It is hard to be ridiculed.

To trip and dump everything on your tray, to hear silence for a moment and then laughter, that’s tough. To miss one item on the checklist and then to be teased forever about your inability to do simple things right, that’s tough. To betray God and to have your name forever known as “Judas” is awful.

But in every one of those cases, something happened. At the very least you tripped. Often we did miss the item, we did betray someone, we did forget.

What if the ridicule happens for doing something right?

• “How could anyone believe that?”
• “Does that mean that you also believe that and that and that?”
• “Why would you waste time on those people. They will never figure it out. They will never understand. And you will have given up any chance of getting ahead.”

When you are doing the right thing and you get teased (at best) or imprisoned (at almost worst), you eventually wonder why you are doing it. Not at first. At first it feels noble to do the right thing and have people recognize it. But the seventeenth time you wipe the lips of the person who threw up and then mocked you for taking care of people like her, it does get old. Especially when you know that if it weren’t for you, no one would care.

At those moments, when you are getting wronged for quietly doing right, you are having the privilege of a glimpse of what Jesus was experiencing in his last hours. There was a steady stream of mocking, ridicule, reviling, laughing, torture, insults, and saliva. Because willingly surrendering his life for people who hated him was the point, there was not much he could do.

Except, of course, love us.