The Sceptre Departs? A Good Friday Meditation

The cross turns scorn to tribute, and mockery to obedience

Today is Good Friday.

Instead of the usual cultural commentary found here at The New Albion, I wanted to instead offer a short meditation on the crucifixion of our Lord. It just doesn’t feel right to spend Good Friday talking about cultural matters. There are bigger things.

I think I arrive at this Good Friday somewhat scattered and frazzled after a busy period, and the great mystery that we are remembering over Easter Weekend feels too vast to begin to get a grip on. My addled brain feels like it needs handholds, details to grasp onto.

Having spent a lot of the past term looking at Matthew’s Gospel with our church youth group, I turned to Matthew’s passion narrative this week, pondering what was unique in relation to the other Gospels, and was reminded of a curious but (I think) rich detail—one which has helped me to get a grip on something of the meaning of the cross once more.

“They Put A Staff In His Right Hand”

Jesus’ subjection to the mockery of the Roman soldiers is a familiar Good Friday scene. It is one the Stations of the Cross. We remember well the crown of thorns, the mocking scarlet robe, and the jeering bows. But Matthew, uniquely, tells us that Christ was also given a staff, or reed, as part of his macabre kingly get-up:

Then the governor’s soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him. They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand. Then they knelt in front of him and mocked him. “Hail, king of the Jews!” they said. They spit on him, and took the staff and struck him on the head again and again. After they had mocked him, they took off the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him.

Matthew 27:27-31 (NIV)

Both Mark and John mention this scene. John makes no mention of the staff. Mark mentions Jesus being beaten with a staff, but not that it was first given to him and then taken.

Why does Matthew tell us this?

Most obviously, the staff is a mocking royal sceptre, accompanying the robe and crown. A sceptre, held in the powerful right hand, is a sign of kingly rule and authority both within and without the Scriptures. To give a sign of power to a man who is entirely at their mercy, and to then turn it on him and beat him with it is base level political satire from the Romans—puerile, meme-worthy, front page of The Daily Sport derision.

Yet there is a more specifically biblical connotation here, I think. Recalling as it does a kingly sceptre, the mock-staff of Christ recalls the particular association that sceptres have with the royal tribe of Judah and the promised Messiah.

In Genesis 49:10, whilst blessing (and cursing) his sons, Jacob makes this prophecy::

The sceptre will not depart from Judah,
nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,
until he to whom it belongs shall come
and the obedience of the nations shall be his

We have here the first hint that Judah will, in time, rise to prominence among the tribes of Israel, and that the future Messiah will come from him. This is a great and powerful promise: the sceptre will not depart from Judah until the peoples (which we could take to be the nations of the world) submit to him.

Other references to the sceptre can be found throughout the Old Testament, notably Psalm 60:7 and Psalm 108:8, which are virtually identical:

God has spoken from his sanctuary:
“In triumph I will parcel out Shechem
and measure off the Valley of Sukkoth. 
Gilead is mine, and Manasseh is mine;
Ephraim is my helmet,
Judah is my sceptre.
Moab is my washbasin,
on Edom I toss my sandal;
over Philistia I shout in triumph.”

From the beginning, Matthew’s Gospel has a focus on Jesus’ status as a descendant of David, and thus as a member of the tribe of Judah. In Matthew 1:1 he is “Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham”; the genealogy in Ch. 1 is built around the number 14, which is the gematrical value of the word “David”. We could add more to this, but this is enough to show us that Matthew is concerned with God’s promises to and about the tribe of Judah.

On Good Friday, as Christ falls before the jeering soldiers, it would seem that God’s promises to bring a great Messiah out of Judah have failed. The hoped-for king of Israel is at the mercy of the Romans, and the victim of his own people’s conspiracies. The sceptre has departed from Judah.

And yet look again at Genesis 49:10. The promise there is not that the sceptre will never depart, but that it will not depart until “he to whom it belongs shall come, and the obedience of the nations shall be his”. Literally, it says “until Shiloh comes”, and there’s disagreement about exactly how these verses should be translated and what they mean. The ESV says “until tribute comes to him”, still referring to Judah, rather than whoever “Shiloh” is, taking “Shiloh” to mean “tribute” rather than “the one owed tribute”. Similarly, the “obedience of the nations” could be attributed to either “Shiloh” (whoever that might be) or Judah himself. The majority opinion seems to go with “Shiloh”, which the NIV (which I’ve quoted) renders “he to whom it belongs” (or “is owed tribute”, we could say).

However, the point is that the verses point forward to some departure of the sceptre from Judah—which does not appear to be a negative thing, but something which accompanies a greater and fuller rule marked out not simply by Judah’s prominence within Israel but a rule that extends over all the nations. It is, perhaps, a restful laying down of the sceptre once a full rule has been established.

But what do we see in the mockery of Christ? The sceptre departing from Judah—yet his tribute is mockery. And instead of the obedience of the nations, he receives their blows, their spit, and their false bows. Jacob’s great prophesy seems to have come undone, and perversely so.

The promises of God, however, should be pushing us forward as we read this. Matthew alone, with his eye on Jesus as the Son of David and lion of Judah, shows us the departing of the sceptre. And so even though tribute and obedience seem nowhere in sight, we should be looking through the blood and spit and tears in the knowledge that the mock-tributes and faux-obedience of the soldiers of Good Friday will be transformed from their grim inversions into their true and glorious selves.

And indeed, we do not even have to wait for Easter Sunday for that to happen. Note another unique feature of Matthew’s passion account: it is not simply the centurion who makes a confession about Christ at the foot of the cross, but a number of others: “When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!” (Mt. 27:54).

Within mere hours, as the sceptre departs from Judah, scorn has become tribute to the Son of God and mockery has become obedience to the crucified King.