The Scarlet Robe

"The Scarlet Robe"

Matthew 27:26-28: Then he released Barabbas to them; and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered Him to be crucified. Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole garrison around Him. And they stripped Him and put a scarlet robe on Him.

The prelude to a crucifixion is first to scourge the condemned prisoner. A scourge consists of strands of leather attached to a wooden handle. At the end of those strands were bits of metal or bone attached. It was bad enough to be whipped, but those attached objects made it so the back would literally look like furrows of a field. With some prisoners, the scourging would prove fatal, and thus the cross would be unnecessary.No word of reproach is uttered by Jesus during this awful practice.

Jesus is then removed from the place of scourging, and brought into Pilate's residence in the Antonia Fortress, which was just northwest of the temple. The governor would have a garrison of about 600 soldiers there to keep the peace.

Christ's body would have soaked what clothes were left to him. Thus they removed those blood stained clothes, and put on him a discarded scarlet robe. Mark and John both describe the robe as being purple. Probably, it was the closest thing they could find to being a "kingly color." In Roman times, the robe was a military cloak, and it had probably belonged to one of the soldiers. Little did they know that they were insulting, ridiculing, and torturiing the very God who will one day judge their works and condemn them to the Lake of Fire.