The first humiliation is the degrading of the status of the Lord Jesus Christ. Tried as a criminal before the secular authority, an appeal for the death sentence, someone only fit to be got rid of and dealt with as a criminal, someone to be bound and bundled in front of the Roman procurator with demands for sentence and execution. The first humiliation – the deliverance to Pilate – is the destruction or the attempted destruction of the status of Christ. One moment, even if they did not believe in him as Messiah, he is unmistakably a mightily servant of God, a prophet, whose power they cannot explain, who can heal thousands, who spoke and preached like no other man. He is one who commanded vast audiences and crowds wherever he went, taught with authority and such clarity in such an unusual manner and bought light and understanding and constantly preached repentance and remission of sin. So he has status in a religious nation. He is listened to; he is followed; he has disciples, he is clamoured for. All that must be stripped away and he must be reduced in status, and humiliated and turned into a criminal, one arrested and dealt with by the civil authorities.
Have you torn away the status of Christ? Many people do. They say, ‘Oh Christ, yes, I think he was a good man.’ What have we done? By saying that we have torn away his status; we have reduced him to a mere man. We think we are saying something good – ‘I admire him as a religious teacher, a teacher of ethics’ – but we are tearing down his status of the eternal Son of God, the Saviour of the world, who everlastingly has been equal with the Father, a member of the Godhead.
There are theologians and churchmen who do this in this city today. In various churches and cathedrals there are those who dress up in all sorts of finery and parade as leading churchmen, who write in their books that they do not believe in the deity of Christ. They have torn away his status and defamed him. So they are represented in this, just like the leading Jews who handed him over, bound like a criminal, to the Roman authorities.