The Chief Priests and Their Officials

After having been beaten, mocked, and ridiculed by Pilate’s soldiers, Jesus was presented before the chief priests and their officials: “Here is the man!” (The Latin is “Ecce Homo” as in the Vulgate translation.) Having given repeated indications already of his reluctance to condemn Jesus, Pilate likely had hoped that the appearance of Jesus, degraded in his blood and bruises from the beating, along with the ongoing mockery of his attire, would together evoke the first glimmers of mercy from the religious leaders. Perhaps Jesus had suffered enough. Instead, the Jewish leaders shouted, “Crucify, crucify!” Pilate then repeated once more, “I find no basis for a charge against him.” In his frustration, Pilate then began to make sport of the religious leaders by taunting them with his reply: “You take him and crucify him.” The Roman governor knew full well that the Jewish leaders had no power either to execute Jesus or to do it in the manner that they so obviously desired, that is, by crucifixion, a point noted earlier (see Day 31). Pilate’s reply, then, was a rhetorical insult; it was offered to remind the religious leaders of their place, their subservient position in relation to Rome.

The problem with lying or with being deceptive in terms of one’s true motivation is that you have to have a very good memory in order to keep the story straight. This is precisely what the religious leaders, in their exchange with Pilate, failed to do. Although earlier they had offered the pretense that Jesus was a criminal, a threat to the Roman state—“If he were not a criminal,” they replied, “we would not have handed him over to you” (John 18:30)—by now the charge was not political or criminal at all, but simply religious: “We have a law, and according to that law he must die, because he claimed to be the Son of God.” This shift of frameworks disturbed Pilate, for when he heard the specific claim that Jesus was the Son of God, no longer offered in the political language of “the king of the Jews” (John 18:33), but in specifically religious language, “he was even more afraid.” Who was this man?

Fearful, Pilate went back inside for another major interrogation of Jesus. “Where do you come from?” he asked. Observe that Pilate’s question was not a geographical one (he had already sent Jesus to Herod), but one far more important. Superstitious as he was, with a belief in a pantheon of gods, Pilate was likely inquiring in terms of the nature of Jesus, exactly what kind of being he was. So then, the question, “Where do you come from?” might have suggested that Jesus had come down from heaven and that reality, in and of itself, could pose significant problems for Pilate. In Jesus a greater authority, one from a different realm, so to speak, might be standing right before the procurator. Pilate had good reason to fear.

To Pilate’s question, “Where do you come from?” Jesus gave no answer this time around, although he had spoken freely earlier. This silence baffled the governor because issues of life and death were at stake: “Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?” In his reply to this further question, Jesus himself actually addressed the major contentious issue that would preoccupy and perplex subsequent generations up until this present day: Who bore the greater burden of responsibility for the death of Christ, was it Rome or Jerusalem?

Speaking carefully, Jesus reminded Pilate of his place as a Roman governor in the larger scheme of things: “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.” In other words, not only is God higher than Pilate’s office, but also that very office had been established by God (in the general sense of the goodness of rule and governance) in order to be a blessing to the people. Holding the office that he did, one that entailed important and unavoidable duties, and pressed to make a judgment in this case in accordance with the obligations of that office, Pilate would bear less responsibility for the outcome of this than those religious leaders, Caiaphas in particular, who had handed Jesus over to Pilate in the first place.

In light of what he had just learned in this subsequent interrogation, Pilate wanted to set Jesus free. However, given the array of circumstances then in play, he would be unable to do this. Indeed, Pilate was far less free than he had imagined. For one thing, he had the religious leaders to consider and they were now changing the framework once more by reverting back to political arguments that criticized not only Jesus as a threat to the state—“Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar”—but now also Pilate himself: “If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar.” These leaders were so bold in their actions and determined to have Jesus crucified, that they were willing to threaten even the Roman governor himself. They were willing to complain to Tiberius about what a bad job his procurator Pilate was doing, as if they had been such great Roman subjects all along. Now that move took both nerve and hypocrisy!

Recognizing the difficult position in which he had been placed, Pilate brought Jesus out before the people and sat down on the judge’s seat in order to render his verdict. It was the day of Preparation of the Passover, and so the Passover lambs would soon be slain. With the threat of the Jewish leaders likely still in his mind, Pilate nevertheless demonstrated his authority and power as the Roman governor by continuing to make fun of the Jewish leaders by announcing what he knew they would loathe to hear: “Here is your king.” In reply, the Jewish leaders shouted, “Take him away! Take him away! Crucify him!” Pilate then continued to mock the chief priests and their officials with great irony: “Shall I crucify your king?” The answer to that question would be decisive for everyone—for Jesus, Pilate, and the Jewish leaders themselves. Now there are some passages in the Bible which, because they are so brief, not even a full verse, we may quickly pass over them and, thereby, fail to appreciate their full significance. Such is the case here, in our current setting, as the Jewish leaders were about to reply to Pilate’s taunting question: “Shall I crucify your king?”

Among other things, the response of the Jewish leaders to this question would reflect their long and belabored attempt to eliminate Jesus, to put him to death: “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation” (John 11:48). The Sadducees clearly had an interest here. Moreover, such an effort would receive renewed interest, this time from the Pharisees, with the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem: “See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!” (12:19). Beyond this, the intentions and passions of the religious leaders would be raised to fever pitch as Jesus was brought before Caiaphas, the teachers of the law, and the elders: “Look, now you have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?” “He is worthy of death” (Matt. 26:65b–66). In short, there were so many elements, and so much prior history, along with troubling motivations along the way, that would feed into the reply of the religious leaders to Pilate. Their obsessive focus on Jesus, manifested in angry shouting and threats, would invariably lead the leadership down a path that should have shocked them, but it didn’t, for it would undermine nothing less than their very identity as Jews.

What are those few words full of meaning and rich in implications, what is that brief verse that constitutes the reply of the chief priests to Pilate’s question: “Shall I crucify your king?” It is none other than the shouting of what is a grand apostasy, a full sellout, one that undercut all the religious values that these Jewish leaders were supposed to hold dear. Ironically, during the Passover season the cry rang out in Jerusalem: “We have no king but Caesar.” Really? Really? Was there no room then for the reception of the Messiah, the Anointed One, the one who would usher in the kingdom of God? Or would the claim by anyone to be the Messiah be met with both disbelief and rejection simply because it detracted from the prerogatives and self-driven concerns of the current religious class, the chief priests in particular (see John 11:48)? They had already worked out their accommodation with Rome. What would be next?

In rejecting Jesus, in turning aside any right to kingship other than that of Caesar, the chief priests had abandoned not only the hope of the Messiah, but also no one less than the Holy One of Israel, the one who had set their ancestors free from Egyptian bondage with a mighty outstretched arm. That king was no longer recognized; rather a Gentile potentate, and a Roman one at that, had taken the place of the Most High. Moreover, in their full-blown apostasy this religious leadership, so full of their own present interests and driven by murderous intent, had also betrayed their own people, the Jewish people, who were genuine victims here as well. What then remained of such beautiful psalms that had earlier proclaimed the Holy One of Israel as king: “Hear my cry for help, my King and my God, for to you I pray” (Ps. 5:2) or “The LORD is King for ever and ever; the nations [or heathen] will perish from his land” (Ps. 10:16)? These psalms, as was with so much else, were vacated, emptied out of virtually all meaning. Now they were simply words once written a very long time ago. The religious leaders had said it themselves so clearly and so undeniably. We must therefore take them at their word: “We have no king but Caesar.”

THE PRAYER