Sermon for Wednesday of Judica (Lent V)
Witnesses to Christ: Pontius Pilate
In the Name of the Father, & of the Son + & of the Holy Spirit
Grace to you and peace from the One Who Is & Who Was & Who Is to Come!
There are so many beautiful verses in the Gospel of John that if you were to highlight them, most of the Gospel would be highlighted. John 3:16 springs immediately to mind, of course. Then John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word.” One of the most amazing and important is John 1:14: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The Word did not change into flesh. He did not "transition" into flesh. The Eternal Word, the Son, the second person of the Trinity, remained as He was – God – and become as we are – flesh. One-hundred percent of both. And tonight, Pontius Pilate does not know what to make of Him and has that holy flesh torn apart in his weakness.
Cyril of Alexandria wrote: “We cannot acquit Pilate of his complicity in the iniquity of those who committed this impious crime against Christ. Pilate shared their responsibility inasmuch as when he might have delivered and rescued him from the madness of his murderers, he did not merely refrain from releasing him but even gave him up to them to be crucified.”1
Pilate was so close to the truth. So close to salvation. His Savior was there before him, but he did not know Him, as St. John again writes: “The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.”2 Pilate’s heart was hardened.
A french doctor names Guy Patin wrote in 1692, "I saw a woman today become as hard as wood all over." This was the first clinical description of fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, also called stoneman’s disease and Münchmeyer disease. It is caused by a genetic mutation that affects connective tissue – muscle, ligaments, and tendons. When these tissues become injured, and the body heals them, the old tissue is replaced permanently by bone tissue, gradually fusing the entire body.3 This rogue gene has only one goal, which is to slowly harden the body until it dies. Life expectancy maxes out around forty years for sufferers of this extremely rare disease.
Hardness of heart is another matter entirely. As we continue our series "Witnesses to Christ," meeting important characters in the story of Jesus' Passion, we have come to the figure who is perhaps the most notorious after Judas Iscariot: Pontius Pilate. His crime is even immortalized in the words of the Apostles' Creed. His problem is hardness of heart, an acute case of stoneman's disease of the spirit. In Moses' time, pharaoh hardened his heart after each plague. God only hardened his heart after the sixth.4 Pilate hardened his own heart.
We are all guilty of hardness of heart at one time or another. It creeps up on us, little by little, like a bad habit. Sometimes when we earnestly pray for something we want but do not get, our heart hardens because we think God is ignoring us or does not love us. We fail to realize we are not getting what we want because it is either not yet time, or it is not good for us, or it is simply not His will. We become spiritually hard of heart when our priorities become a little mixed up, then they get out of hand completely. Again, little by little. We stop coming to church regularly. We stop reading the Bible. We stop praying. We stop repenting. Then we stop trusting Jesus. Little by little, our hearts become hardened so that the Name of Jesus has as much impact as "Aunt Sarah" or "Uncle Bob." The awe and mystery of the Lord's Supper become just some ritual we all do on a Sunday morning. No thought is given to your baptism and what it means to you every day. You don’t think it happens? Then ask yourselves, when did Lutherans, as a whole, stop crossing themselves? When did crucifixes disappear from our sanctuaries? When did The Lord’s Supper stop being offered every Sunday? Hardness of heart.
According to an inscription in Latin found on a limestone dedicatory block in Caesarea in 1961, Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor of Judea from AD26-36.5 We know from various ancient sources6 that Pilate was a member of the Equestrian, or knight, or second class in Roman society. That is important because it was difficult to impossible to move up from your socioeconomic class in those days. Some things never change. Pilate served in the Legions in Germania until one year, while on leave, he married a member of the first class, a patrician woman named (by tradition, not the historical record) Claudia Procula.7 It so happened that Claudia Procula was the granddaughter of Augustus, the former Emperor, who was, in turn, the father of the current one, Tiberius.
Okay, preacher man, this is supposed to be a sermon, so why the history lesson? Remember, Pilate was essentially upper-middle class, and he married into money. Not only that but married into essentially the royal family. That's how Pilate got his big assignment as the Roman Proconsul in the province of Judea. It comes with more money and status, but it is not a cushy assignment. As we saw last week, there is political unrest. Insurrectionists called the Zealots, led by a fellow called Barabbas, wanted the Romans out of Palestine at any cost. Pontius Pilate is there to keep the peace and keep the taxes flowing to Rome. He also serves at the pleasure of the Emperor. Doing a lousy job will mean exile from the Empire itself. Pilate's motivation revolves around money, power, class, and prestige. In other words, Pilate’s world revolves around himself. Sound familiar?
This brings us to the current situation at Jesus' trial. The Sanhedrin has been setting Jesus up, convicting Him of blasphemy, which is punishable by death. Only there is one problem. The Jews are forbidden by their law to put someone to death. They need to get the Romans, their sworn enemies, to do it for them. Pilate asks the usual things. "What has this man done?" The Jews hesitate. They can't say "Blasphemy" because there is no Roman law against blasphemy. The Jews can not say "He claims to be the Messiah" because the Romans would not care less about that. Like most Romans and indeed much of the world in those days, Pilate did not understand Jews or Jewish culture. So Pilate starts getting impatient, and his heart stiffens.
