. And was it to be wondered at that He, who was treading the wine-press alone, etc., travailing in the greatness of His strength for humanity, should, in that hour of awful suffering, feel the pangs of thirst? How terrible were those sufferings on the cross, to which heart and soul anguish were added in incalculable degree! How racked with fever was that sacred body, whilst His tongue clave to the roof of His mouth, and all the dreadful pain of thirst added to the strain and torture!

3. Who will relieve Him? Not the Jew. He is ready with his taunts to the end. But now even the rude soldiers are being touched with the patient yet majestic bearing of the kingly Sufferer; for it was evidently from the supply of sour wine provided for them (Luk. 23:36) that a sponge was filled and held to Jesus lips on the end of a stem of hyssopit may be at the instigation of the centurion in command, on whom the whole scene had made a deep impression (Luk. 23:47).

4. It was the last service rendered to Jesus in the period of His humiliation. It strengthened and revived Him for the final declaration, It is finished, which is the charter of our redemption. May not the hope be permitted that this last kindly actif it were kindly meant, as it seems to have beendid not go without its reward?

II. This utterance of Jesus proclaims Him as the divinely predicted Messiah, to whom all prophecy bears witness.

1. Though this word was the expression of a natural desire, yet in its utterance, and in the answer accorded, prophetic Scripture was fulfilled. This was foretold as part of the suffering of the Messiah (Psa. 69:21).

2. The darkness and trouble that had encompassed His soul, resulting in the cry Eli, Eli, etc., had now passed away, as the shadow of eclipse from the face of nature, and Jesus knew that He had now endured to the uttermost all that had to be endured for humanityeven to this mysterious hiding of the Fathers face. But now when that face was again seen by Him radiant with love, He knew that His great work was ended, that He had done for men what men could not have done for themselves, and that the Father was well pleased (Rom. 8:3). Then physical nature, which had been forgotten during the dreadful conflictas men forget their wounds in the press of battlereasserted itself, and the cry arose, I thirst. But in this very cry the last unfulfilled word of prophecy regarding the Saviour in His humiliation received its fulfilment. It had been predicted of the suffering Servant of Jehovah that in His thirst they should give Him vinegar to drink. Thus the whole prophetic picture of Messiah in His sufferingsthrough which He was made perfect (Heb. 2:10; Heb. 5:7)was filled in; and all men might see that He was the fulfilment of law and prophecythe divinely given, God-appointed Messiah.

III. This thirst of the Redeemer was endured for us.

1. What He endured might be held to be symbolical of that despairing search after God and peace of humanity, that, longing and thirst after God, which was now to be satisfied. To the Redeemer the travail of His soul was now finished, and He desired to see the end of it and its blessed fruits. And as the wine-filled sponge was held to His lips He was physically refreshed and strengthened to proclaim that His soul-travail was past, His soul satisfied (Joh. 17:4-5).

2. Now, too, that the work was accomplished that had been given Him to do, He longed for the presence of the Father, and for that blessed home where the sin and evil of earth could no more pain and torture His pure spirit (Joh. 11:33; Joh. 12:27).

3. He thirsted, He endured, that an ever-flowing fountain of the water of life might be opened for all who desire to have their soul-thirst quenched (Isa. 55:1; Rev. 22:17). And He shall be most satisfied, and the courts of heaven shall ring (Luk. 15:10) with songs of joy, when men and women who have themselves drunk and been satisfied from those rivers of Life which He thirsted and died to send forth, shall lead others who are thirsting for the higher lifethe life of Christs redeemed onesto drink and thirst no more.

Joh. 19:30. It is finished.The life heralded by promises of peace is slowly ebbing in pain. He who was announced as king dies as a malefactor. His kingly crown is one of thorns, His high-priestly altar a cross, His sacrifice Himself. The world looked on coldly or mockingly. If His entrance into life was humble, what of His exit? Yet at His birth angels rejoiced, at His death nature trembled. What a life of holiness and heavenly beneficence was it which was thus closing! But this death was the most momentous event in the worlds history. The completion of a great work is matter of rejoicing. Yet never was a great undertaking ended in apparently less auspicious circumstances. These, however, were the concomitants of His victory. What is the meaning of this word?

I. In this word Jesus proclaimed the close of His state of humiliation.

1. His earthly life, begun in lowliness, etc., misunderstood, etc., was ended. The suffering His soul endured in contact with sin, unbelief, etc.; His rejection by the Jews, the weakness of the disciples faith, the dark deed of Judas, Gethsemane and the cross, were now past.
2. His body for a time must lie in the grave, but it will see no corruption. His humiliation was past, and what we should remember is that it was endured for us.

II. This word shows that Gods preparatory discipline of the race had ended.

1. Moses and the prophets take the position of witnesses to Christ. The educational rgime of the law was no longer necessary; it had served its purpose of bringing home to mens hearts the consciousness of sin, etc. Sacrifice was shown to be typical of this supreme sacrifice, and prophetic utterances ceased which pointed to a coming deliverance by a heaven-sent Redeemer.

2. The heathen worlds dreaming of a coming age fairer than the golden age of fable here became a reality; and even their false religions served an educational purpose, emphasising ever the need of cleansing. And what a training had theirs beena wandering ever further from the true source of light! To what depths of iniquity had they sunkall going in the same dreary track, with no true light to cheer them on the way!
3. But this voice from the cross proclaimed the end of this preparatory training. Every type and symbol of redemption must give place, for the antitype had come. Jew and Gentile were under tutelage till they had learned that no rites or ceremonies could bring reconciliation. The times of this ignorance God winked at, etc., but is now calling men to be saved without the deeds of the law, etc.

III. This utterance implies the final triumph of the people of God through Christs finished work.

1. By His will we are sanctified by the offering of the body of Jesus, etc. (Rom. 8:30); and when thus sanctified believers shall also be glorified (1Co. 1:30). But notice: If we are His we must be justified and sanctified. There should be no mistake here.

2. The final triumph of the kingdom of God is here proclaimed. Christ died, but in this very fact is the potentiality of the worlds redemption. Even at that very moment Christ began to see the travail of His soul, the discomfiture of the enemies of His kingdom, and its final triumph. This cry is one of victory. It was the signal of the triumphant conclusion of His enduring for men.

3. It is finished. It is the voice of Emmanuel, the Captain of our salvation, who on the red battle-field lays aside the weapons of His warfare, and raises the shout of victorya conqueror over sin and death and Satan, though seeming to be vanquished by His foes.

HOMILETIC NOTES

Joh. 19:23-30. Christs battle and victory on the cross.Let us also go, that we may die with Him, Thomas had said to his fellow-disciples (Joh. 11:16), when Jesus prepared to go the grave of Lazarus to awake him from the dead. In the case of Thomas this was more a kind of resignation which despaired of escape than faith which follows Jesus to death and yet fills the heart with hope of victory. On Good Friday it is well for us to accompany Jesus on the way of His sufferings and death, to pass through it all with Him in faith, so that going with Him we may be led to the cross, but also from the cross to the throne. It is well also to comprehend how the sufferings and death of Jesus effect our reconciliation with the Father, and how thereby are given to us comfort in life and in death. We consider the theme

How Christ suffered and died on the cross.We picture to ourselves in connection with His four last words:

1. His anguish of soul;
2. His physical anguish;
3. His cry of victory;
4. His closing prayer.

Joh. 19:23-30. Christs conflict and victory on the cross.We represent to ourselves:

I. Christs bitter conflict.

1. The earth was darkened, for even nature suffers through the sinfulness of men.
2. The cup of divine wrath was emptied out on the Son of man, so that He felt as if God had forsaken Him, and burning thirst increased the torture of His physical frame.
3. The unbelieving world requited the unspeakable love of the Crucified to humanity with mockery.

