A week after Jesus was born, Mary and Joseph brought him to the Temple for circumcision, and Simeon prophesied over the infant: “Look: This one is appointed for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and a sign that will be spoken against – and your own soul a sword will also pierce – so that the considerations of many hearts will be revealed.” (Luke 2:34-35) About three decades later, Mary would see her beloved son pierced, and her soul would feel every blow. Simeon, steeped in the Scriptures, saw all this.
Three decades later, Jesus confronts Pilate twice, in John 18 and 19. Pilate might think he’s confronting Jesus, but Pilate soon finds out he’s wrong. The bound prisoner unsettles the most powerful man in the land. John focuses on the morningtime conversation between the two, which seems as intimate and as unpredictable as the nighttime conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus in John 3.
Like Nicodemus, Pilate is flummoxed. In response to Pilate’s five questions, Jesus will ask his own question (18:34), or he’ll keep silent (19:9), but three times Jesus actually answers Pilate directly (18:36, 18:37, 19:11). Pilate’s fourth question, “Where are you from?” (19:9), has been asked repeatedly throughout the Gospel. This is the question Jesus does not answer at all.
Pilate has no framework for understanding the true answer to that question, that Jesus is from the Father. Jesus’s silence is a better, more merciful answer than the distorted picture the word “Father” would conjure up in Pilate’s power-obsessed mind. Pilate would imagine a Father who punishes, who crucifies. But it is Pilate who crucifies, and who, frustrated, threatens Jesus with that cruel form of death (19:10).
When threatened, Jesus stands his ground and puts Pilate’s power in eternal context, so it suddenly seems very small. Pilate’s power was given him from above, so it should be used as the One Above would use it, in service, not coercion. But Pilate is of the people Isaiah prophesied about, those with eyes that don’t see and ears that don’t hear.
God’s power is very different in mode and manifestation than anything Pilate envisions. Jesus doesn’t tell Pilate what his kingdom IS (that takes a sermon on the mount to convey) but he does tell Pilate what his kingdom is NOT:
“My Kingdom is not of this cosmos; if my Kingdom were of this cosmos my subjects would have struggled so that I should not be handed over to the Judaeans; but for now my Kingdom is not from here.” (18:36 DBH)
Pilate’s kingdom is from this world of politics, force, and law. Pilate tries to get out of his discomfort by giving the judgment to the people, but they refuse, releasing the insurrectionist Barabbas instead. (18:40) Pilate tries mockery short of death: his soldiers flog Jesus, press a crown made of thorns on his head, and wrap him in a purple cloak, the color of emperors, dyed with a hugely expensive snail extract (or a cheap imitation of that hue). (19:2) The people stare at this mock-ritual, but it’s not enough, they shout “Crucify! Crucify!” (19:6) Pilate tries to release Jesus but the Judeans threaten him that this isn’t what a “friend of Caesar” would do. (19:12) The threatener is threatened, and Pilate caves again.
So at noon, Pilate displays Jesus at a place called Stone Pavement (“Gabbatha”). Jesus appears anything but a king, rivulets of blood dripping down his face, soaking through the purple robe “Look at your king,” says Pilate, hoping the incongruity will change some minds and someone will say “enough!” But no one does. The leaders pile incongruity upon incongruity, saying in their anger something they would never say otherwise, “We have no king but Caesar.” Pilate gives up and hands Jesus over to die.
I’m sure that in his own eyes, Pilate was a victim constrained by circumstances. What else can he do? His hands were tied by the need to keep the people from rioting and bringing a massacre on themselves, and everything he did just made things worse.
In his own eyes, Caiaphas was constrained by the sword of the Roman Empire hanging over his head, and Jesus had to die so the nation could live. A truer kind of prophecy could’ve shown him the Romans would destroy the Temple in forty short years anyway.
In his own eyes, Peter was alone and defenseless around that charcoal fire, constrained by the accusations of the small crowd gathered there. It was a little lie, it was important for him to be around in case Jesus needed him, the ends justified the means.
