Yared was walking home.1 It had been a few months since he decided to follow Jesus and he wanted to share the good news with his family in the East African countryside. Along the way, two men approached him. One drew him into friendly conversation; the other struck him without warning in the stomach, knocking him unconscious.
When he awoke, his hands were bound and his shirt had been taken. The men humiliated him for his Christian faith. Crowning a host of cruel acts, they spit on him. Yared did not retaliate. Eventually, he broke free and ran away.
There are many ways to despise a living person. But spitting in someone’s face gives contempt a physical form. It says, You are not worthy of human regard. You are dead to me.
Hopefully few of us have ever been literally spat upon. But we all likely know something of the message it carries. Perhaps we have seen contempt gather in another person’s eyes or sharpen their voice. We have felt it in words behind our back or a finger raised in our face.
And maybe we also know the answering temptation: to return contempt for contempt.
The Face He Would Not Hide
On the way to the cross, Jesus told his disciples exactly what awaited him:
See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. And after flogging him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise. Luke 18:31–33
Luke tells us that the disciples understood none of this. Jesus, however, knew full well how his body would be violated on Good Friday—even down to the detail of being spit upon.
How did he know? Was it his familiarity with the ways of sinful humanity? Was it his divine knowledge of all things? Perhaps it was simpler than that. Jesus was a man of the Scriptures. And knowing them well, he would have carried near to heart the words of Isaiah 50:
Morning by morning he awakens;
he awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught.
The Lord God has opened my ear,
and I was not rebellious;
I turned not backward.
I gave my back to those who strike,
and my cheeks to those who pull out the beard;
I hid not my face
from disgrace and spitting.
But the Lord God helps me;
therefore I have not been disgraced;
therefore I have set my face like a flint.
Isaiah 50:4–7
I find the order compelling. Before the servant sets his face, God opens his ear. He listens, he does not turn backward, and because the Lord helps him, he does not hide his face. His resilience is not grim self-reliance. It grows from communion with God.
As Jesus continued toward Jerusalem, Isaiah’s words were fulfilled with grave precision. Those gathered in the hall of the high priest spat in his face. Later, Roman soldiers spat upon him too. Matthew records the moment with brutal simplicity: “‘He deserves death,’ they answered. Then they spit in his face” (26:66-67).
Why did the Gospel writers preserve this terrible detail?
The Depth of Our Contempt
If Jesus Christ is God in the flesh, then to spit in his face is part of human sin in its most concentrated form. It is the creature’s contempt for the Creator made visible. Charles Spurgeon grieved it this way:
Why couldst thou not spit upon earthly splendors? Why must heaven be thy scorn? Or if heaven, why not spit on angels! Was there no place for thy spittle but His face? His face! Woe is me! His face! Should such loveliness receive such shame as this? I could wish that man had never been created, or that being created, he had been swept into nothingness rather than have lived to commit such horror.2
It is tempting to distance ourselves from the people who did it. I was not there. I would never have done such a thing. But Spurgeon makes it difficult to remain a spectator. He traces this contempt not firstly to the beginning of the passion, but all the way back to Eden. “When our parents broke the command of their Maker…they did as it were spit into the face of God.” Every sin since, he writes, has been “a repetition of the same contempt of the Eternal One.”3
It may not be common today to spit into the face of someone we despise. But that doesn’t mean contempt is absent. Our practices of it just usually appear more respectable. It abides in the dismissive look, the refusal to listen, the decisive online comments—anything that reduces another person to whatever we oppose in them. These acts are not equivalent to the violence Christ suffered or my friend Yared endured. Yet they grow from the same impulse to place another person beneath our regard.
While pastoring through 2020, I felt this temptation from both directions. No one spat in my face; neither did I in theirs. But I did have fingers publicly waved in it, along with other moments when I was reviled. Again and again, I had to choose whether to revile in turn or hold my face steady without allowing my heart to harden. Or break.
Contempt wants to reproduce itself. It urges me to become what has wounded me.
The terrible detail preserved in the Gospels therefore exposes more than what those men did to Jesus. It reveals something that dwells within.
The Height of His Grace
Spurgeon sees this exposure flowing into something much grander:
Now, of all the things that ever existed, sin is the most shameful thing that can be. It deserves to be scourged, it deserves to be spit upon, it deserves to be crucified…If you want to see what God thinks of sin, see His only Son spat upon when He was made sin for us.4
At the cross, Jesus bore the judgment our sin deserved. But the cross gives us more than a doctrine to explain. It gives us a face to behold.
The full wonder of grace is not only that such degradation happened. Spitting in another person’s face was evil no matter who received it. The wonder is that the sinless Son of God willingly entered the violence and shame our sin created—and he remained.
To spit repeatedly in someone’s face, that face must remain exposed. The human impulse is to duck and cover, to immediately begin restoring your honor by at least wiping the dribble from your cheek. Isaiah says that Jesus did not hide his.
This was not helpless resignation. He knew what awaited him and did not turn backward. His face remained steady because his ear remained open to the Father. The truth spoken over him kept the disgrace from defining him. Therefore he did not retaliate. The contempt did not harden his heart. Nor break it beyond repair.
Spurgeon marvels at the contrast:
He who covers the heavens with blackness, yet did not cover His own face, and He who binds up the universe with the girdle which holds it in one, yet was bound and blindfolded by the men He had Himself made; He whose face is as the brightness of the sun that shineth in its strength was once spit upon.5
Why this, Lord?
Because you loved us. Yes, you poured out your life so that our sins could be forgiven. But also so that our contempt for you could be transformed into affection. And the shame we carry stripped of its power. And the retaliation we wield beaten into plowshares.
Stay Close to Me
On the night before his face was spat upon, Jesus told his disciples, “Abide in me” (John 15:4). In the same conversation, he warned them, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you” (John 15:18). Communion and contempt belonged to the same conversation.
In The Chosen’s depiction of that night, Jesus says something to the apostle John that lingers with me. John admits, “Things are going to change.” Jesus replies, “Yes, John, but stay close to me.”6
The lines are imagined, but I think they capture the heart of Jesus’ invitation. Things were about to change indeed. The disciples would be scattered into hiding. Their hope would not be found in holding themselves together. Resilience would only be possible by a restored closeness to him.
Abiding does not always mean remaining wherever someone harms us. Yared broke his bonds and ran. It means remaining with Jesus wherever obedience carries us. We keep receiving his love so that contempt does not determine what we become—or what we return.
Perhaps this is how we hold our faces steady even when our hearts are breaking. Not by becoming invulnerable, but by staying close to the One who did not hide his.
Lord, we lift our faces to you.
Name changed for security.
Charles H. Spurgeon, “The Shame and Spitting,” sermon, Metropolitan Tabernacle, London, July 27, 1879, The Spurgeon Library, https://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/the-shame-and-spitting
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
"The Same Coin." The Chosen, created by Dallas Jenkins, season 5, episode 4, Come and See Foundation, 2025, The Chosen TV