Jesus Before Pilate

“And Pilate gave sentence that it should be as they required.” Luke xxiii. 24.

THE story of Pilate is both pitiful and shameful, ending in the most atrocious crime ever committed by man. It explains nothing to say that Pilate, like most Romans of the period, thought little of human suffering, and therefore did not weigh the agonies to be inflicted on Jesus, against the inconvenience of displeasing the Jews. He did not send Jesus to the cross lightly. The whole nature of the

Whyr
Matt.xxvii.

Mark xv.
1-15.

Luke xxiii.
1-25.

John xviii.
28-xix. 19.

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Matt,
xxvii. 19.

John xix.
8, 12.

Luke xiii.

Pilate,

man was stirred to its depths. He was profoundly agitated, unnerved, unmanned.

The Jews, who had more than once felt his strength, who remembered how ruthlessly he had mingled the blood of the Galileans with their sacrifices in the very temple itself, must have wondered at his unwonted infirmity of will that day, as all the world has wondered ever since.

Let us study Pilate’s character: It Is worth while surely to discover, if we can, what fatal defect made such conduct possible, what lack in him left him destitute of principle In the moment of his supreme testing. He was, remember, no common man. Rome had made him governor of one of her most turbulent and ungovernable provinces, and Rome did not put weak men In such places. The remarkable questions which he asked that day, show antr 0^tv Snterpretationg him to have been a man of alert and vigorous mind. What, then, was the secret of his weakness, and so of his infamy?

I think he laid bare that secret when he asked his famous question, “What is truth?” What did he mean? For asking Jesus that question he has been called ^’ jesting Pilate.” I do not think Pontius Pilate was In a jesting mood that day, rather, in that question, half sadly, half contemptuously asked, the profound moral hopelessness of the Pagan world found a voice.

The great philosophers had come and gone before Christ was born, and they had not found ultimate truth. Their best systems not only contradicted each other at every vital point, but failed to touch the real problem of human life — destiny. Epicureans and Stoics remained, but men of action like Pilate turned wearily from their

The pagan
hopelessness.

John xviii.
38.

I Cor. iL
8, 9.

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disputes about words, knowing that they had no power over conduct, character or destiny.

Look abroad over the world-empire of Rome that day and ask if there was any other place where it would have fared better with Jesus. Absolutely nowhere. Pilate was as good a representative of Gentilism as Annas and Caiaphas of Judaism. The world was morally dead and rotting. Humanity had had its long probation from Noah to Jesus, and had come to Annas, the Jew, and Pilate, the Gentile, and between them they crucified the Lord of Glory.

Pilate a
type.

Pilate was a type of what, In these days, we call a man of the world. He and his kind, the real actors in the real drama of life, had come to believe that the pursuit of truth was vain; that no truly authoritative voice had ever spoken. And when that conviction enters a aitiJ (0tf)er interpretations human soul, the substance of character is gone, the man is henceforth a mere opportunist. If greatly tempted he will greatly fall; before God he is already fallen. How lightly men in our day deny the whole principle of authority in religion, so throwing every soul of man adrift without chart or compass, without point of departure or destination. Nay, it is deviPs work to take away the authority of Christ and of the Bible, and will have its issue in fatal enervation of character, — in a race of Pilates.