And you know what? Not one of them is completely wrong – yet together, they participate in and multiply each other’s wrongness. The crowd, the accusing group, and the fear of accusation, that is to blame. We’re all constrained by each other, and we all victimize each other.
Rene Girard writes of Judas, Pilate, and Peter, that all contribute, with the crowd, to the suffering and execution of Jesus, that “whatever the particular motivation of every individual participant, all these motivations ultimately resemble so many rivulets running together to form a big river, all flowing in the same direction.” It’s no good to blame just the Roman governor, the leaders, or this or that people group. Such blame only distracts from the truth that all have hurt and lied to cover it up — all have sinned and fallen short.
“This is what the religion that comes from man amounts to, as opposed to the religion that comes from God,” writes Rene Girard. Pilate, Caiaphas, and Peter all resort to violence and lies, each in his own way attempting a “violent disavowal of human violence.” The only way the world can think of to quell this violent chain reaction is to focus it onto one figure, the more innocent the better, and destroy him. And, this one time, that figure short-circuits that retributive cycle, interceding for them from the cross, praying, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)
Pilate doesn’t hear Jesus’s prayer, and thinks he has the last word. Pilate nails a sign on the cross, above the human body of the Son of God. In three languages, it was written, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” (19:19-20) Three times over, the truth was proclaimed where it could be seen by those with eyes to see, even though it was wrapped up in the guise of a cruel joke, with irony upon irony. Pilate didn’t know what he was doing, but he was telling the truth.
The Truth was not recognized that day, as Jesus became unrecognizable under the burden of shame and mockery. Denys Turner writes, “Here on the cross the godhead is not recognizable even as a man, never mind as a God.”
No one recognizes, no one but Jesus knows, that behind and beneath the scenes, a hidden power is working. This same power gave Pilate authority and gave Moses the Law. This power reveals and undoes the blame and hurt, because it is kind and keeps no record of wrongs, but slowly, because it is first of all patient. Its revelation is ever-ancient, ever-new. It has been written down since before Moses came down from the mountain, and when it is received it is as if the world is created again.
This hidden power inspired Psalm 22 hundreds of years before Jesus was born. The free acts of Pilate and Caiaphas, and of the persecutors of the Psalmist, all followed the patterns of the “rivulets … all flowing in the same direction” of the world’s established way of dealing with things, of finding a victim and dispatching him to calm the crowd. This pattern is so strong that Psalm 22 is repeated on the cross, even down to four specific details:
Jesus’s thirst (John 19:28) is the Psalmist’s “My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws.” (Psalm 22:15)
Jesus’s nailed flesh (John 19:23) is the Psalmist’s “they pierced my hands and my feet.” (22:16)
Jesus’s unbroken bones (John 19:33) is the Psalmist’s “I may tell all my bones: they look and stare upon me.” (22:17)
Jesus’s garments given to the soldiers (John 19:24) is the Psalmist’s “They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.” (22:18)
This pattern is not strictly scripted by a top-down micromanager, but it emerges inevitably from earthly natures. These rivulets of red-hot anger run from each human old enough to point a finger, then merge into a torrent of stress and blame, overwhelming like Noah’s flood and threatening everyone. But this river of death is hemmed in and held back by the good gifts from above, and is ultimately swallowed up in victory by the God who is love, and who loves us to the end.
For now, we are tossed by flash floods of all this darkness, with the cross as our anchor, to hang on to, and to hope in. As George MacDonald wrote, “Love and pain seem so strangely one in this world, the wonder is how they will ever be parted. What God must feel like, with this world hanging on to him with all its pains and cries.”
IMAGE: Ecce homo by Antonio Ciseri
QUOTES: Rene Girard, P.90 Disorder and Order, P.166 Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. “Prayer and the Darkness of God,” by Denys Turner in Church Life Journal, January 20, 2020