II. Christs glorious victory.l. The crucified One remained in communion with His Father; He committed His spirit into the hands of the Father; consciously and freely He yielded up His life.

2. The ransom for mans debt of guilt was paid; the Father who was angry with mens sins is reconciled; Gods righteousness and Gods love are firmly established. The work of redemption is completed!Translated from J. L. Sommer.

Joh. 19:23-30. The death of Jesus.It is no ordinary death which we are called to witness. The suns light is veiled, the earth quakes, and the veil of the temple is rent. Adam was pointed to Him who dies upon the cross, in that it was said to him that the womans seed should bruise the serpents head. Noah was occupied with Him when he recognised that the life was in the blood. Abraham saw Him in Isaac bound on the altar, and in the bleeding ram. Moses preached Him when he raised up the brazen serpent. Isaiah pointed Him out as He who was wounded for our transgressions, etc. And as men from afar had looked forward to the cross, so we look back from afar to the cross. They are eternal obsequies which are celebrated for Him who dies on Golgotha. It is with us as if to-day we stood beneath His cross, heard His latest voice, saw His blood-besprinkled face. Then we say, O sorrow and mourning! Yet also, In Him we have redemption through His blood, etc. No ordinary death is this which we are called to behold. We seek to find expression for:

I. The astonishment which fills us.The true God, the Creator, the King, the Life, eternal Love, the holy God, the Judge of the world, in deepest suffering and misery.

II. The grief to which this moves us.

1. Over the unbelieving world, which mocks Him.
2. Over our own hearts, which so often forget Him.

III. The penitence which it preaches to us.

1. We should remember Gods wrath against our sins.
2. Take care that we dishonour God no more by sinfulness.

IV. The comfort which it confirms to us.

1. In the struggle with sin.
2. In the pains of death.Appuhn, idem.

Joh. 19:30. The sixth word of Jesus from the cross.

I. Its meaning.

1. The Messianic prophecies and types are fulfilled.
2. The Lords sufferings had come to an end.
3. Reconciliation between God and man is established, and peace reinstated.

II. The blessings for which we have to thank it.

1. It calls us to repentance.
2. It assures us of salvation.
3. It serves to strengthen our faith.
4. It enlivens our hope in relation to enduring unto the end.Dr. von Biarowsky.

Joh. 19:30. The dominion of sin and death ended on the cross (Rom. 5:12-14; Rom. 5:19; 1Co. 15:22).The thought of the apostle in these and other passages circulates around Adam on the one hand and Christ on the other, as centres of spiritual influence. The state of man before Christ, and the state of man afteror of all who belong to Christ and share in His redeeming workis strongly contrasted. Adam, as sinner, gives its character to the one; Christ, as Saviour and the righteous One, gives its character to the other. In the passage from the Epistle to the Romans sin and death are represented as the ruling powers in the world. Adam is the source through which they have entered into the world. Through his one act of sin Adam not only fell himself, but the line of spiritual integrity was broken in him. The flaw extended to the race. Sin entered the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all, for that all have sinned. In other words, sin passed to us from Adam, and death from sin. This is the simple meaning of the words as they stand in our version. They might seem at first to add little to the doctrine of hereditary corruption as generalised from the facts of experience. But on a closer view they will be found to add various features to this doctrine. They emphasise the position of Adam as not merely the first in a line of sinners, but as the type or representative of the whole lineone whose act was fatal not only for himself, but for all who followed him. All mankind fell with him into the death which he had incurred.

1. This typical character of Adam;
2. The descent of spiritual depravity from him; and
3. The fatal character of the results which followed, not only for himself, but for his posterityin other words, the judicial character of these results in their downward passageare all ideas more or less involved in the passage.Dr. John Tulloch.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Joh. 19:26. Woman, behold thy son.It has been considered strange that the Saviour, in speaking to Mary, should have made use of the distant word Woman, instead of the tender name of Mother. In reply to this, it is certainly true that He did so, partly because He would not still more deeply wound her bleeding heart by the sweet title of mother, as well as that He might not excite within Himself a storm of human emotions; and likewise lest He should expose His mother to the rudeness of the surrounding crowd. But the chief reason why, instead of the maternal title, He used the more general term Woman, or lady, lies much deeper, both in this and the well-known scene at the marriage in Cana. He certainly meant His mother to understand that henceforward His earthly connection with her must give way to a superior one. As though He had said, Thou, my mother, wilt from this time be as one of my daughters, and I thy Lord. Thou believest in Me, and shalt be blessed. Thou layest hold of the hem of My garment, and I appear in thy stead. Thou adorest Me, and I am thy High Priest and King. Mother, brother, and sister, henceforward are all who swear allegiance to My banner. The relationships according to the flesh and the manner of the world have an end; other and more spiritual and heavenly take their place. It was this that the Lord intended to suggest to Marys mind; and hence the word Woman, which at first sounds strange, instead of the more tender and affectionate term Mother. Nay, it the less became Him to call her mother now, since this term in the Hebrew includes in it the idea of Mistress, whilst He was just preparing, as the Lord of lords, to ascend the throne of eternal Majesty. But whilst endeavouring to elevate Marys mind above the sphere of merely human conceptions, He does not forget either that He is her son, or that she is His dear and sorely-tried mother; and reflects at the same time that man in his weakness has need of man, and must, besides the heart of God, possess at least one heart upon earth into which he can confidingly pour out his own, and upon whose love and faithfulness he may firmly reckon under all circumstances. For these reasons, the Lord is desirous in His filial forethought, and as far as is practicable, to fill up for Mary, even in a human respect, the void which His decease would leave in her life, and give her, instead of Himself, a son to assist her, even in an earthly manner, in whom she might place entire confidence, and on whose shoulder she could lean in all her distresses, cares, and sorrows, and this new son He bequeaths to her is His favourite disciple, the faithful and feeling John. Is it not as if He intended to say?I well know, My mother, how solitary and dreary must be a widows path upon earth when the crown is removed from her head. But lo I here is the disciple that lay in My bosom, and is thus peculiarly prepared to become thy support and stay. He is ready to do all I desire of him; and since I have neither silver nor gold, I bequeath thee all My claim on this disciples love, gratitude, and faithfulness. Let him be thy son! It was thus He loved to the end; thus delicately does He provide for all the necessities of those He loves. And as He formerly did, so He does still. He is to this hour the compassionate High Priest. He enters most feelingly into the wants of those who confide in Him, so that every one in his station, whether they be widows, orphans, poor and infirm, or to whatever class of the weary and heavy-laden they belong, may rely most peculiarly on His providential care. After saying to Mary, Woman, behold, etc., He says to John, Behold thy mother. Oh, what a proof does the Saviour here give His disciple of the affection and confidence which He reposes in him! He imposes a burden upon him, but He knows that John will regard it as the highest honour and felicity which could be bestowed upon him on earth. Nor is the Saviour mistaken in His disciple. John understands His Masters wish, looks at Mary, and his whole soul says to her, My mother!F. W. Krummacher, Suffering Saviour.

Joh. 19:26-27. Self-renunciation at the Cross.Thus the Redeemer endured. Although terror seized hold of His disciples heart and a sword went through His mothers soul as He bled on the cross, yet no bands of blood, nor human friendship, could turn Him aside from His high emprise. And thus, too, His disciples endured. No Peter would have left all, no Paul would have borne the reproach of Christ, no missionary would have gone among the heathen, no Luther would have journeyed to Worms, had they conferred with flesh and blood merelyif womens tears and friends entreaties had availed more than the call of the Lord. No, where the Lords work is in question the most beloved on earth must stand aside; when God commands, then we must be prepared to leave and part with what is dearest. Especially at critical moments it is needful to be armed with this spirit of self-denial. Then no sweetest heart-ties, no soft feeling, should hinder us from setting our face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem. Men must renounce many a peaceful hour, many a lawful joy, many a pleasant custom, in the service of the Lord. Sometimes the husband must drag himself away from wife and child when duty calls him; and then the wife must become a heroine, and able to give up husband and child to the divine service, like that heroic mother of the times of the Maccabees who saw her seven sons die before her eyes, whilst she herself had exhorted them to die the martyrs death.Translated from Karl Gerok.

