The Politics of Death: The Mystery of Pontius Pilate’s Strange Behavior

John 18: 33-19: 16

Passion/Palm Sunday

St. Stephen Presbyterian Church

Fort Worth, TX

April 1, 2012

Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, Preacher

 

The names are familiar, even if you are not a churchgoer at all: Pilate. Caiaphas. Jesus. The three main characters who comprise a First Century version of “Law and Order:” Jesus, the accused traitor, insurgent and potential rebellion leader. Caiaphas, high priest, arresting officer, and prosecuting attorney. And Pilate, Roman magistrate, judge.

For people of faith, the situation has an ironic twist, because Caiaphas and Pilate at some level view themselves as free agents, acting in their own perceived interests and in what they perceive as the interests of their constituents. But we know better. We know that they are but pawns in the great plan of salvation, that Jesus’ death, which Caiaphas has so adroitly maneuvered for his own political reasons, is actually part of God’s perfect plan to save humanity.

That irony is doubled when we realize that, from the perspective of Pilate, Jesus was just some Galilean peasant who bothered Caiaphas, and as a result Pilate could use his power to kill or save Jesus as a hammer to beat up on his greatest political rival. Both Pilate and Caiaphas are using Jesus as a pawn as they play a game of political chicken. What neither of them realize, is that their own wants, desires, and ambitions are being used by God to save humanity.

You may not realize that even outside the Bible, both Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas were notorious figures in the ancient world.

Pontius Pilate was roundly criticized by ancient historians such as Josephus as the worst Roman proconsul to serve in Judea. He apparently was quite in favor of Roman emperor worship and quite against Jewish “one God” worship. As a result, he kept undermining Roman policy in Judea, which was to tolerate the Jews and their worship as much as was required to collect the taxes and to keep the peace.

After years of war, Rome in the first century was finally established as the world empire, and was experiencing the golden age of the “Pax Romana.” The one fly in the ointment was Judea and the Jews. They had strange religious customs that wouldn’t allow them to call the emperor a god. They had a history of being a powder keg of rebellion. So Roman policy, wisely, was to practice religious toleration: to keep all elements of emperor worship out of dealing with Jews and to do everything possible to keep Jewish religious leaders happy with Roman rule.

Pilate, though, seems to have been an “emperor worship” fundamentalist. Twice he attempted to establish images of the emperor in Jerusalem, and once he used the Jewish Temple’s holy money to finance an infrastructure improvement plan.  These policies twice led to near rebellion on the part of the Jewish people. The second near-rebellion resulted in wholesale slaughter of unarmed civilians.

Needless to say, the traditional image of Pilate as the soul of Roman rationality standing alone against those seeking to kill Jesus is, well, to say the least, exaggerated.

Likewise, ancient Jews held Caiaphas up as the worst example of the excesses of the late Temple period. Caiaphas is remembered in the Babylonian Talmud and the writings of Josephus as the worst of a bad lot of high priests, almost a mafia family of corrupt priests whose godfather was Caiaphas’ father-in-law, Annas. These high priests created a hierarchy of rich and poor priests, kept much of the  Temple money for themselves, and extorted, abused, and even killed other priestly families, keeping them in near-starvation poverty. And while many traditional Jewish sources condemn most of the priests of that time as puppets of the Romans, it points to Caiaphas as particularly in the Roman pocket.

It was the norm for proconsuls to fire high priests almost every year. But somehow Caiaphas stayed high priest the entire period of Pilate’s rule, some 14 years. Maybe this was because they were political allies. But it sure doesn’t appear that way in the Bible. They are clearly at odds over Jesus, for instance.

And it doesn’t explain the most glaring inconsistency between the Pilate of history and the Pilate of the Bible, which is that Pilate actually resists killing Jesus.

As a well-documented bloody and reactionary Roman ruler, there was absolutely no reason for Pilate not to kill Jesus. In fact, he had good reason to kill him: Jesus was condemned by the Sanhedrin; and he had a fan club among the people as a prophet and potential king. No Roman proconsul needed much more than that to pronounce the death sentence.

The whole process should have been a rubber stamp, and clearly that was what Caiaphas was expecting. Instead, Pilate drags the whole thing out. He questions what was so dangerous about this man. He offers an amnesty: the gathered crowd could decide whether to free Jesus or a condemned rebel leader, Barabbas.

Let me tell you a secret: Pilate knew they’d choose Barabbas. Why? Because nobody knew Jesus was on trial. He’d been captured in secret and all his disciples abandoned him. Pilate knew that the “crowd” gathered there was hardly representative of the Jewish public. There were only two groups represented: friends of Barabbas and the people who’d had Jesus arrested in the first place. Of course they were going to choose Barabbas.

Which by the way means, contrary to the way it’s often depicted, that Jesus wasn’t condemned by “the Jews,” but by a hand-picked crowd that wanted him dead to begin with. He was not even, apparently, condemned by the whole Sanhedrin, but by those sympathetic to Caiaphas; that’s why they were meeting at Annas’ house rather than in the Sanhedrin headquarters in the Temple courtyard. It was not unusual during Caiaphas’ tenure as high priest for the Pharisees, who comprised half the Sanhedrin, to be left out of key decisions, and Jesus had developed a following among some key Pharisees.

