Pontius Pilate John M, Buchanan
Matthew 2711-2, 11-26 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
April 4, 1982 Columbus, Ohio

High up in the Swiss Alps, picturesque Lake Lucerne sits at the base of
Mt. Pilatus. According to ancient, but unconfirmed legend, when the mists and
fog extend from the water all the way up the mountain, the ghost of Pontius '
Pilate may be seen, washing his hands in the water of the lake, over and oved,
moaning, "What shall I do with Jesus who is called the Christ?"

What we know about Pontius Pilate is a mixture of fact and legend, much
more of the latter than the former. Early Christian writers attribute to him
a variety of sinister characteristics, portraying hi, as cruel, unfeeling, Liner
sensitive, the arch enemy of God, On the other hand, the Eastern Church
canonized Pilate's wife, calling her Procula. The Coptic Church honors both
Pilate and his wife, as saints and martyrs. arly traditions have him committing
suiciie during the historically cruel reign of Caligula. Yet other traditions
hold that Pilate became a Christian, that his body was carried to France and
buried on a hill near Vienne which bears his name.

There is no way to recover fact from legend. Among it all, I come down on
the side of the ghost of Lake Lucerne. For there, washing his hands, asking over
and over, “What shail I do with Jesus who is called the Christ?", is the charac-
terization relevant for us.

How strange that the Apostles's Creed, the oldest, orderly Christian affir-
mation of faith, should recall him by name. Out of a great gallery: Joseph,
his father, John the Baptist, Anna, Zechariah, Simeon, Elizabeth, Peter, Andrew,
John, Nicodemus, Mary Magdalene, Martha, Lazarus - the creed choses two, two
portraits - two people to accompany the church's memory down through history:
Mary his mother, and Pontius Pilate, under whose political jurisdiction he died. ut
But even that is not as concise as we might wish. Pilate himself would protest
the simplicity and clarity and finality of that liturgical cant - "suffered
under Pontius, was crucified, dead and buried..." In fact. if we listen care-
fully to the ghost of Lake Lucerne, we might hear something.«.--

I was a politician. I was a politician in a system of government that
dignified the word politics. The Roman Empire you talk about so condescen-
dingly, so patronizingly, was a marvel. You don't know much about it. Your
preachers, so glibly, use it for sermon illustrations, in full confidence that
people won't know the first thing about Roman Justice, Roman Peace, Roman Law.
Well, I was a Roman politician ~- and I participated in a system that made jus~
tice a reality for people living on the very edge of barbarism. We made peace:
there were no great wars: there were no body counts mounting into the thousands.
We kept the peace: enforced it when we had to. You're still trying to do that -
and not very successfully, but we did and whereever we went, we brought order
and justice and a system in which human life thrived. We civilized whereever
we went. We built - courts and libraries and temples and roads and bridges and
aqueducts andamphitheatres. We loved music and poetry and architecture and sport.

I was a Governor in the Roman Imperial system with a title of Proconsul.
The Emperor was Tiberius Caesar. My assignment was the provinces of Judea,
Samaria and Idumea. My subjects were a strange, volatile mixture of people

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who had been fighting along the Eastern rim of our sea for. centurtes “as far as any
body knew. Arabic people, merchants, tratets froh further east, wandering desert
people, and-the Semites - the Samaritans and the Jews.

The Jewish people and their cousins, thé Samaritans, were alwdys difficult to
govern, Their teligion. itself.seemed te-us to be the sbdurte bE Gtrogance and con-
ttariness, ‘they didn't appreciate our culture. They had-their-own notions of
justice. And-they had @ particular averion to our art. We Romans have one of the
best records in history for respecting the rights of conqueted people. We didn't
insist that Jews stop being Jews in order to satisfy some theological exclusive-
ness on our parts Their religion was their owm businessi But that wasn't good
enough. They inBisted, my advisors told me, that their God was the only God.

They refused eyeti to acknowledge our gods and, you know, the more you think
about that, the more it begins to look like political resistance, subversion
even, And then ~ all those laws - you can't eat this and that, you can't cook
on Friday evening, you can't draw water from a well all day Saturday, and the
holidays and secret ceremonies. I'm no barbarian, mind you. I know that you
can't force people to believe or not to believe anything. But the Jews made
it terribly difficult for us to govern.