Joh. 19:27. Behold thy mother.He who was dying on the cross, whose name was Love, was the great philanthropist, whose charity embraced the whole human race. His last dying act was an act of individual attachment, tenderness toward a mother, fidelity toward a friend. Now, some well-meaning persons seem to think that the larger charities are incompatible with the indulgence of particular affections; and therefore, all that they do and aim at is on a large scale; they occupy themselves with the desire to emancipate the whole mass of mankind. But it not unfrequently happens that those who act in this manner are but selfish after all, and are quite inattentive to all the fidelities of friendship and the amenities of social life. It was not so, if we may venture to say it, that the spirit of the Redeemer grew, for as He progressed in wisdom and knowledge, He progressed also in love. First, we read of His tenderness and obedience to His parents, then the selection of twelve to be near Him from the rest of His disciples, and then the selection of one more especially as a friend. It was through this that, apparently, His human soul grew in grace and in love. And if it were not so with Him, at all events it must not be so with us. It is in vain for a man in his dying hour, who has loved no man individually, to attempt to love the human race; everything here must be done by degrees. Love is a habit. God has given to us the love of relations and friends, the love of father and mother, brother, sister, friend, to prepare us gradually for the love of God; if there be one stone of the foundation not securely laid, the superstructure will be Imperfect. The domestic affections are the alphabet of love.F. W. Krummacher, Suffering Saviour.

Joh. 19:28. The Redeemer drank the full cup of agony on the cross.I thirst; in answer to this they gave Jesus vinegar to drink. Now upon first reading this we are often tempted to suppose, from the unnatural character of the draught, that an insult was intended, and therefore we rank this among the taunts and fearful sufferings which He endured at His crucifixion. But as we become acquainted with Oriental history, we discover that this vinegar was the common drink of the Roman army, their wine, and therefore was the most likely to be at hand when in the company of soldiers, as He then was. Let it be borne in mind that a draught was twice offered to Him; once it was accepted, once it was refused. That which was refused was the medicated potion, wine mingled with myrrh, the intention of which was to deaden pain, and therefore when it was presented to the Saviour it was rejected. And the reason commonly assigned for that seems to be the true one: the Son of man would not meet death in a state of stupefaction; He chose to meet His God awake. There are two modes in which pain may be struggled withthrough the flesh, and through the spirit; the one is the office of the physician, the other that of the Christian. The physicians care is at once to deaden pain, either by insensibility or specifics; the Christians object is to deaden pain by patience. We dispute not the value of the physicians remediesin their way they are permissible and valuable; but yet let it be observed that in these there is nothing moral; they may take away the venom of the serpents sting, but they do not give the courage to plant the foot upon the serpents head, and to bear the pain without flinching. Therefore the Redeemer refused, because it was not through the flesh, but through the Spirit, that He would conquer. To have accepted the anodyne would have been to escape from suffering, but not to conquer it. But the vinegar or sour wine was accepted as a refreshing draught, for it would seem that He did not look upon the value of the suffering as consisting in this, that He should make it as exquisite as possible, but rather that He should not suffer one drop of the cup of agony which His Father had put into His hand to trickle down the side untasted. Neither would He make to Himself one drop more of suffering than His Father had given.F. W. Robertson.

Joh. 19:28. Christs thirst on Calvary.Indeed He did thirst: The zeal of Thine house hath consumed Me. He was parched with longing for the glory of God and the safety of man. I thirst: I thirst to see of the travail of My soul; I thirst for the effects of My anguish, the discomfiture of Satan, the vindication of My Father, the opening of the kingdom of heaven to all believers. Shall our last end be, in any measure, like this? Would that it might! Would that, when we come to die, we may thirst with the thirst of the Redeemers soul! Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. My soul thirsteth for Thee, is an exclamation of the psalmist, when declaring the ardency of his longings after God. And our Saviour endured thirst that our thirst might be quenched. His tongue clave to the roof of His mouthMy heart, saith He, in the midst of My body, is even like melting waxthat we, inhabitants naturally of a dry and barren land, might have access to the river of life, which, clear as crystal, pours itself through the paradise of God. Who does not thirst for these waters? Ah! there is nothing required but that every one of us should be able, with perfect truth, to declare I thirst, and the Scripture shall be fulfilled in that mans drawing water out of the wells of salvation. For the invitations of the Bible presuppose nothing but a sense of want and a wish for relief. Ho! every one that thirsteththere is the summons, there the description. Oh that we may now thirst with a thirst for pardon, a thirst for reconciliation, a thirst for holiness! Then, when we come to die, we shall thirst for the joys of immortality, for the pleasures which are at Gods right hand; we shall thirst, even as Christ did, that the Scripture may be fulfilled. And the Scripture shall be fulfilled; for, bowing the head and giving up the ghost, we shall be in His presence with whom is the fountain of life, and every promise that has cheered us here shall be turned into performance to delight us for ever.Henry Melvill.

Joh. 19:30. Christs dying love embraces the race.That satisfaction was not the mere payment of an obligation which man had incurred; it was not the rendering of a bare equivalent for human sin to the outraged justice of God. It was more than plenary; it was superabundant, since it was offered in a finite nature, but by an infinite Being. We may shrink, indeed, from saying that such a satisfaction must have exerted a peremptory claim on the justice of God. Needed it not, after all, to be accepted by infinite Mercy? Might it not have been dispensed with? Might not the almighty Father, infinite in His resources, have saved the world without exacting the death of His Son as the price of its salvation? Here revelation does not encourage conjecture. Enough that the satisfaction actually offered has been as really accepted. We may presume, without hardihood, that, if God might have saved us in other ways, He has chosen the way which was in itself the best. And the freedom of the Fathers gift of His blessed Son, the freedom of the Sons self-oblation, are insisted on in Scripture, as if with the object of condemning by anticipation any mercantile estimate of infinite Love. There is a profusion of self-sacrifice which meets us everywhere in the history of the Passion. Throughout it is the history of a plenteous redemption. The bearing of the divine Victim is not that of one who is tendering an equivalent for a debt which had been incurred. He does not seek to undergo only the precise amount of ignominy and pain which was needed for the redemption. He has offered His human will without reserve; and His offering has been accepted. True, one blow from the soldiers sword or hand, one lash from the scourge, one pang of Christs sacred soul, one drop of His precious blood, might have redeemed our world, or a thousand such worlds as ours. For each act of submission, each throb of pain, had infinite value in thesight of Heavennot only as representing the perfect offering of our Lords will, but as being penetrated by the informing presence and boundless merits of His divinity. Yet Jesus, who might have saved us thus, was in truth enamoured of profuse self-sacrifice. In His love and in His pity He redeemed us (Isa. 63:9), and His pity and His love knew no bounds. He had surrendered His throne on high, His angel-ministers, His earthly home; He had left His mother and His friends; and when His doctrine and His miracles had brought Him fair fame and popular ascendency, He chose to become a worm, and no man; the very scorn of men, and the outcast of the people (Psa. 22:6). And so He gave His face to the smiters, and His cheeks to them that pulled off the hair. He gave His body to physical torture; He gave His soul to an unspeakable spiritual agony. He offered the long history of His suffering life, and of His death of shame and pain, to atone for the sins of us guilty men. He gave all to that will, in which we are sanctified, by the offering of His body (Heb. 10:10). Less might have merited the Fathers grace; less might have satisfied His justice. But Jesus would display the range, the power, the prodigal generosity, of divine charity. The cross was to be not merely the instrument of His punishment, but the symbol of the throne of His conquering love. I, when I am lifted up, etc. (Joh. 12:32). He loved me, and gave Himself for me. Each sinner, each saint, around His cross might have used the words of the apostle. For His blessed mother and St. John, for the Roman judge and for the Roman soldiers, for the chief priest and for the Pharisee, for the vilest and hardest of His executioners, and for the thieves who hung dying beside Him, our Lord gave Himself to death. For all who have been first and greatest, for all who have been least and last in human history, for all whom we have loved or seen, for our separate souls, He gave Himself. True, His creatures indeed are still free to accept and appropriate or to refuse His gift. But no lost soul shall murmur hereafter that the tender lovingkindness of God has not willed to save it. No saint in glory shall pretend that aught in him has been accepted and crowned, save the infinite merit, the priceless gifts, of his Redeemer. The dying love of Jesus embraces the race; and yet it concentrates itself with direct, as it seems to us, with exclusive intensity, upon each separate soul. He dies for all, and yet He dies for each, as if each soul were the solitary object of His incarnation and of His death.H. P. Liddon.

