She was probably only half aware of it–there were bigger things on her mind–but Monica was quoting Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea who tried and sentenced Christ. Pilate still gets quoted all the time–usually evoked when people worry about the morality of what they are about to do. “What is truth?” is the classic clever, shallow, quasi-intellectual line. You ask a question, probably a deep and worrying one, and then you immediately drop it, as John’s Gospel says Pilate did. You’re not interested in the answer, because it raises issues you don’t want to get into.
Even more frequently, we remember Pilate’s action from the end of the trial, when he washed his hands of Jesus. Pilate seemed to have some inkling that Jesus was unusual, and probably innocent, but he lacked the spine to follow up that pricking of his conscience. Public opinion, in the shape of the Jewish crowd, wanted Jesus dead. Pilate’s own job, and possibly his head, too, depended on keeping the peace in Judea by giving the crowd what it wanted. He couldn’t please both the people and the emperor, and do the right thing.
The governor’s dilemma draws plenty of sympathy from modern leaders. In an interview four years ago, Tony Blair, now the British prime minister, explained why. “We know he did wrong,” he told his interviewer, “yet his is the struggle between what is right and what is expedient that has occurred throughout history. The Munich Agreement of 1938 was a classic example of this… And it is not always clear, even in retrospect, what is, in truth, right.”
No one really knows whether all this was coursing through Pilate’s head, of course. The evangelists were writing theology, not history, and embroidering events more or less as they chose. Yet the governor’s frantic attempts to pass the buck, one way or another, appear in every Gospel. This suggests that, in some form, it probably happened.
It is not exactly inspiring behavior. And it raises the question why, at Easter, people keep being drawn back to Pilate, rather than to his divine and suffering prisoner. We ought to be feeling Christ’s pain, but we also end up feeling with Pilate, hung on the horns of his dilemma. And the reason seems to be this: Christ, for all his apparent passivity–“the lamb dumb before his shearers,” as Isaiah says–is really the one in charge. And Pilate, for all his blustering authority, is a mere puppet in Christ’s hands. Christ is God, even in this most wretched human guise, but Pilate can only be a man, like ourselves.
Jesus, as he has made clear in the Gospels, intends to die on a cross, where only Pilate can put him, in order to save sinners. To bring Redemption to pass, Jesus at his trial makes no attempt to defend himself. What must happen, must happen. Pilate makes a weak judgment–does the wrong thing, in fact–so that the great Right Thing in human history may occur.
Pilate was not a particularly good governor of Judea. The ancient Jewish sources suggest he was tactless, thuggish and stubborn, and never liked the Jews. A few years after Jesus’ death he was recalled to Rome for putting down an armed revolt with excessive violence. Were it not for the trial of Jesus, nobody would give this clumsy civil servant a second thought. But we remember him at Easter for his human wriggling, because however much our world is without God we still keep, like Pilate, our small corner of doubt and our suspicion that, one day, God may be there–bothering, challenging, extraordinary–right in front of us.
