But I follow a crucified man

“It was so casual for them—just a joke, just a post—but for me it stayed, long after they’d moved on.”

Bullying through social media can be both casual and cruel, especially for young people. What feels like a fleeting moment for one can linger painfully for another. It is no surprise, then, that governments around the world—Australia being the first—are beginning to explore ways of offering greater protection to this vulnerable age group.

And yet, this is not a new phenomenon.

Long before screens and smartphones, there were other “walls” on which people wrote their mockery. One such wall belonged to a young man called Alexamenos. Somewhere around AD 150–200, on the plaster of a training school—the Paedagogium—on the Palatine Hill, someone scratched a crude image.

A figure hangs on a cross, but with the head of a donkey. Nearby stands another figure with one arm raised in worship. Beneath it, the words: “Alexamenos worships his god.”

It is one of the earliest known visual references to the crucifixion of Jesus—and it is not an act of devotion, but of ridicule. For who, in the Roman world, would worship a crucified man?

The Roman statesman Cicero helps us understand the depth of that reaction. He described crucifixion as “the most cruel and disgusting penalty,” and went so far as to say that the very word “cross” should be kept far from the thoughts, eyes, and ears of a Roman citizen. It was not simply a form of execution; it was something shameful, degrading—unfit even for polite conversation.

So who was Alexamenos?

Most likely, he was an ordinary young man in a training school for slaves—learning to read and write, preparing for service in a Roman household. Nothing remarkable, except perhaps this: he believed something different. He was, it seems, a Christian.

And that made him a target.

Someone noticed. Someone mocked. Someone etched the insult where others would see it—crudely drawn, no doubt deliberately so. It is the ancient equivalent of a post designed to humiliate.

Because the cross and mockery go together.

Crucifixion was not only a means of death; it was a public spectacle, carried out along busy roads, designed to expose and degrade. Those who suffered it were not only executed—they were ridiculed.

The Gospels record the same pattern. As Mark tells us, even at the cross there was jeering and scorn: “He saved others—but he can’t save himself!”“Even those crucified with him also heaped insults on him.” (15:31–32)

From the very beginning, the cross was not only an instrument of execution but a stage for public humiliation, reserved for rebels and runaway slaves. For Alexamenos, crucifixion would not have been a distant idea or mere metaphor, but a very real and present possibility should he attempt escape.

And those who follow Christ should not be surprised if they encounter something similar.

As Graham Kendrick puts it so simply:

I follow a crucified man,

A man who died on a cross;

I follow a crucified man,

Count everything else as loss.

Back in that Roman school, there is a small but deeply moving detail. Not far from the graffito, another inscription appears:

“Alexamenos is faithful.”

We do not know who wrote it—perhaps Alexamenos himself, perhaps a friend. But there is no retaliation, no clever reply, no attempt to outwit the insult. Just a quiet statement of identity.

Faithful.

Most of us will never be mocked for worshipping a crucified God with a donkey’s head. Yet many—especially young people—know something just as sharp: the quiet sting of being singled out, the cutting edge of exclusion, the laughter that comes when you refuse to go along or dare to be different.

The pressure this creates can be immense. The temptation is always the same: to withdraw and disappear, to retaliate and strike back, or—perhaps most dangerously—to reshape ourselves just enough to fit in.

But Alexamenos—whoever he was—seems to have chosen another way.

He stayed.

He did not erase himself. He did not answer mockery with mockery. He did not abandon what he believed in order to belong. Instead, quietly and without fanfare, he remained.

And perhaps that is the truest answer to every insult—quiet faithfulness that refuses to let mockery have the last word.

The world thinks I’m a fool,

But I follow a crucified man.