Fuente: The Preacher’s Complete Homiletical Commentary Edited by Joseph S. Exell

(19) Comp. Notes on Mat. 27:37; Mar. 15:26; Luk. 23:38. St. John speaks of the title placed over the cross. This was the common Roman name for an inscription of the kind, which was meant to give information of the crime for which the sentence of crucifixion had been given. St. Matthew calls it the accusation; St. Mark, the superscription of the accusation; St. Luke, the superscription. (Comp. Luk. 23:38.) The inscription varies in word, though not in sense, in each of the narratives; i.e., the Evangelists, in dealing with a written inscription, in which there could have been neither doubt nor difficulty, have not been careful to give us the exact words. The fact is significant, as bearing upon the literary characteristics of the Gospels, and upon the value which the writers set upon exact accuracy in unimportant details. The reason of the variations may, of course, be traced to the fact that one or more of the accounts may be a translation from the Hebrew inscription.

Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)

19. Pilate wrote a title Pilate (doubtless by the hand of a writer) prepared this title, with the careful purpose of another and final sarcasm upon the Jews. It was probably borne upon the person of Jesus while going to execution, and then fastened upon the cross.

Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

‘And Pilate wrote a title also, and put it on the cross. And there was written, JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS. This title therefore read many of the Jews for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Hebrew (Aramaic?) and Latin and Greek. And the Chief Priests of the Jews therefore said to Pilate, “Do not write the King of the Jews, but that he said, ‘I am the king of the Jews’.” Pilate answered, “What I have written, I have written”.’

It was normal for a man’s crime to be recorded on his cross, and what Pilate wrote tied in with his earlier words (Joh 18:39; Joh 19:14-15). The Jews had charged Him with claiming to be a king, so Pilate was determined to let the Jews know that he saw Jesus as their king. Something about Jesus had impressed him, and besides, he hated these proud, demanding priests. He possibly felt that Jesus was their superior. So he was being deliberately provocative. The use of three languages ensured that all could read it wherever they came from. Aramaic was often spoken of as ‘Hebrew’. Aramaic and Greek were the two popular languages in the area.

The cross was clearly in a very public place where many people passed by and as they passed they read what was written. The city was still full of people there for the Passover, which would include many Galileans. And as they looked at this One whom they had seen as a prophet, no doubt many a word was said, and many a rumour passed round. The King of the Jews had been crucified. And the stories built up, and blame was ascribed. It is not surprising that the Chief Priests were unhappy.

They therefore approached Pilate to ask him to change the words. But Pilate knew that he was on safe ground here. He had had enough of these interfering priests, and it must have given him great pleasure to be able to say, ‘what I have written, I have written.’ As far as he was concerned, if anyone deserved that miserable title of ‘King of the Jews’ it was Jesus. As far as the writer was concerned he wanted his readers to know that Jesus’ claim bore Pilate’s approbation.

‘The chief priests of the Jews’. This is an expression only used here. There is an ironic contrast between ‘the king of the Jews’ and the ‘chief priests of the Jews’. He came to His own and His own received Him not (Joh 1:11). They were the chief priests of the very people over whom He was king, but they disowned Him. And they were supposed to be representing God.

Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett

Joh 19:19-22. And Pilate wrote a title, The governor, as usual, put up a title or writing on the cross, signifying the crime for which Jesus was condemned: this writing was in black characters, on a whitened board, and in the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin languages, that foreigners, as well as natives, might be able to read it. All the evangelists have given an account of the title, but the words of it are different in each: the difference however may easily have arisen from the languages in which the title was written; for one evangelist may have inscribed the words of the Greek inscription, a second might translate the Hebrew, a third the Latin, and a fourth may have given a different translation to the Hebrew or Latin. Thus the inscription of the title may be exactlygiven by each of the evangelists, though the words that they have mentioned be different, especially as they all agree inthe meaning of it. It has been observed, that this title was written in Latin, on account of the dignity of the Roman empire; in Hebrew, on account of the place in which the punishment was inflicted; and inGreek, on account of the great con-fluence of the Hellenistic Jews which was at that time in Jerusalem; and because Greek was then a very universal language. The inscription set up in the temple to prohibit strangers from coming within those sacred limits, was written in all these three languages. It is indeed remarkable, that, by the influence of divine Providence, the cross of Christ bore an inscription in the languages of those nations which were soon to be subdued to his faith; for not only the Jewish religion was to give place to him, but likewise the Grecian learning, and the Roman strength. The superscription, however, highly displeased the chief priests, because as it represented the crime for which Jesus was condemned, so it insinuated that he had been acknowledged for the Messiah. Besides, being placed over the head of one who was suffering the most infamous punishment, it implied that all who attempted to deliver the Jews should come to the same end. Wherefore, the faith and hope of the nation being thus publicly ridiculed, the priests thought themselves highly affronted, and came to Pilate in great concern, desiring that the writing might be altered: but Pilate having plainly intended the affront, because the Jews had constrained him to crucify Jesus, contrary to his judgment and inclination; rejected their application with some warmth, and with that inflexibility which historians represent as part of his character.

Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke

Joh 19:19-20 . ] Not a supplemental statement: he had written (De Wette, Tholuck), but: he wrote (caused to be written), whilst the crucifixion took place without; and when it had taken place, he caused the (solemn Roman expression for a public inscription, particularly for the tablets, naming the criminal and his offence, see Lipsius, de cruce , p. 101, and Wetstein) to be placed on the cross. He himself was not present at the crucifixion, Mar 15:43-44 .

. .] Consistent bitterness in the designation of Jesus. Joh 19:20 . ] of the hierarchic party.

. . .] See on Mat 27:33 .

., . . .] No longer dependent on , since , Joh 19:20 , unlike Joh 19:19 , is not to be taken in a general sense. It rather attaches to the first circumstance, on account of which the made their proposal, Joh 19:21 , to Pilate ( , Joh 19:20 ), a second assigning a reason therefor, namely: it (that which ran on the ) was written in three languages , so that it could be read by everybody, including foreigners. For an inscription, even in four languages, on the tomb of Gordian, see in Jul. Capitolin. 24.

Fuente: Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer’s New Testament Commentary

DISCOURSE: 1722
THE SUPERSCRIPTION AFFIXED TO THE CROSS

Joh 19:19-22. And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. And the writing was, JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS. This title then read many of the Jews: for the place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city: and it was written in Hebrew, and Greek, and Latin. Then said the chief priests of the Jews to Pilate, Write not, The King of the Jews; but that he said, I am King of the Jews. Pilate answered, What I have written I have written.