“Are you the King of the Jews?”8 To Pilate, king is a title on par with "Emperor" and all the baggage that goes along with it. To the Jews, it means "Messiah" and "Christ," but even they misconstrue it. To a Roman, it means a military ruler. Jesus answers him, "You say I am a king."9 What Jesus means is, "you say I'm a king, but I am not the kind of king you are thinking of." The chief priests and scribes want to confuse Pilate into thinking Jesus is a revolutionary and a terrorist, like Barabbas, and therefore a threat to Rome. A threat to Rome is a threat to Pilate's livelihood – possibly even his life! But the Jew's plan fails. Jesus tells Pilate that His kingdom is not of this world,10 and that “Everyone who is of the truth listens to My voice.”11 To which Pilate cynically quips, “What is truth?”12 Pilate’s heart is becoming as hard as bone.
Pilate has Jesus scourged, almost to the point of death. We will not get into it here, but if you want to know the details of Roman flogging, I will tell you what the Roman historians have recorded. It is nothing short of brutal, and what is portrayed in the movie “The Passion of the Christ” is actually tame in comparison. It should have been enough for anybody to see Jesus thus punished. But the Jews want Him dead, so they play their last and seemingly most uncomplicated card:
“If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend.”13 That is all it took, and the Jews knew they had their man. Pilate knew what the boss was like. The historian Suetonius records that Caesar, the Emperor Tiberius, was capable of turning on his underlings in a heartbeat.14 Physically sick and constantly paranoid of nature, he would fly off into fits of violent rage. Pilate has no desire to be the object of that rage. Especially since he got his position by marriage to a granddaughter of the Emperor who married beneath her station.
The ruling council of the Jews blackmailed Pontius Pilate, plain and simple. And Pilate, though he knew that Jesus was an innocent man, buckled under the pressure. He hardened his heart to the truth and knelt to worship only at the altar of the god "me." The problem with a hard heart is that it will not allow itself to be instructed, no matter how clearly reasoned or simply explained the teaching is made.
Pilate asks, “Shall I crucify your king?”15 But this is not a Roman-type king – the military type looking to conquer. Nor is He a Sanhedrin-type king, a revolutionary king, looking for a fight. No, Jesus is the suffering King, the bleeding King, the looking for you King. He is the King of cleansing sin-stained hearts. The King of healing deep brokenness. He is the dying King, but more so the living King. This is a King who knows the exact time and place of His execution, and goes to it anyway, gladly, all for you.
Pilate is only interested in one thing. What’s in it for me? How many times have you said that, even in jest? What’s in it for me? Pilate is climbing the ladder of success and does not care who he has to step on to get to the next rung. That is a pattern of behavior we can understand. We learned last week that we are not that different than Barabbas, and here we learn we are not that much different than Pilate. “What’s in it for me” is the recipe for a hard heart. Hard hearts break our relationships with each other and with God.
The chief priests answered Pilate, “We have no king but Caesar.”16 Their hearts were stone. They lied to get their way, and it worked. A Jewish riot would end Pilate's governorship, possibly his marriage, and even his life. So he let his heart turn to stone and has Jesus executed.
When we give in to "what's in it for me?" we let our hearts become a little harder. Are you sometimes getting callous, insensitive, or indifferent? The symptoms are all there; we see them. But our hearts are not stone yet. There is a cure. Jesus, by that unjust death on the cross, won for you the forgiveness of all your sins of hardness of heart. He promises to those who repent a new, clean heart.17 Our stony hearts can be molded into one that is alive, as God spoke through Ezekiel, “And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh.”18 Jesus shed His blood to pump new life into your stony heart. In the Name of Jesus. Amen.
T May the peace which passes understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus T
Kήρυξον τὸν λόγον
1Oden, Thomas, Ed. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, John 11–21. p.306.
2John 1:9-10 (ESV).
3Wikipedia contributors, Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fibrodysplasia_ossificans_progressiva&oldid=1075880629 (accessed April 6, 2022).
4Exodus 7-12.
5The Pilate Inscription. K. C. Hanson. 10 August 2015. Retrieved 11 April 2017.
6Eusebius, Tacitus, Philo, and Josephus.
7We do not know anything for certain about Claudia Procula other than some very sketchy evidence from some unreliable historical sources, a brief mention of her in the Bible (but not by name), and other tangential evidence. Everything I mention here is held by traditions of both Western Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy, primarily the church fathers and St. Jerome.
8John 18:33.
9John 8:37.
10John 18:36.
11John 18:37.
12John 18:38.
13John 19:12.
14Sins in the Life of Tiberius According to Suetonius. Accessed April 6, 2022. https://www.netcrit.com/history/sins-in-the-life-of-tiberius-according-to-suetonius.
15John 19:15.
16John 19:15.
17Psalm 51:10.
18Ezekiel 11:19 (ESV).