I remember reading a book once where the main character was a young black women who lived in the era of slavery. At one point in her tragic life, she was taken to a slave auction to be sold to the highest bidder. She was pulled up on a make-shift stage and stripped bare. The author described her frantic attempts to cover herself in her horror at this exposure. I can hardly imagine a worse indignity than that!

And yet our Lord, in His last hours, in His weakened and degraded physical agony, was subjected to the same thing! He was guilty of no wrongdoing. He did not deserve this verdict. There He stood, exposed before those who hated and taunted Him, who despised and completely rejected His message of love.

Imagine how it would feel to be cruelly stripped of your clothing before a jeering crowd, clutching at the last remnants of dignity as your clothing was stripped away.

Jesus was stripped of more than His clothing on Golgotha.

He was stripped of His human dignity. He was denied the recognition of His worth as a human being. This God-man who was the best of humanity was treated as the worst.

When the soldiers took His clothes, they refused to see Him as even a child of God, much less His Son!

Jesus was stripped as a slave sold to the highest bidders of greed and hate and power.

Stripping prisoners and forcing them to stand naked before crowds is not part of punishment in most areas of our modern world.

But sadly, there are other many other ways to “strip” people, and for the same reasons Jesus was stripped: hate, greed, thirst for power and control. Perhaps it is more subtle, but people “strip” others of their human dignity, humiliate them, fail (or refuse) to recognize them as children of God, despite their failures.<

Sometimes we may not even be aware of it. We judge others adversely for many reasons:
their skin color or ethnicity,
their political views,
their income,
their body shape or size,
their religion, or intelligence.

These indignities and humiliations inevitably lead to fissures in the self-image of those abused, and fractures in the community. It is devastating to society, and to the Body of Christ, the Church.

And it was no doubt devastating to Jesus. If you have felt the sting of being “stripped”, unjustly criticized, falsely accused, embarrassed and humiliated (in today’s culture, it might be compared to being “cancelled”), try to remember that Jesus knows the feeling. remember that as He stood there naked, bleeding, suffering for all to see, humiliated beyond belief, He still had a choice: He could give up on His mission of proving God’s love for every man, and “walk away through the crowd and go on His way,” as He’d miraculously done before. (see Luke 4:30). Or Or He could open His arms and die on the cross proving that God’s love is unending.

If you are the unjust one humiliating others, remember that the soldiers still had a choice, too. So did the screaming crowd. So do you. It’s never too late to do God’s revealed will in your life.

Whether we are the abused or the abuser, we have the same choice: to accept Gods love and therefore His will, or deny both. Which will it be?

Lord Jesus, help me understand that I have the power to hurt as well as heal, to ignore as well as value my fellow man. Grant that I can love my neighbor as You love me. Strip me of pride and ego and gift me with the humility to see both myself and others, as You see us! Amen