THE WASHING OF THE HANDS

THE WASHING OF THE HANDS

"Behold the man!"

 

And he turned Christ's shoulders towards that expanse of yelling muzzles that they might see the welts left by the rods, red with oozing blood. It was as if he said: Look at Him, your King, the only King that you deserve, in His true majesty, tricked out as befits such a King. His crown is of sharp thorns; His purple cloak is the coat of a mercenary; His scepter is a dry reed. These are the ornaments merited by your degraded King, unjustly rejected by a degraded people like yourselves. Was it His blood you desired? Here is His blood; see how it drops from the thorns of His crown. There is not much of it, but it ought to be enough for you, since it is innocent blood. It is shed as a great favor to you—to satisfy you. And now be off from here, for you have troubled me long enough!

But the Jews were quieted neither by these words nor by that spectacle. They demanded something quite other than a flogging and a masquerade before they would go their ways. Pilate thought that he could make mock of them, but he would realize that this was no time for feeble jokes. They had had the best of him twice already and they would again. A few bruises and a practical joke played by the soldiery were not enough to punish this enemy of God as He deserved; there were trees in Judea and nails to nail Him to them. And their hoarse voices shouted all together, "Let him be crucified! Let him be crucified!" (Matt. 27:22-23)

Too late Pilate realized that they had driven him into a tangle from which he could not disengage himself. All his decisions were combated with a pertinacity he had not foreseen. By a flash of inspiration he had pronounced the great words, "Behold the man!" (John 19:5) But he himself did not understand that proclamation which transcended his base soul. He did not realize that he had found the truth he was seeking: a half-truth, but deeper than all the teachings of the philosophers of Rome and Greece. He did not understand how Jesus was really Man, the symbol of all humanity, sorrowing and humiliated, betrayed by its rulers, deceived by its masters, crucified every day by the Kings who oppress their subjects, by the rich who cause the poor to weep, by priests who think of their bellies rather than of God. Jesus is the Man of Sorrows announced by Isaiah (Isa. 53:3), the man without form or comeliness, despised and rejected of men, who was to be killed for all men; He is God's only son who had taken on man's flesh, and who would ascend in the glory of power and of the new sun, in the midst of the blaring of the trumpets calling the dead to life. (1 Thess. 5:10) But now to the eyes of Pilate, to the eyes of Pilate's enemies, He was only a wretched, insignificant man, flesh for rods and for nails, a man and not Man, a mortal and not a God. Why did Pilate lose time with those sibylline remarks before delivering Him to the executioner?

And yet Pilate still did not yield. Standing beside that silent man, the Roman felt his heart heavy with an oppression he had never known before. Who could this man be whom all the people wished to kill, and whom he could neither save nor sacrifice? He turned once more to Jesus, "Whence art thou?" (John 19:9)

But Jesus gave him no answer.

"Speakest thou not unto me? knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee, and have power to release thee?" (John 19:10)

Then the insulted King raised His head, "Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above: therefore he that delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin." (Vs. 11)

Caiaphas and his associates were the guilty ones; the others were dogs incited by Caiaphas, mere tools of Caiaphas. Even Pilate was only an indocile instrument of priestly hatred and of the Divine will.

But the Procurator in his perplexity found no new expedient to free himself from the net about him, and returned to his fixed idea, "Behold your King!" (John 19:14)

The Jews, infuriated by this repeated insult, burst out, enraged, "If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend; whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against Caesar." (John 19:12)

At last they had hit on the right words to bring pressure on weak, cowardly Pilate. Every Roman magistrate, no matter how high his rank, depended on Caesar's favor. Pilate's reputation might be ruined by an accusation of this sort, presented with ability, by malicious advocates—and there were plenty of those among the Hebrews, as was shown later by the memorial of Philo. But in spite of the threat, Pilate cried out his last and weakest question, "Shall I crucify your king?" (Vs. 15)

The High Priests, feeling that they were on the point of winning, answered with their last lie, "We have no king but Caesar." (Vs. 15)

Pilate surrendered. He was forced to yield unless he wished to start an uproar which might set all Judea on fire. His conscience did not disturb him: had he not tried everything possible to save this man who did not wish to save Himself?

He had tried to save Him by referring the matter to the Sanhedrin, which could not pronounce a death sentence; he had tried to save Him by sending Him to Herod; he had tried to save Him by affirming that he found no fault in Him; he had tried to save Him by offering to free Him in the place of Barabbas; he had tried to save Him by having Him scourged in the hope that this humiliating punishment would pacify them; he had tried to save Him by seeking to arouse a little pity in those hardened hearts. But all his maneuvers had failed, and he certainly did not wish the whole province to rise on account of that unfortunate Prophet; and even less was he willing that on His account they should accuse him before Tiberius and have him deposed.

Pilate thought himself innocent of the blood of this innocent man. And in order that they might all have a visible representation of that innocence which they would not forget, he had a basin of water brought to him and washed his hands there before them all, saying, "I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it." (Matt. 27:24)

Then answered all the people and said, "His blood be on us, and on our children." (Vs. 25)

"Then released he Barabbas unto them: and when he had scourged Jesus he delivered him to be crucified." (Vs. 26)

But the water which flowed over his hands was not enough to cleanse them. His hands are still blood-stained, and will be to all eternity. He might have saved Christ if he had really wished. Jesus was sent to Golgotha by Pilate's tricks, by the multiple forms taken by the cowardice of Pilate's soul, poisoned by the irony of skeptics. He would have been less base if he had really believed Christ guilty and had given his consent to the assassination. But he knew that there was no fault in Jesus that Jesus was a just man as Claudia Procula had said, as he himself had repeated after her. There is no excuse for a man in authority who, fearing for himself, allows a just man to be killed: he holds office in order to protect the just against assassins. But Pilate said, "I have done everything that I could to save Him from the hands of the unjust." That was not true; he had tried many ways, but not the only way which could have succeeded. He had not offered himself, had not sacrificed himself, had not been willing to risk his dignity and his fortune The Jews hated Jesus, but they also hated Pilate, who had harassed and derided them so many times. Instead of proposing the seditious Barabbas in exchange for Jesus, he ought to have proposed himself, Pontius Pilate, Procurator of Judea, and perhaps the people might have accepted the bargain. No other victim except himself would have satisfied the rage of the Jews. It would not have been necessary for him to die. It would have been enough to let them denounce him to Caesar as Caesar's enemy. Tiberius would have deposed him and perhaps have banished him, but he would have taken into exile and into disgrace a comforting certainty of innocence. Little did his changes avail him; for the fate he now sought to avert by giving Jesus over into the hands of his adversaries fell upon him a few years later. The Jews and the Samaritans accused him; the Governor of Syria deposed him, and Caligula banished him to the frontiers of Gaul. But he was followed into his exile by the shade of that great, silent man, assassinated with his consent. In vain had he constructed in Jerusalem the great reservoir full of water, in vain had he washed himself with that water before the multitude. That water was Jewish water, turbid and fateful water that did not cleanse. No washing will ever cleanse his hands from the stains left on them by the divine blood of Christ.