You forget, don't you, that my territory was remote and essentially wnim-
portant militarily. The attention of the Emperor and his advisors was certainly
never on us. And you forget that to be a governor in a remote province, was to
be on one's own. It took weeks to get a message to Rome and an answer back.
Asking an "Advisory Group on Jewish Affairs" back in Rome how best to deal with
a particular crisis was out of the question. I was in charge. I was Roman au-
thority in Judea. What happened or didn't happen, everyone knew, was my respon-
sibility.

I served for ten years in Judea. About the time I was in line for a pro-
motion, my career came to an end. Three incidents were responsible, I suppose»
Funny you should know about me because of the Nazarene incident. It wasn "et even
one of the three.

In any event, IL used my power to establish Roman authority in Jerusalem
early in my term. I still think I was correct. I thought it was important to
demonstrate our strength. And so I scheduled a parade - all available legions
were summoned to the capital of the Jews for a march-through. It was - and still
is - an accepted military, political strategy for communicating the perimeters
of power to all occupied people. Perhaps it was the revolutionaries who started
it. We never did discover the agitators, but before you knew it, someone in the
crowd started shouting and throwing rocks, a group grabbed the standard with the
Roman Eagle on top and broke it in two, a few of our horses bolted, and several
young legionnaires had their swords out before their commanding officers knew it.
Blood was shed: we demonstrated our ability to rule. But word of the incident
did get to Rome.

On another occasion, I expropriated some money from their very ample temple
treasury in order to complete an aqueduct we were building for them. The money
was for something they needed: drought was permanent and serious. I assumed their
cooperation, I thought they would be pleasddto help, contribute voluntarily perhaps.

=

I really didn't understand that my expropriation of funds would be regarded as a
veiigious offense, as blasphemy. Rome, too, thought I should have known better.

The third incident caused my recall. Some fanatical Samaritans, inspired by
their version of Jewish religion thought they were about to discover valuable ancient
artifacts at their sacred mountain. More and more people got involved and gathered
to watch. They wouldn't disperse and we learned long ago that unruly crowds of oc~
cupied people have a way of becoming politicized mobs rather quickly. So I did
what I thought I had to do. I ordered our legions to disperse the crowd and to
execute the vrouble makers. By the time the account arrived in Rome, my decision
appeared very foolish. The Emperor recalled me from my post and I fade from your
view.

So I haunt you. You know my name better than any Emperor save Julius Caesar.
For nearly 2,000 years you have remembered me better than any of your own saints,
save a small handful. There's irony in it, I suppose. But then you haunt me as
well, and yes, I do recall the incident, the man, Jesus of Nazareth.

My job, at religious holidays - and Passover was the biggest of all, was -
very simply - to keep the peace. "Law and order" I believe you call it and under
its guise you have made some ghastly mistakes of your own if I remember coorectly -
Chicago - Selma ~ Kent State. You know then, don't you, the difficulty of my po-
sition. I had to see that the Jewish puppet monarchs had their egos massaged, and
that those pompous fools at the Temple had opportunity to play silly games, and that
the crowds didn't get out of control, and that the water didn't dry up and that there
was enough: food. And so you will understand it if I didn't appear attentive when
the priests came insisting that I do something about one God-forsaken, rag-tag
carpenter from Nazareth. God knows, you remember my story. I just wish you
wouldn't be so pompous about it..."Suffered under Pontius Pilate"...Why can't you
acknowledge that the art of politics is the art of compromise, expedience, and
that every President, Governor, and Mayor who ever lived knows what that means.
Every General who commits troops knows that some will be killed.

You know what I did. It's all there for you to read. I did not find fault
with the man. I tried every maneuver at my disposal to set him free. I stalled,
I sent him to that fool, Herod, I had him whipped thinking the crowd might come
to its senseswhen he appeared bloody and beaten. I even tried to bargain with the
life of a ruthless, murdering scoundrel named Barabas. If I had not approved the
execution of Jesus - I would have had a riot on my hands, Worse yet, when the
news arrived in Rome, that I had interrogated someone who claimed to be King - and
allowed him to go free, my career would have been over.

My wife knew my agony. Procula saw exactly what was happening. She warned me,
So I washed my hands of the whole affair and did what liad: to be done. Or rather,
I tried to wash my hands. That, you see, is the only ultimate mistake I made.
History remembers me not for some great evyl I did, but for something I allowed
to transpire: something that happened because I washed my hands.