NOTHING was left undone which could add to the sufferings of our blessed Lord. From the tribunal at which he was condemned, he was hurried away to execution, and crucified between two most notorious malefactors, as being himself the vilest of the human race. This however served only to fulfil the Scripture, which had said, He was numbered with the transgressors. On such occasions it was common to place above the head of the criminal an inscription, by which all the spectators might know both his name and the crime for which he suffered. This was observed at the crucifixion of our Lord: and (as no circumstance respecting him is uninteresting) we shall call your attention to,

I.

The superscription put over him

This, however intended at first, must certainly be considered by us in a two-fold view;

1.

As an accusation against him

[The principal charge which had been exhibited against him before Pilate, was, that he had professed himself to be Christ, a King [Note: Luk 23:2.]. On this point he had been interrogated by Pilate; and had witnessed a good confession, acknowledging plainly, that he was a King, though his kingdom was not of this world [Note: Joh 18:36-37 and 1Ti 1:16.]. Pilate, seeing that this claim did not at all interfere with the temporal government of Csar, considered it as unworthy his attention; and therefore sought by all possible means to release him. But the chief priests, being determined to prevail, represented this claim of his as an avowed hostility to Csar; and declared that the protecting of Jesus was nothing less than treason [Note: ver. 12.]. This terrified Pilate into a compliance with their wishes. He instantly consented to his death; and, according to custom, ordered the crime of which Jesus was accused to be affixed to his cross, in these memorable words, Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews.]

2.

As a testimony in his favour

[As Caiaphas, when designing only to destroy Jesus, unconsciously declared the extensive benefits which would flow from his death, so Pilate, meaning only to inform the people for what reason Jesus was put to death, unintentionally attested his innocence. Had Jesus falsely pretended to be the King of the Jews, he would have been guilty of fraud and imposture: but as he really was what he pretended to be, the title placed over his head was nothing more than a plain truth, containing not only no crime at all, but not even the smallest charge of crime. What could be a stronger testimony in his favour than this?

The testimony itself contained the most important truth that could possibly be affirmed: it declared that Jesus was the King of Israel, that very King predicted in the prophets [Note: Jer 23:5-6. Zec 9:9.], even Messiah the Prince, who should be cut off, not for his own sins [Note: Dan 9:26.], but for the sins of others. And, that it might be universally known, it was written in Hebrew, and Greek, and Latin; (the three languages most known in the world at that time:) so that, in fact, Pilate himself became the first preacher of a crucified Redeemer.]

Whether the precise mode of expressing the accusation was intentional on the part of Pilate, or not, we cannot but wonder at,

II.

The firmness of Pilate in relation to it

That the superscription would give great offence, we may easily conceive: for the priests, so far from acknowledging Jesus as their king, had got sentence of death pronounced against him for arrogating to himself that honour. They did indeed expect the promised Messiah, and supposed that he would erect a temporal kingdom amongst them; and this very expectation made them feel still more keenly the indignity which this inscription offered them; since it intimated, that any person who should hereafter attempt to rescue them from the dominion of Cassar, should be crucified in like manner.
Without delay they make known to Pilate their wishes upon the subject, and propose an alteration in the words: but behold, he is firm and immoveable: his only answer to them is, What I have written, I have written.
Now to understand his answer aright, we must consider him,

1.

As incensed against them

[They had urged, and (so to speak) compelled him to give sentence against a man whom he knew to be innocent: and, being condemned in his own conscience, he could not but feel exceedingly displeased with them. The alteration which they proposed in the inscription was very trifling: it might have been made without in the least derogating from his authority: and, no doubt, if he had not been offended with them, he would have readily complied. But to a person irritated, no concession appears trifling. He felt himself injured by them: and therefore would not give way, even for a moment. His pride was hurt: and he determined that he would make them sensible of his displeasure. Hence he not only refused their petition, but expressed his refusal in terms most authoritative, most contemptuous, and most repulsive.]

2.

As over-ruled by God

[Though perfectly free to follow the dictates of his own mind, he was undoubtedly under the influence of God; just as Balaam was, who though of himself disposed to curse Israel, was invariably constrained to bless them [Note: Num 22:18; Num 22:38; Num 23:8; Num 23:11-12; Num 23:26; Num 24:10; Num 24:13.]. The truth exhibited in that inscription was itself unalterable, and was to be proclaimed to every people of every language under heaven. It was the corner-stone on which all mankind were to build their hopes: and therefore God, who had left Pilate to his natural timidity for the crucifying of his Son, now emboldened him to withstand their renewed solicitations, though in a matter of comparatively no importance [Note: Act 4:27-28.].

Thus it was on that occasion, and thus it ever shall be; the counsel of the Lord, that shall stand, and he will do all his will. As far as the wrath of man will praise him, he will suffer it to act; but the remainder of it he will restrain.]

We may notice from hence,
1.

What care God will take of his people

[He permitted his Son to be put to death, because that was necessary for the accomplishment of the Divine purposes in the work of redemption. But he took care that all his enemies should attest his innocence: and where so small a concession as that before us might have counteracted their testimony, he makes a poor shaking reed as firm and immoveable as a rock. Who then will be afraid to trust him? Who will not cheerfully commit his reputation, his interest, yea his very life, into the hands of such an almighty Friend? Know, beloved, that he is to his people both a sun and a shield; and that whilst he directs and invigorates them by his beams, he will protect and uphold them by his power The Lord reigneth, let the earth rejoice, and the multitude of the isles be glad thereof.]

2.

In what way they must attain to his kingdom

[That which is the highest privilege of the saints may be made the strongest article of accusation against them. In the primitive times, to be a Christian was to expose oneself to all manner of calumny and danger. And thus at this time, to be numbered with the saints is to be classed with enthusiasts, fools, and hypocrites. A man need have no other inscription over his head than, This is one of the saints, and he shall never want for contempt or hatred. Let him call himself a King, and men will be ready to cry out, Crucify him! crucify him! But this should not discourage us: it is the way the Saviour trod before us. We, like him, are kings [Note: Rev 1:6.]; we have a crown and a kingdom given to us [Note: Luk 22:29.]: and in due time shall be seated with Christ on his throne, even as he now sitteth on his Fathers throne [Note: Rev 3:21.]. But we must suffer with him, if we would reign with him [Note: 2Ti 2:12.]. Even he, though a Son, was made perfect through sufferings; and we also must go through much tribulation, before we can enter into the kingdom of heaven [Note: Act 14:22.]. Let us then consider what he endured for us; and let us arm ourselves with the same mind [Note: 1Pe 4:1.]: and let us rest assured, that, if we suffer with him, we shall also be glorified together [Note: Rom 8:17.].]

Fuente: Charles Simeon’s Horae Homileticae (Old and New Testaments)

And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross, and the writing was, JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS. (20) This title then read many of the Jews: for the place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city: and it was written in Hebrew, and Greek, and Latin. (21) Then said the chief priests of the Jews to Pilate, Write not, The King of the Jews; but that he said, I am King of the Jews. (22) Pilate answered, What I have written, I have written.

There is somewhat very striking and well worthy of our regard, in the title which Pilate wrote and put on the cross of Christ. I will beg to detain the Reader while I propose an observation or two upon it.

It appears from history, that it was the custom of the Romans, when at any time inflicting capital punishment, first to proclaim the name and crimes of the person going to suffer. Sometimes this was done by an herald going before the culprit to the place of execution, and sometimes by publishing his name and crimes over his head, that all passing by might read. And in all those cases, it was done with a view to justify the sentence, and to make known the equity of the Roman nation and character.

