“…and plaiting a crown of thorns they put it on his head…” (RSV, Matthew 27:29)

A crown of thorns!  Who would have thought on that Good Friday morning that the crown woven by a soldier as a piece of barrack room horseplay would express for ever after the true Kingship of God the Son!  If they had placed upon his head a flashy imitation of the crown of an earthly king, how false it would have been!

For Our Lord had already spurned an earthly crown in principle when, in the wilderness after his Baptism, Satan offered him, “…all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them…” (RSV, Matthew 4:8).  And he had rejected it in practice later in his ministry when the nationalistic Galileans were on the point of taking him by force and making him King (John 6:15).

His Kingdom, his reign was to be a willingly accepted sovereignty over the hearts and minds of countless men and women and children of every nation and every race, not only in this world but in the world to come for all eternity.