At about seven o’clock in the morning, up the marble stairs of a palace
and across the floors of richest mosaic and under ceilings dyed with all
the splendors of color and between snowbanks of white and glistening
sculpture, passes a poor, pale and sick young man of thirty-three years,
already condemned to death, on his way to be condemned again. Jesus of
Nazareth is His name.
Coming out to meet him on this tesselated pavement is an unscrupulous,
compromising, time-serving and cowardly man, with a few traces of
sympathy and fair dealing left in his composition--Governor Pontius
Pilate.
Did ever such opposites meet? Luxury and pain, selfishness and
generosity, arrogance and humility, sin and holiness, midnight and
midnoon.
The bloated-lipped governor takes the cushioned seat, but the prisoner
stands, his wrists manacled. In a semicircle around the prisoner are the
Sanhedrists, with eyes flashing and fists brandished, prosecuting this
case in the name of their religion.
The most bitter persecutions have been religious persecutions, and when
Satan takes hold of a good man he makes up by intensity for brevity of
occupation. If you have never seen an ecclesiastical court trying a man,
then you have no idea of the foaming infernalism of those old religious
Sanhedrists.
Governor Pilate cross-questions the prisoner, and he finds right away
that he is innocent; so he wants to let him go. His caution is also
increased by some one who comes to the governor and whispers in his
ear. The governor puts his hand behind his ear, so as to catch the words
almost inaudible.
These whispered words are a message from Claudia Procula, his wife, who
has had a dream about the innocence of this prisoner and about the danger
of executing him, and she awakens from this morning dream in time to send
the message to her husband, who was at that hour on the judicial bench.
And what with the protest of his wife, the voice of his own conscience
and the entire failure of the Sanhedrists to make out their case Governor
Pilate resolves to discharge the prisoner from custody.
But the intimation of such a thing brings upon the governor an
equinoctial storm of indignation. They will report him to the emperor
at Rome. They will have him recalled. They will send him up home, and
he will be hanged for treason, for the emperor has already a suspicion
in regard to Pilate, and that suspicion does not cease until Pilate is
banished and commits suicide.
So Governor Pontius Pilate compromises the matter, and proposes that
Christ be whipped instead of assassinated. So the prisoner is fastened to
a low pillar, and on his bent and bared back come the thongs of leather,
with pieces of lead and bone intertwisted, so that every stroke shall be
the more awful.
Christ lifts Himself from the scourging with flushed cheek and torn and
quivering and mangled flesh, presenting a spectacle of suffering in which
Rubens, the painter, found the theme for his greatest masterpiece.
But the Sanhedrists are not yet satisfied. They have had some of the
prisoner’s nerves lacerated; but they want them all lacerated. They
have had some of his blood; now they want all of it, down to the last
corpuscle.
So Governor Pontius Pilate, after all this merciful hesitation,
surrenders to the demoniacal cry:
“Crucify him! Crucify him!”
But the governor sends for something. He sends a slave out to get
something. Although the constables are in haste to take the prisoner to
execution, and the mob outside are impatient to glare upon their victim,
a pause is necessitated.
Yonder it comes--a wash basin. Some pure, bright water is poured into
it, and then Governor Pilate puts his white and delicate hands into the
water and rubs them together, and then lifts them dripping, for the towel
fastened at the slave’s girdle, while he practically says:
“I wash my hands of this whole homicidal transaction. I wash my hands of
this entire responsibility. You will have to bear it.”
Behold in this that ceremony amounts to nothing, if there are not
contained in it correspondences of heart and life.
It is a good thing to wash the hands. God created three-fourths of the
world water, and in that act commanded cleanliness; and when the ancients
did not take the hint, He plunged the whole world under water, and kept
it there for some time.
Hand washing was a religious ceremony among the Jews. The Jewish Mishna
gave particular directions how that the hands must be thrust three times
up to the wrist in water, and the palm of the hand must then be rubbed
with the closed fist of the other.
All that was well enough for a symbol, but here is a man in the case
under consideration who proposes to wash away the guilt of a sin which he
does not quit and of which he does not make any repentance. Pilate’s wash
basin was a dead failure.
Ceremonies, however beautiful and appropriate, may be no more than this
hypocritical ablution. In infancy we may be sprinkled from the baptismal
font, and in manhood we may wade into deep immersion, and yet never
come to moral purification. We may kneel without prayer and bow without
reverence, and sing without any acceptance. All your creeds, liturgies,
sacraments, genuflections and religious convocations amount to nothing
unless your heart-life go into them.
When that bronzed slave took from the presence of Pilate that wash basin
he carried away none of Pilate’s cruelty, wickedness or guilt.
Nothing against creeds; we all have them--either written or implied.
Nothing against ceremonies; they are of infinite importance. Nothing
against sacraments; they are divinely commanded. Nothing against rosary,
if there be as many heartfelt prayers as beads counted. Nothing against
incense floating up from censer amid Gothic arches, if the prayers be as
genuine as the ceremony is sweet. Nothing against Epiphany, Lent, Ash
Wednesday, Easter, Good Friday, Whitsuntide or Palm Sunday, if these
symbols have behind them genuine repentance, holy reminiscence and
Christian consecration.
But ceremony is only the sheath to the sword; it is only the shell to
the kernel; it is only the lamp to the flame; it is only the body to the
spirit. The outward must be symbolical of the inward. Wash the hands, by
all means; but, more than all, wash the heart.
Behold, also, as you see Governor Pontius Pilate thrust his hands into
his wash basin, the power of conscience. He had an idea there was blood
on his hands--the blood of an innocent person, whom he might have
acquitted if he only had the courage.
Poor Pilate! His conscience was after him, and he knew the stain would
never be washed from the right hand or the left hand; that, until the day
of his death, though he might wash in all the lavers of the Roman Empire,
there would be still eight fingers and two thumbs red at the tips.
Alas for this Governor Pontius Pilate! That night, after the court had
adjourned and the Sanhedrists had gone home and nothing was heard outside
the room but the step of the sentinel, I see Pontius Pilate arise from
his tapestried and sleepless couch and go to the laver and begin to wash
his hands, crying: “Out! Out, crimson spot! Tellest thou to me and to God
and to the night my crime? Is there no alkali to remove these dreadful
stains? Is there no chemistry to dissolve this carnage? Must I to the day
of my death carry the blood of this innocent man on my heart and hand?
Out, thou crimson spot!”
Against the disappointing and insufficient laver of Pilate’s vice,
cowardice and sin I place the brazen sea of a Savior’s pardoning mercy!