In this instance of our dear Lord, there are two points which are more particularly deserving our notice. The first is, that the Inscription on Christ’s cross was the very reverse of what they intended, for it confirmed both Christ’s innocency, and proved by their own confession what Jesus had claimed; This is the King of the Jews. And the other is, that Pilate himself who had passed sentence of death upon Jesus for the claim, now confirmed it with his own hand. And no sooner was the thing done, than some of the more knowing ones perceived the oversight, and begged Pilate to alter it. But the Lord who compelled Pilate’s hand thus to honor Christ, and write his own mittimus of condemnation, restrained his heart from allowing any change. What I have written, (said he,) I have written. And this positiveness in such a character as Pilate is the more wonderful, who had before shewn such a changeable, fearful, and irresolute mind. Reader! think of it, and behold how the Lord thus overruled the whole to vindicate Christ’s innocency, to proclaim his royalties, and to have his name published in the three great languages of the chief part of the then governing world. The Hebrew tongue being the language of the Jews, the Greek of the Gentiles among the greater parts of the earth, and the Latin the ordinary dialect of the Romans. What but the predisposing power of the Lord could have induced all these things? And who but must see the divine hand in the whole?

Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

19 And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. And the writing was, JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS.

Ver. 19. Jesus of Nazareth, &c. ] To persuade the people to bow superstitiously at the name of Jesus, Papists commonly (but ridiculously) teach in their pulpits, that Christ himself on the cross bowed his head on the right side, to reverence his own name, which was written over it; as Sir Edwin Sands relates from his own experience.

Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

19. ] Mat 27:37 .

Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament

Joh 19:19 . . “And Pilate wrote a ‘title,’ also, and set it on the cross.” The “title,” , was a board whitened with gypsum ( , ) such as were commonly used for public notices. Pilate himself, meaning to insult the Jews, ordered the precise terms of the inscription. , “a title also ,” in addition to all the other insults he had heaped on them during the trial.

Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson

John

AN EYE-WITNESS’ S ACCOUNT OF THE CRUCIFIXION

THE TITLE ON THE CROSS

Joh 19:19 .

This title is recorded by all four Evangelists, in words varying in form but alike in substance. It strikes them all as significant that, meaning only to fling a jeer at his unruly subjects, Pilate should have written it, and proclaimed this Nazarene visionary to be He for whom Israel had longed through weary ages. John’s account is the fullest, as indeed his narrative of all Pilate’s shufflings is the most complete. He alone records that the title was tri-lingual for the similar statement in the Authorised Version of Luke is not part of the original text. He alone gives the Jews’ request for an alteration of the title, and Pilate’s bitter answer. That angry reply betrays his motive in setting up such words over a crucified prisoner’s head. They were meant as a savage taunt of the Jews, not as an insult to Jesus, which would have been welcome to them. He seems to have regarded our Lord as a harmless enthusiast, to have had a certain liking for Him, and a languid curiosity as to Him, which came by degrees to be just tinged with awe as he felt that he could not quite make Him out. Throughout, he was convinced that His claim to be a king contained no menace for Caesar, and he would have let Jesus go but for fear of being misrepresented at Rome. He felt that the sacrifice of one more Jew was a small price to pay to avert his accusation to Caesar; he would have sacrificed a dozen such to keep his place. But he felt that he was being coerced to do injustice, and his anger and sense of humiliation find vent in that written taunt. It was a spurt of bad temper and a measure of his reluctance.

Besides the interest attaching to it as Pilate’s work, it seems to John significant of much that it should have been fastened on the Cross, and that it should have been in the three languages, Hebrew Aramaic, Greek, and Latin.

Let us deal with three points in succession.

I. The title as throwing light on the actors in the tragedy.

We may consider it, first, in its bearing on Jesus’ claims. He was condemned by the priests on the theocratic charge of blasphemy, because He made Himself the Son of God. He was sentenced by Pilate on the civil charge of rebellion, which the priests brought against Him as an inference necessarily resulting from His claim to be the Son of God. They drew the same conclusion as Nathanael did long before: ‘Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God,’ and therefore ‘Thou art the King of Israel.’ And they were so far right that if the former designation is correct, the latter inevitably follows.

Both charges, then, turned on His personal claims. To Pilate He explained the nature of His kingdom, so as to remove any suspicion that it would bring Him and His subjects into collision with Rome, but He asserted His kingship, and it was His own claim that gave Pilate the material for His gibe. It is worth notice, then, that these two claims from His own lips, made to the authorities who respectively took cognisance of the theocratic and of the civic life of the nation, and at the time when His life hung on the decision of the two, were the causes of His judicial sentence. The people who allege that Jesus never made the preposterous claims for Himself which Christians have made for Him, but was a simple Teacher of morality and lofty religion, have never fairly faced the simple question: ‘For what, then, was He crucified?’ It is easy for them to dilate on the hatred of the Jewish officials and the gross earthliness of the masses, as explaining the attitude of both, but it is not so easy to explain how material was found for judicial process. One can understand how Jesus was detested by rulers, and how they succeeded in stirring up popular feeling against Him, but not how an indictment that would hold water was framed against Him. Nor would even Pilate’s complaisance have gone so far as to have condemned a prisoner against whom all that could be said was that he was disliked because he taught wisely and well and was too good for his critics. The question is, not what made Jesus disliked, but what set the Law in motion against Him? And no plausible answer has ever been given except the one that was nailed above His head on the Cross. It was not His virtues or the sublimity of His teaching, but His twofold claim to be Son of God and King of Israel that haled Him to His death.

We may further ask why Jesus did not clear up the mistakes, if they were mistakes, that led to His condemnation. Surely He owed it to the two tribunals before which He stood, no less than to Himself and His followers, to disown the erroneous interpretations on which the charges against Him were based. Even a Caiaphas was entitled to be told, if it were so, that He meant no blasphemy and was not claiming anything too high for a reverent Israelite, when He claimed to be the Son of God. If Jesus let the Sanhedrim sentence Him under a mistake of what His words meant, He was guilty of His own death.

We note, further, the light thrown by the Title on Pilate’s action. It shows his sense of the unreality of the charge which he basely allowed himself to be forced into entertaining as a ground of condemning Jesus. If this enigmatical prisoner had had a sword, there would have been some substance in the charge against Him, but He was plainly an idea-monger, and therefore quite harmless, and His kingship only fit to be made a jest of and a means of girding at the rulers. ‘Practical men’ always under-estimate the power of ideas. The Title shows the same contempt for ‘mere theorisers’ as animated his question, ‘What is truth?’ How little he knew that this ‘King,’ at whom he thought that he could launch clumsy jests, had lodged in the heart of the Empire a power which would shatter and remould it!

In his blindness to the radiant truth that stood before him, in the tragedy of his condemnation of that to which he should have yielded himself, Pilate stands out as a beacon for all time, warning the world against looking for the forces that move the world among the powers that the world recognises and honours. If we would not commit Pilate’s fault over again, we must turn to ‘the base things of this world’ and the ‘things that are not’ and find in them the transforming powers destined to ‘bring to nought things that are.’

Pilate’s gibe was an unconscious prophecy. He thought it an exquisite jest, for it hurt. He was an instance of that strange irony that runs through history, and makes, at some crisis, men utter fateful words that seem put into their lips by some higher power. Caiaphas and he, the Jewish chief of the Sanhedrim and the Roman procurator, were foremost in Christ’s condemnation, and each of them spoke such words, profoundly true and far beyond the speaker’s thoughts. Was the Evangelist wrong in saying: ‘This spake he not of himself?’

