The lengthiest readings of the liturgical year occur at the Liturgy of the Passion on Good Friday, when we hear the longest of Isaiah’s “servant songs” (Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12) and – after a modest chunk of Hebrews 4 and 5 – two full chapters of St John’s Gospel, taking us from Jesus setting forth across the Kidron valley to the unnamed garden where he will be arrested, to the burial of Christ by Joseph of Arimathea in a new tomb in another unnamed garden.
For much of my Dominican life I have been in Oxford, where the Passion is sung in English to the traditional Dominican tune, and more often than not I have been cast as “Ancilla”, as we call the part that encompasses all the solo players apart from Christ himself (it is named after the first such, the maid at the door, ancilla being the Latin for maid).
This is a fun part to sing, although the tune is not as interesting as Christ’s, because one gets to play Pilate. He has so many good lines! “Am I a Jew?”, “What is truth?” and “Behold, the man” being the most memorable. The dialogue between Jesus and Pilate that St John preserves, one of a number in his Gospel, creates a highly plausible portrait of a real human character, much like the Woman of Samaria.
Pilate is by no means a pantomime villain – though historical evidence suggests he did have quite a villainous side. When confronted by Jesus he is bemused, floundering out of his spiritual depth in the face of Christ’s serenely majestic certainty of his own identity and purpose. Pilate really could have learned something and is tantalisingly close to engaging in a worthwhile discussion; what stops him are two factors that we might well bear in mind.
Pilate is clearly concerned more with popularity than with doing what is right: “‘We have a law, and by that law he ought to die, because he has made himself the Son of God.’ When Pilate heard these words, he was the more afraid” (19:7ff). He becomes more afraid yet when it is suggested that not only the crowd gathered around him, but Caesar himself might not be best pleased by Jesus’s lèse majesté in claiming to be King of the Jews – the crime for which, according to the words above the Cross, he was put to death.
But in some ways Pilate’s other failure is the worse: not only does he not do what is right, out of fear or a wish to be popular, but he doesn’t even want to know what is right. His dismissive rhetorical question “What is truth?” echoes through the ages in the minds of those for whom the concept of absolute, objective truth is inconvenient or incomprehensible or – as for so many today – reduced to that which can be demonstrated by scientific experiment, so that there is no room for objective truth in the family home or the religious community, but only in the laboratory.
Yet Pilate does speak a great truth, albeit unwittingly, when he shows Jesus to the people and says “Behold, the man.” Jesus Christ is the one true human being, the one who takes up the mantle laid down by the first man, Adam, in that first garden, the mantle of obedience and of a right relationship with God, the mantle of stewardship over God’s creation.
Pilate, by contrast, shuns responsibility, including that fundamental human responsibility to seek truth and justice. His motivation, ultimately, is a mystery. As mysterious, indeed, as that of the other villain of Holy Week, Judas Iscariot. This is the man who hands Christ over to the soldiers in that earlier garden, a man whose name has become synonymous with treachery.
St John has hinted a good deal earlier in his narrative (12:4) that Judas is motivated by avarice, but this can hardly be why he became involved with Jesus in the first place. It is, I suppose, because his motivation is so hard to determine that he has become a figure of fascination for many, notably playing the role of anti-hero, but not the villain, in Jesus Christ Superstar.
But John also makes it clear that, whatever Judas’s motivation, he is a traitor, guilty of a disloyalty that is diametrically opposed to that loyalty of God which is made manifest through the life and death of Christ. As such, there is in him “something of the night” (cf John 13:29ff).
These two villains present us with the same choice: to seek the truth and come to the light of Christ, whatever the cost may be, or to disappear into the darkness. Photo: ‘Ecce Homo’ (“Behold the Man”), Antonio Ciseri’s depiction of Pilate presenting a scourged Jesus to the people of Jerusalem.
This article first appeared in the March 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.
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