"Suffered under Pontius Pilate..." May I remind you that my name in your
areed is blunt testimony that your Jesus lived in history. You are inclined to
forget that, you'll pardon me for observing. You enshrine him in stained glass,
and syrupy; hyms written 1900 years after the fact, and moral platitudes... You've
got him on the walls of your churches looking for all the wofld like a character
out of an English novel and you forget that he was in history. My name is there

1

adhe

kQ remind you. He was a semite: a Jew, dark, swarthy, spoke Aramaic. He had a family
‘and friends, a body, an appetite, emotions and intellect. We Romans cast our deities
dim bronze and decorated the street corners with them. Yours walked around on earth,

in the streets, and was unrecognizable as deity. Yours lived and taught you how to
Hive... and died teaching you how to die.

And let me remind you, in case you still need reminding, about the complexity
pf politics. Let me remind you that I was not - by anybody's estimation - a bad man,
§ did the best I could. I certainly didn't make a habit of executing innocent car~ ~
penters from the countryside. If intended no harm that day so long ago. But the city
was crowded, and the revolutionaries - the Zealots - were all there, always waiting,
. like buzzards, watching for the right moment to start a fight they hoped would result
dn Pp revolution. That's what I saw when I walked out on the portico, with Jesus -
bound and bleeding, standing behind me: a hostile mob, furious at Rome, at me, at the
hang fate had dealt them. They didn't care about Jesus. He wasn't the issue. I had
fo do something - and so I compromised..."trade - off". I believe you call it now:
fhe: life of one insignificant carpenter - for a little public peace and tranquility.
That's what politics is all about: Hiroshima, Nagasaki - in exchange for nuclear
weapons instead of food, medicine; swords instead of plow shares. You should know by
now the complexity of politics and the necessity of compromising morality. And if
yo don't: if it doesn't torture you, then please have the decency to take my name
oug of your creed.

I tried to wash my hands. It didn't work, of course. And that's the lesson you
should learn from me. It is impossible to be neutral about Jesus who is called the
Christ. My neutrality cost him him life.

There was something about him, which made neutrality very difficult - for every-
body, Certainly he pushed his friends to the limits and beyond. He made it almost
impossible for his own people to remain neutral. In fact, it seemed to me that he

-went out of his way to precipitate a crisis: to force the issue with people who would
rather not have taken a stand. Let me remind you that the day he really became a pro-
blem for me was the day he went to great pains to play out a role his own people had
assigned to the Messiah. When those old men at the temple, praying and chanting and
swaying back and forth with their prayer shawls on started to think about their Savior -
what they thought about was an obscure description in their Scripture about a King
coming on an ass, humble - but victorious, He didn't have to hire that donkey to
enter the city. He could have walked in like every other pilgrim. But in riding in
he forged the issue, don't you see. People had to decide what they thought of hin.
People had to decide, Some stripped the clothes off their backs to make a royal car-
pet for him. Others turned into that angry, surly mob which showed up outside my
palace five days later. Neutrality was out of the question.

We're not really so different - you and I. It's natural to want to avoid making
commitments, taking stands, particularly when they might be unpopular, costly.

But let me remind you of something you should already know and that is that on
the really important matters it isn't possible to be neutral. One of your own theo-
logians - Catholic - wrote: "We are free, But we are not free to be free. In the
long run it is impossible to be undecided about reality. Not to chose is itself a
choice." (Hans Kung, Does God Exist?, p. 438.)

You see ~ the towering tragedy of my life: the towering irony of Pontius
Pilate - is that in trying to be neutral, I presided over his crucifixion.

I had an opportunity to do something utterly good and strong and right. I
had a God-given chance to be fully human: to be myself in a way that God intended
me to be. I was face to face with the Savior of the human race ~ and I flinched:
I caved int in what I now regard as the weakest, most pathetic gesture of my life -
I chose expediency, I publicly washed my hands of the whole affair.

I had wy chance and missed it. I could have loved and followed; instead
you temember me as a crucifier.

What of you? That's the question which remains now.

What will you do with Jesus whe ts called the Christ?

The historical information about Pilate was discovered in:

The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, Volume 3, pp, 811-813.

A Gallery of New Testament Rogues, From Herod to Satan, John R. Bodo, Westminster
Press 1979, pp. 58-65.