II. The Title on the Cross as unveiling the ground of Christ’s dominion.

It seemed a ludicrous travesty of royalty that a criminal dying there, with a crowd of his ‘subjects’ gloating on his agonies and shooting arrowy words of scorn at him, should be a King. But His cross is His throne. It is so because His death is His great work for the world. It is so because in it we see, with melted hearts, the sublimest revelation of His love. Absolute authority belongs to utter self-sacrifice. He, and only He, who gives Himself wholly to and for me, thereby acquires the right of absolute command over me. He is the ‘Prince of all the kings of the earth,’ because He has died and become the ‘First-begotten from the dead.’ From the hour when He said, ‘I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me,’ down to the hour when the seer heard the storm of praise from ‘ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands’ breaking round the throne, every New Testament reference to Christ’s dominion is accompanied with a reference to His cross, and every reference to His cross merges in a reference to His throne. The crown of thorns was a revelation of the inmost nature of Christ’s rule. The famous Iron Crown of Milan is a hard, cold circlet within a golden covering blazing with jewels. Christ’s right to sway men, like His power to do so, rests on His sacrifice for men. A Christianity without a Cross is a Christianity without authority, as has been seen over and over again in the history of the Church, and as is being seen again today, if men would only look. A Christ without a Cross is a Christ without a Kingdom. The dominion of the world belongs to Him who can sway men’s inmost motives. Hearts are His who has bought them with His own.

III. The Title as prophesying Christ’s universal dominion.

The three tongues in which it was written were chosen simply to make it easy to read by the crowd from every part of the Empire assembled at the Passover. There were Palestinian Jews there who probably read Aramaic only, and representatives from the widely diffused Jewish emigration in Greek-speaking lands, as well as Roman officials and Jews from Italy who would be most familiar with Latin. Pilate wanted his shaft to reach them all. It was, in its tri-lingual character, a sign of Israel’s degradation and a flourishing of the whip in their faces, as a government order in English placarded in a Bengalee village might be, or a Russian ukase in Warsaw. Its very wording betrayed a foreign hand, for a Jew would have written ‘King of Israel,’ not ‘of the Jews.’

But John divined a deeper meaning in this Title, just as he found a similar prophecy of the universality of Christ’s death in the analogous word of Caiaphas. As in that saying he heard a faint prediction that Jesus should die ‘not for that people only, but that He might also gather into one the scattered children of God,’ so he feels that Pilate was wiser than he knew, and that his written words in their threefold garb symbolised the relation of Christ and His work to the three great types of civilisation which it found possessed of the field. It bent them all to its own purposes, absorbed them into itself, used their witness and was propagated by means of them, and finally sucked the life out of them and disintegrated them. The Jew contributed the morality and monotheism of the Old Testament; the Greek, culture and the perfected language that should contain the treasure, the fresh wine-skin for the new wine; the Roman made the diffusion of the kingdom possible by the pax Romana, and at first sheltered the young plant. All three, no doubt, marred as well as helped the development of Christianity, and infused into it deleterious elements, which cling to it to-day, but the prophecy of the Title was fulfilled and these three tongues became heralds of the Cross and with ‘loud, uplifted trumpets blew’ glad tidings to the ends of the world.

That Title thus became an unconscious prophecy of Christ’s universal dominion. The Psalmist that sang of Messiah’s world-wide rule was sure that ‘all nations shall serve Him,’ and the reason why he was certain of it was ‘for He shall deliver the needy when he crieth.’ We may be certain of it for the same reason. He who can deal with man’s primal needs, and is ready and able to meet every cry of the heart, will never want suppliants and subjects. He who can respond to our consciousness of sin and weakness, and can satisfy hungry hearts, will build His sway over the hearts whom He satisfies on foundations deep as life itself. The history of the past becomes a prophecy of the future. Jesus has drawn men of all sorts, of every stage of culture and layer of civilisation, and of every type of character to Him, and the power which has carried a peasant of Nazareth to be the acknowledged King of the civilised world is not exhausted, and will not be till He is throned as Saviour and Ruler of the whole earth. There is only one religion in the world that is obviously growing. The gods of Greece and Rome are only subjects for studies in Comparative Mythology, the labyrinthine pantheon of India makes no conquests, Buddhism is moribund. All other religions than Christianity are shut up within definite and comparatively narrow geographical and chronological limits. But in spite of premature jubilations of enemies and much hasty talk about the need for a re-statement which generally means a negation of Christian truth, we have a clear right to look forward with quiet confidence. Often in the past has the religion of Jesus seemed to be wearing or worn out, but it has a strange recuperative power, and is wont to startle its enemies’ paeans over its grave by rising again and winning renewed victories. The Title on the Cross is for ever true, and is written again in nobler fashion ‘on the vesture and on the thigh’ of Him who rides forth at last to rule the nations, ‘KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.’

Fuente: Expositions Of Holy Scripture by Alexander MacLaren

And = Moreover.

wrote. John alone mentions that Pilate wrote it himself. See App-163.

on. Greek. epi. App-104.

the writing was = it was written.

OF NAZARETH = the Nazarene. See Joh 18:5.

Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics

19.] Mat 27:37.

Fuente: The Greek Testament

Joh 19:19. , wrote) not caring what would he likely to please the Jews.- , Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews) Mark expressed the predicate alone, the King of the Jews; Luke also the same, prefixing, This is [See my note, Luk 23:38]; Matthew, This is Jesus the King of the Jews. John expresses the actual words of Pilate, which without doubt were the same in the three tongues.

Fuente: Gnomon of the New Testament

wrote: Mat 27:37, Mar 15:26, Luk 23:38

And the: The apparent discrepancy between the accounts of this title given by the Evangelists, which has been urged as an objection against their inspiration and veracity, has been most satisfactorily accounted for by Dr. Townson; who supposes that, as it was written in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, it might have slightly varied in each language; and that, as Luke and John wrote for the Gentiles, they would prefer the Greek inscription, that Matthew, addressing the Jews, would use the Hebrew, and that Mark, writing to the Romans, would naturally give the Latin.

Jesus: Joh 19:3, Joh 19:12, Joh 1:45, Joh 1:46, Joh 1:49, Joh 18:33, Act 3:6, Act 26:9

Reciprocal: Psa 149:2 – let the Jer 30:21 – governor Zep 3:15 – the king Mat 2:2 – born Mat 2:23 – Nazareth Mat 25:34 – the King Mar 10:47 – Jesus Mar 14:67 – Jesus Mar 16:6 – Jesus Luk 18:37 – Jesus Joh 12:13 – the King Joh 18:5 – Jesus Joh 19:14 – Behold Act 2:22 – Jesus

Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge

9

The title also means an inscription, in the form of a placard or poster, placed on the cross in full view of the passers-by. The wording on this poster was, Jesus of Nazareth the king of the Jews. The inscription was to inform the public of the charge on which the victim had been crucified. This one showed that Jesus was nailed to the cross for the “crime” of being king of the Jews.

Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary

Joh 19:19. And Pilate also wrote a title, and put it on the cross; and there was written, JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS. The object, as before, was to do despite to the Jews, not to Jesus. To the last moment their terrible crime must, under the overruling providence of God, be brought home to them.

Fuente: A Popular Commentary on the New Testament

Observe here, 1. The inscription wrote by Pilate over our suffering Saviour: This is Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. It was the manner of the Romans, when they crucified a malefactor, to publish the cause of his death in capital letters over his head, that so the equity of their proceedings might more clearly appear to the people.

Now it is observable how wonderfully the wisdom of God overruled the heart and pen of Pilate to draw this title, which was truly honourable, and fix it to his cross. Pilate, who before was his judge, and pronounced him innocent, is now his herald to proclaim his glory.

Learn hence, that the regal dignity of Christ was openly proclaimed by an enemy, and that in the time of his greatest reproaches and sufferings. Pilate, without his own knowledge, did our Saviour an eminent piece of service; he did that for Christ, which none of his own disciples durst do: not designedly, but from the special overruling providence of God. No thanks to Pilate for all this; because the highest services performed to Christ undesignedly, shall neither be accepted nor rewarded by God.

