Good Friday

Pontius Pilate was a politician. That says it all, doesn’t it?

I once read that 53 percent of Americans can’t name their representative in Congress. But that doesn’t keep Congress from being highly unpopular. As someone once asked, “If pro is the opposite of con, is progress the opposite of Congress?”

Someone else has said that the reason a person in Congress tries so hard to get re-elected is that they would hate to have to make a living under the laws they’ve passed.

Pontius Pilate married into a political family. His wife, Claudia, was the granddaughter of Caesar Augustus. So, Pilate was a member of the emperor’s family by marriage, not merit.

Pilate served as the Roman prefect of Judea for ten years, from A.D. 26-36. A prefect is like a governor. It’s a position of power, but not absolute power. Pilate took his orders from Rome and, for that reason, he was insecure in his position. He ruled at the whim of his wife’s family. Being prefect of Judea was not a plum assignment. Palestine was a hotbed of insurrection. The Jews were a restless people, always ready to begin a rebellion at the drop of a hat.

Pilate got in bad with the Jews from the very beginning. As soon as he took office in 26 AD, he needlessly provoked the pious folk in Jerusalem by riding into the city with his troops bearing their standards in full view. On the top of every flagpole that the soldiers bore was a carved image of Caesar. For the Jews, this was a transgression of the commandment to have no graven images. Even more grievously, because of the Roman custom of emperor worship, Pilate’s action smacked of blatant idolatry. This thoughtless action provoked a riot. So, Pilate was in trouble from the beginning of his reign.

There were some skirmishes in which Pilate proved himself a brutal ruler. Luke 13 mentions one of these, an occasion where Pilate’s soldiers killed some Galileans. To compound their crime, however, the soldiers then took the Galileans’ blood and mixed it with sacrifices to their pagan gods. It was a despicable act.

Pilate’s brutality probably grew out of his fear of being deposed. He was caught between a Roman government which had little respect for him and a civilian population that was known for its intractability. And then he had to deal with Jesus of Nazareth.

It was the religious leaders who brought Jesus to Pilate’s palace. They brought him to Pilate, but they refused to enter the palace. Why? Because this would make them ceremonially unclean by entering the residence of a Gentile. Jews believed that if you took two steps over a Gentile threshold, you defiled yourself. So they wanted Pilate to do their dirty work, but they wanted to keep their distance from him while he did it.

So Pilate interrogated Jesus. He asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?”

“Is that your own idea,” Jesus asked, “or did others talk to you about me?”

“Am I a Jew?” Pilate replied. “Your own people and chief priests handed you over to me. What is it you have done?”

Jesus answered somewhat cryptically, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”

“You are a king, then!” said Pilate.

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

And it is here that Pilate cynically asked, “What is ‘truth’?”

Listen to political debates today and you will ask the same thing: “What is truth?” Truth is whatever is left over after the politicians spin the facts.

Then the religious leaders hit Pilate’s weak spot: “If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar. Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar.”

There’s no doubt Pilate was frustrated by Jesus. It was also clear to him that Jesus posed no threat to the empire. Jesus himself said that his kingdom was not of this world. Pilate went out again to the religious authorities and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him.”

Pilate tried to reason with them. Then he tried to bribe them. He remembered that the Jews had a tradition that they would release one prisoner at Passover. So he offered to release Jesus. But the crowd chose Barabbas, a bandit. As for Jesus, the crowd shouted, “Crucify him, crucify him!”

At this point, Pilate had Christ flogged, hoping that would appease the mob, but it did not. He had his soldiers mock Christ. They put a purple robe on him and thrust a crown of thorns on his head, and called out in derision, “King of the Jews.” That still wasn’t enough.

He tried turning Jesus over to Herod. But that didn’t work either. Pilate was getting desperate. The mob was determined for Jesus to die, while Pilate’s sense of justice told him the man was innocent. According to Matthew’s Gospel, even Pilate’s wife wanted Pilate to have nothing to do with Jesus. Matthew 27:19 states, “While Pilate was sitting on the judge’s seat, his wife sent him this message: ‘Don’t have anything to do with that innocent man, for I have suffered a great deal today in a dream because of him.’”

Pilate simply didn’t know what to do. He could not in good conscience find Jesus guilty, but it was not politically expedient to set him free. Three times, Pilate tried to release Jesus, fully convinced of Jesus’ innocence, but the mob would not listen. “Crucify him, crucify him,” they shouted.

It is Matthew who reports that when Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” he said. “It is your responsibility” (27:24).

If Pilate had only known how those words would haunt him. He was the man who had the innocent Son of God put to death. And this time, it wasn’t because he was brutal. It wasn’t because he was trying to rob Jesus of his life. He was not. Pilate’s only crime was that he was weak.

How often are we like Pilate? When we do wrong, it’s probably not because we’re brutal, or greedy or hard-hearted. It’s because we’re morally weak, spiritually weak. We keep quiet when we should have spoken up, we give in when we should have walked away, we strike a bargain when we should have remained true to our values.

We all know about weakness, the kind that wrecks families and ruins lives, the kind that refuses to speak out in the face of evil.

Pontius Pilate is one of the few people on earth to have had a one-on-one interview with the Son of God. Pilate asked, “What is truth?” Well, here’s the truth: After Pilate had scorned Christ and had him flogged, mocked and crucified, if Pilate had confessed his weakness, Christ would have forgiven him. He, too, would have experienced the grace of Jesus Christ.

And that is the good news for us on this Good Friday. If we have been weak, if we have betrayed others, if we have betrayed our values, if we have ever followed the crowd rather than voicing our convictions, if we have committed some grievous sin, not because we are mean, not even because we are evil, but simply because we are weak, there’s room at the foot of the cross for us.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu once put it this way: “We tend to turn the Christian religion into a religion of virtues, but it is a religion of grace. You become a good person because you are loved. You are not loved because you are good.”

Have you accepted the grace of God?