So, back to Pilate’s odd behavior. After the crowd chooses Barabbas, there’s that whole thing with presenting Jesus whipped and beaten, in purple robe, wearing the crown of thorns.  It’s just to embarrass, anger, and frustrate Caiaphas, to rub his face in how weak and powerless Jesus is, and yet poor Caiaphas is so afraid of him.

Pilate is dragging this whole thing out just to get Caiaphas’ goat. Why is he doing this?

My guess is that, because of Pilate’s continued misbehavior, the power dynamic between the proconsul and high priest had been turned on its head. According to Josephus, Pilate had been condemned to Rome by everyone. Even King Herod and his brother Philip had complained, and they were good friends with the emperor. He had so upset things that the Jewish people were in a constant state of near rebellion. He was overdue to be expelled and put to trial before the emperor, and in fact a few years later exactly that would happen to him.

My guess is the high priest had put in a good word for Pilate. Said he was doing a good job. Said, give him a chance. The high priest had used his office to ease tensions with the people and with King Herod and Philip.

 Caiaphas had kept Pilate in office.

And now Pilate was beholden to him. He couldn’t fire Caiaphas and he couldn’t control him.

Until now. Now Caiaphas had come to Pilate with something he wanted desperately: the death of this Galilean prophet. At last, Pilate had the upper hand! And he was going to use it.

What did Pilate want?

John tells us, better than any of the Gospel writers, what it was Pilate was after. In John, Pilate says, “Shall I crucify your king?” And the crowd, led of course by the high priest and his minions, say the one thing that Pilate, the emperor-worshiping fundamentalist, wanted to hear more than anything else from these Jews who supposedly believed their only king was God: “We have no king but Caesar!”                                                   

After years of working for it, Pilate had at last succeeded in making the religious leadership renounce their faith and assert that Caesar was god. This was a turning point. At last, Pilate had the upper hand.

And so to Pilate, after all, Jesus is just a pawn in a great political game, his life or death irrelevant except insofar as it gets Pilate what he wants from Caiaphas.

What keeps frustrating Pilate is that Jesus doesn’t act like a pawn. Not only that, but Caiaphas may be Pilate’s enemy, but he’s also no fool. Clearly Jesus is some sort of threat. The problem is, what kind?

What Pilate discovers, and what all the gospels bear out, is that Jesus is the kind of threat that Pilate is least able to defend against. He is a spiritual threat, psychological threat, and he is that in two ways.

The first is because he is not afraid of Pilate. There is nothing worse than that for the dictatorial ruler of a police state, because after all, fear is what makes a police state tick. But Jesus doesn’t fear Pilate. Or Rome. Or, apparently, anyone but the Jewish God.

But the second psychological threat is far, far worse. Jesus gets under Pilate’s skin. Pilate thinks he’s got it clear what’s important and what isn’t. The power of the state—dominating power, period. Domination, winning, power over others, that’s what counted.

But Jesus completely dismisses it. Pilate has no power except it was granted him from above, Jesus says. You think you hold my life in your hands? You don’t. God does.

Pilate thinks what’s important is his power play with Caiaphas, but in spite of himself, again and again, Pilate finds himself fascinated, confused, befuddled, confounded–and even afraid of–his dirty Galilean prisoner—as if his game with Caiaphas, which to Pilate seems a matter of life and death, is completely irrelevant; as if somehow there are greater forces at work even than Caesar himself, forces to whom Pilate and Caiaphas and all their ambitions and goals are but pawns in some greater purpose.

Pilate finds himself engaged in philosophical discussions about truth—this man who is a soldier and politician, and truthfully a bit petty, whose greatest fear would have been to examine his life–who never looked into his own soul, who would normally slap down anyone who suggested that he should, this man is debating “truth” with a Jewish rabbi!

Perhaps he even finds himself feeling some grudging respect for this Jesus–the same kind of grudging respect he’d learned to have for the Jewish people, who were powerless before the might of Rome but who had the undaunted spirit to stand up to him time and again, to assert that their God was victorious and the true God despite all the clear evidence to the contrary.

Maybe that’s why, when Jesus is crucified, Pilate poked Caiaphas in the eye one more time by putting a sign on Jesus’ cross that said, “This is the King of the Jews”—because Jesus represented the indomitable spirit of the Jews which Caiaphas had renounced when he declared that he had no king but Caesar.

Whatever Pilate may have learned from his time with Jesus, it didn’t stick. Sometime within the next five years, Pilate overreacts to an unarmed Jewish religious minority, sending a legion to kill them all. The Roman Governor in Syria has had it with him and asks the emperor to recall Pilate and put him on trial. Pilate leaves Judea in shame, and Caiaphas goes down with him, losing the high priesthood. And history after that loses track of Pilate.

But history doesn’t lose track of the man who Pilate thought of as the powerless, unimportant cat’s paw in his political game with the high priest. History doesn’t lose track of Jesus of Nazareth.