Of all the people involved in the Passion of our Lord, Pilate is probably the most fascinating.  Apart from the Blessed Virgin Mary, only Pilate is mentioned by name in the Creed which is the basic resumé of our Christian belief.  It is a matter of fact statement which establishes the death of Jesus as having taken place during the rule of Pilate as the chief servant of Rome in Judea.  Because of other evidence, both in the Gospel and in secular writings, we have some details of Pilate’s career in Judea from 26AD to about 33AD so it is safe to assume that his encounter with Jesus took place in the latter part of his time in the Province.  To look for a motive for including Pilate in the Creed beyond this one is to enter the realm of speculation.

Whilst it is true that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has canonized Pilate as a Saint because he washed his hands of our Lord’s death, there is no evidence that the early Christians who composed our Creed held him in any special veneration nor does the Biblical evidence  leave us with any sense in which Pilate could be venerated, not least because he comes across as a man who had not the courage of his convictions. Whilst he recognized something in Jesus which unnerved him, in the end he behaved true to form and, actually, he was given no choice to do otherwise.  The most fascinating study of him can be found in tonight’s Gospel extract from St John. 

Here we are given a picture of a man who see-sawed between decision and indecision.  Claiming not to find any fault in Jesus – certainly nothing worthy of the death penalty, he ultimately succumbs to the braying crowd outside his door who, whipped into a frenzy by the Jewish religious leaders, called for our Lord’s blood.  Could these be the same people who tore down Palm branches just days before and hailed Jesus as their King.

Well, yes, it is possible. Public opinion is fickle and we have only to think how our own Royalty are treated to realize the truth of this.  At one level we might wonder why Pilate was swayed by the crowd at all. He was in a position of absolute power and yet when it came to the crunch he was unable to exercise it as he seemed to have wished.  The view is usually put forward that Pilate’s hands were tied because what he wanted most was to keep the Jews on-side or that he became afraid that, in a Jerusalem teeming with Jewish pilgrims, there for the great Passover festival, any flashpoint which ignited violence must be avoided.

Be that as it may, he was not always concerned to keep the Jews happy. He had raided their Temple coffers to build himself an aqueduct which led him to exercise a very different kind of crowd control. When a rebellion followed his action, he secreted his soldiers in civilian dress amongst the crowd and at his given signal they clubbed and battered them into submission.  Until his encounter with Jesus he was seen to be a ruthless and cruel man who showed the worst traits of the Conqueror to the conquered.  Except, that is, for one incident which gives a different insight into his character.

This was the occasion when he had placed the Roman ensigns with the usual images of the Emperor near the Temple. This enraged the Jews who rushed to Caesarea, where he was staying, to demand their removal.  For a few days he ignored them and then he allowed them to put their complaint. He then surrounded them with soldiers and threatened that if they didn’t go away he would kill them. The Jews immediately threw themselves down to the ground and bared their necks for slaughter. This so impressed him that he withdrew the ensigns.  Perhaps this points us to a side of Pilate’s character which was revealed again in tonight’s Gospel.

It is clear that Pilate is truly impressed by Jesus and despite what subsequently happened he remained convinced that Jesus was not the rebel leader who threatened Roman authority as the Jewish leaders insisted.  Indeed, he seems to have been persuaded that Jesus really was the King of the Jews because he insisted on that inscription being placed on the Cross. Hardly the action of a man who feared the Jewish leaders.  Maybe this was because in his conversation with Jesus, Pilate realized that he was dealing with no ordinary Jew.

In a province far from Rome and its culture he had come across a man who was both intelligent and able to engage him in the kind of philosophical debate much favoured in Roman Society.  The conversation John records is portrayed as our Lord’s trial and certainly it ended with a judgement which led to our Lord’s death.  Throughout, however there is a sense that this is less about an examination of a criminal by a judge as a conversation between two debaters of equal status.  The dialogue flows between them in a way which confirms this.  There is a discussion about Kingship and about Truth, which leaves Pilate confused and perplexed.  It is a conversation which subtly turns things on their head.  At the end we are left wondering who actually was on trial and who was being judged.

Pilate claims to have power over Jesus but perhaps he knows by then that it is an empty power.  Jesus knows it too and, in the end, releases Pilate when he says: You would have no power over me at all if it had not been given to you from above.  In those words we are brought to the heart of this trial.  We are back on the stage of a Drama in which the principal role belongs not to men but to God.  Pilate’s part in our Lord’s Passion is a carefully controlled one and it is Jesus who has the control.  The power belongs to God.

By the time Jesus had reached the Praetorium he had already taken part in the real trial of the Passion. That had taken place in Gethsemane when Jesus had struggled with His Father’s will for him and had emerged ‘at-one’ with that will. They were in this together and Pilate’s role became essential if the Divine Plan was to succeed.  Just as God had needed Mary’s part in the Incarnation so now He needed Pilate to play his part in the Crucifixion.

Jesus had to die not because the Jewish authorities demanded it but because it was now the only way for God the conquer the dark forces which threatened His Kingdom of Love from spilling out across the world.  At one level the treatment of Jesus by, first the Sanhedrin and then by Pilate, could be exposed as a sham.  What justice was there when even the chief Judge found no fault in him yet still allowed the sham to be played out to the bitter end?  It wasn’t justice but judgement and it was God who judged that this was the only way to save humankind.

In this God was making a very different kind of judgement. He was judging that we humans are actually worth saving and if it took a Cross and a Passion to achieve that, then it must be so.  Pilate played his part in that judgement unwittingly as God’s took power away from him and then released him from his own sense of uncertainty. Who is really in charge here? Well God is, of course. Pilate was given power from above to exercise the power he thought he had but which, during the conversation with Jesus, he had lost.  Without this exercise of power there would have been no Crucifixion and no salvation for the human race – no salvation for you and me.  To fail to condemn Jesus to death would have been to deny God the means by which His redeeming love and his victory over death, evil and sin was to be accomplished.

Hard though it may seem because we have been used to casting Pilate in the role of Judge and Jury, he became, in fact,  the instrument of God’s will..  Was Pilate’s heart, then, turned by God to his own loving purpose?  Perhaps not his heart but certainly his mind. Jesus engaged him at an intellectual level because Pilate’s Roman training made this the most accessible part of him.  That is why the conversation John records between Jesus and Pilate is so fascinating.

We see Jesus carefully turning his mind towards a truth which ultimately eludes him and leads him to ask that profoundest of questions, Truth, what is that?  Whether Pilate ever discovered the answer we have no means of knowing except that he recognized a Kingship in Jesus which, despite his loyalty to the Emperor, made him write an Inscription on the Cross – suggesting that he was pretty close to the truth after all.

It is easy to Judge Pilate - and Christianity has done just that – recognizing the flaws in his character which seemed to make him indecisive and weak. The hand-washing is a symbol of his failure to have the courage of his convictions yet this did not entirely leave him.

What I have written I have written  

he said to the Religious leaders who objected to the inscription on the cross.  That’s a pretty decisive statement.  What he was not to know is that it was to become the truth he had failed to find but which, in his failing, allowed us to discover it ourselves – that Jesus is the King of our hearts and lives and of a world which, because Pilate was led by God to this action, made the Cross a Throne from which Love reigned supreme.  That was God’s plan and Pilate had a particularly significant part to play in it. 

So a thought :  Whatever our motives, mixed as they often are – God has a plan which involves us in His loving the world into His Kingdom.  Even the Pilates of this world are part of that plan. How much more then are we? After all we are especially loved by Him for all eternity. That is the true Judgement of our Lord’s Passion.