Observe, 2. How the Jews endeavour to alter this: Write not, the king of the Jews: but that he said, I am the King of the Jews. The Jews thought it would be a disgrace to them, that Christ should be reported abroad to have been their king, therefore they desire an alteration of the writing. But Pilate, that wrote in honour of Christ, stiffly defends what he had done: to all their importunity he returns this resolute answer, what I have written, I have written.

Surely the constancy of Pilate, at this time, must be attributed to special divine providence. How wonderful was it, that he who before was as inconstant as a reed, should now be fixed as a pillar of brass!

Whence is this, but from the God of spirits moving upon his spirit to write, and to defend what was written! The providence of God hath a prospect beyond the understanding of all creatures.

Fuente: Expository Notes with Practical Observations on the New Testament

Joh 19:19-22. And Pilate wrote a title, &c. The governor, as usual, put a title or writing on the cross, signifying the crime for which Jesus was condemned. This writing probably was in black characters on a whitened board. And the writing was, JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS Here, as Bengelius has observed, John gives us the very words ordered to be written by Pilate, (and without doubt the same in the three languages,) although the other evangelists do not express them at large. This title then read many of the Jews Who came up to the feast of the passover; for the place was nigh to the city Lying but just without the gates; and, that the inscription might be generally understood, it was written in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin So that it might easily be read by Jews, Romans, and most other foreigners. It was written in Latin, for the majesty of the Roman empire; in Greek, for the information of the Hellenists, who spoke that language, and came in great numbers to the feast; and, in Hebrew, because it was the language of the nation. The inscription set up in the temple, to prohibit strangers from coming within those sacred limits, was written in all these three languages. It is remarkable, that, by the influence of Providence, the cross of Christ bore an inscription in the languages of those nations which were soon to be subdued to the faith of it; for not only the Jewish religion was to give place to it, but likewise the Grecian learning, and the Roman strength. Then said the chief priests, Write not, The King of the Jews, &c. When the priests read this title, they were exceedingly displeased; because, as it represented the crime for which Jesus was condemned, it intimated that he had been acknowledged for the Messiah. Besides, being placed over the head of one who was dying by the most infamous punishment, it implied that all who attempted to deliver the Jews should come to the same end. Wherefore, the faith and hope of the nation being thus publicly ridiculed, the priests thought themselves highly affronted, and came to Pilate in great concern, begging that the writing might be altered. But he, having intended the affront, because they had constrained him to crucify Jesus, contrary both to his judgment and inclination, would not hear them, but rejected their application with some warmth, and with that inflexibility which historians represent as part of his character. Macknight.

Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Vv. 19-22. Pilate also caused an inscription to be made and to be put upon the cross; there was written: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. 20. Many of the Jews therefore read this inscription, because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city; and it was written in Hebrew, in Greek, and in Latin. 21. The chief priests of the Jews said therefore to Pilate: Write not, The King of the Jews, but that he said, I am King of the Jews. 22. Pilate answered, What I have written, I have written.

John here completes the very brief account of the Synoptics. According to the Roman custom, thecruciarius carried himself, or there was carried before him, on the road to the crucifixion, an inscription (titulus,, , , ) which contained the indication of his crime, and which was afterwards fastened to the cross. Pilate took advantage of this custom to stigmatize the Jews by proclaiming even for the last time this malefactor to be their King.

Tholuck and de Wette have thought that must be explained in the sense of had written; Meyer and Weiss hold that Pilate had the inscription written during the crucifixion, and placed on the cross after it. But the , now also, is a connection sufficiently loose to allow us to place these acts at the very time of the crucifixion, which is more natural. The mention of the three languages in which this inscription was written is found also in Luke, according to the ordinary reading; but this reading is uncertain. Hebrew was the national language, Greek the language universally understood, and Latin that of the conquering nation. Pilate wished thus to give the inscription the greatest publicity possible. Jesus, therefore, at the lowest point of His humiliation, was proclaimed Messiah-King in the languages of the three principal peoples of the world.

The expression: the chief priests of the Jews, Joh 19:21, is remarkable. It is found nowhere else. Hengstenberg explains it by an intentional contrast with the term King of the Jews. The struggle, indeed, was between these two theocratic powers. This explanation, however, is far- fetched; the expression means, more simply, that they were acting here as defenders of the cause of the theocratic people.

The imperfect they said characterizes the attempt which fails. The present write not is the present of the idea. Pilate answers with the twice repeated perfect: I have written; it is the tense of the accomplished fact. We find Pilate here again as Philo describes him: inflexible in character (Hengstenberg).

The parting of the garments:

Fuente: Godet Commentary (Luke, John, Romans and 1 Corinthians)

Verse 19

This inscription is recorded by the evangelists in the following forms:–

“This is Jesus the King of the Jews,” . . . . . . . . Matthew 27:37

“The King of the Jews,” . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mark 15:26

“This is the King of the Jews,” . . . . . . . . . . Luke 23:38

“Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews,” . . . . . . John 19:19

A very important principle is illustrated by this diversity, viz., that it is the custom of the sacred writers to use the form of a quotation of words from others, when, in fact, the words are their own, used only to express in a more distinct and vivid manner the general ideas of their own minds. This was their mode of relating events,–clothing their own conceptions of the facts in language attributed to the actors. Even where they are recording real dialogue, they give the substance of what is said, in their own words. A comparison of the different accounts of the same conversation, recorded by the different evangelists, as, for example, the institution of the Lord’s supper, the dialogue with Pilate, and any other case where the same dialogue is given by more than one evangelist, places this principle beyond question. It is a principle of fundamental importance, satisfactorily disposing of, as it does, a very large portion of the verbal discrepancies in the New Testament.

Fuente: Abbott’s Illustrated New Testament

19:19 {6} And Pilate wrote a title, and put [it] on the cross. And the writing was, JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS.

(6) Christ, sitting upon the throne of the cross, is publicly proclaimed everlasting King of all people by the hand of him who condemned him for usurping a kingdom.

Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes

3. The inscription over Jesus’ cross 19:19-22 (cf. Matthew 27:37; Mark 15:26; Luke 23:38)

John evidently included the controversy about the inscription over Jesus’ cross because it underlines the Jews’ deliberate and conscious repudiation of and the true identity of God’s Son.

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)

Normally the judge of a person sentenced to crucifixion would order that a placard (Lat. titulus) identifying his crime would accompany him to the place of his execution. This would inform onlookers who the criminal was and why he was suffering such a terrible fate as they passed him. The soldiers would then affix the sign to the criminal’s cross for the same purpose. [Note: Carson, The Gospel . . ., p. 610.]

The Gospels all report slightly different inscriptions. Probably what Pilate really wrote was the sum of all these variations, and the Gospel writers each just quoted a part of the whole. Perhaps some or all of the evangelists paraphrased the inscription. Another possibility is that the Gospel writers may not have been translating the same language since Pilate ordered the charge written in three different languages. [Note: Edersheim, 2:590-91.] Aramaic (popular Hebrew) was the common language spoken by the Jews in Palestine. Latin was the official language that the Romans, including the soldiers, spoke. Greek was the lingua franca of the empire. Pilate continued to insult the Jewish hierarchy for forcing his hand by identifying Jesus this way for all to read. However, his trilingual notice was God’s sovereign way of declaring to the whole world who His Son really was, the Jewish king whose rule is universal.

Clearly Pilate regarded Jesus as guilty of sedition, the political charge that the Jews had brought against Him rather than the religious charge of being the Son of God (18:33). By identifying Jesus as the Jews’ king and then crucifying Him, Pilate was boasting Rome’s superiority over the Jews and flaunting its authority.

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)