Holy Wednesday

Christ before the Pilate by Mihály Munkácsy, 1881, Oil on canvas

"The essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man… Man claims prerogatives that belong to God alone; God accepts penalties which belong to man alone."

- John Stott

I’ve had some horrible bosses in my time, especially when I worked in retail. One manager was fired for embezzlement not long after he hired me. His successor, whose moods swung from Ghandi to Ghengis in a matter of minutes, had an affair with our stockroom guy just weeks into her tenure. The quality of these leaders proved to be a direct reflection of the district manager we had. It was a tough two years.

The world is such that great leaders are necessary, but in short supply. And it seems to me many would-be leaders often have a relationship to truth that is driven by self-preservation or self-advancement. Many land in their positions because they’ve reinforced the same compulsion in their own bosses. Corruption spreads by osmosis. Unfit leadership is like a cast iron pipe that corrodes from the inside, polluting the water before it bursts.

But if you’ve ever had a great leader, chances are she was probably noticeably selfless. Did you sense that she could “lead past” herself? If so, you saw her relating to Truth, even if it wasn’t labeled “Christian.”

When you read the account of Jesus’ early morning trial before Pilate in John 18, it becomes clear the Roman prefect is no different than what we so often experience from would-be leaders today. Pilate had no legal basis either to flog and humiliate Jesus or to hand him over for crucifixion, which tells us he was simply trying to appease Jewish authorities — even against his better judgment. He was not contending for justice, but for his own preservation.

Pontius Pilate was the fifth prefect of the Roman province of Judaea from AD 26–36, ruling a relatively small annex of Syria. He was a military leader given command to rule in matters of Roman law in a backwater of the Empire. In short, it was his job to keep the peace and stamp out any insurrection, allowing the bulk of civil law to be handled by local authorities. This is what a prefect did. Justice and truth had little to do with it.

But if the Sanhedrin wanted to kill Jesus, they had to defer to Pilate because they had been mostly stripped of their rights to capital punishment. And the only way Pilate had any jurisdiction here was if Jesus posed a military threat of insurrection, which he clearly did not.

So when Pilate asks Jesus if he is the “King of the Jews,” Jesus responds with a question, “Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?” Jesus is exposing the lie they were leveraging with a question about its origin. Jesus said, “My purpose is to bear witness to the truth.” And Pilate responds, “What is truth?”

It’s just this sort of self-interested relativism that leads to a world on fire.  “Who can even say what’s right or wrong?”  In the utopia of “my truth” or “your truth,” every person claims a right not just to autonomy, but to leadership. A claim to truth subjects others to it. The obvious problem is that leaders (and everyday people) want the benefit of certain shared ethics, so long as they can decide which should apply at any given time and to whom. This is the sinful heart of humanity writ large — man claiming “prerogatives that belong to God.”

Pilate’s truth tortures an innocent man to death. The Sanhedrin’s truth convicts him against all evidence. Pilate washes his hands. The Council goes back to leadership as usual — back to the Passover for which they were intent on remaining qualified (ceremonially clean) to eat. This warped picture is exactly what is true about humanity apart from God. Our ways are warped. Our truth is leverage.

So, what is truth? Man’s constant capacity for evil, not just in his hard-hearted willfulness to wreak havoc, but also in his soft and slinky self-service, is undeniable. The fragile nature of human leadership is clear and if you’ve ever worked or lived under self-interested leadership, you’ve felt what it does to whole offices, homes, churches and countries.

This is why the incarnation of God was and is necessary. He stands not only bound and subject to Pilate’s leadership, but also in stark contrast to it. Jesus’ humility qualified him to lead. It qualified him to expose other would-be truths. It qualified his name to be on our lips today. The fact that a Galilean peasant is humanly revered by most and divinely worshipped by many speaks to the quality of his Truth. It also speaks to the quality of human leadership that actually  follows his lead.

Every day I must ask myself where my own interests might be ahead of the interests of God, which are the best interests of those he loves. Every day my leadership has to do with a truth beyond me that necessarily humbles and reshapes me and my influence. When leadership begins in the humility that characterizes a man or woman in proximal relationship to God — our cosmic anthropology — then truth has a place to manifest and make the world more as it was created to be, one sphere of influence at a time.

Apart from transcendent truth that humbles a man or woman, the world looks like Pilate’s Judaea. It looks like the scene depicted in the painting above — a room full of judges, but no justice. It looks like so much of what we call normal today.

So during Holy Week, we pause to hope for the Kingdom to come fully even as it has already begun to come in our hearts. We pause to consider that a resurrected Jesus is enthroned not on marble or velvet, but on the seat of cosmic Truth at the strong right hand of the Father. His kingdom must come through our lips and our leadership as a Truth making men free, not binding them to the prerogative of authoring their own flaccid truth, the penalties of which God has already taken upon himself in Jesus Christ.

Today's Prayer:

Assist us mercifully with your grace, Lord God of our salvation, that we may enter with joy upon the meditation of those mighty acts by which you have promised us life and immortality; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.