In His trials before His crucifixion, Jesus was asked two key questions.
The high priest asked Jesus, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” (Mark 14:61 NIV). The Greek word for “Blessed One” is eulogetos (from which we get our English word “eulogy”). It is a word compounded of eu (good) and logos (word, something said) and thus means “to speak well of” or “to praise.” Thus, the high priest asked Jesus if He was the Son of the One who should be praised. In asking this, he was asking Jesus if He was the Son of God. This was a crucial question because if Jesus was the Messiah and the Son of God, then Jesus would replace the high priest as the highest religious authority in Jerusalem and Judea. Jesus was a threat to the high priest’s power and position.
Pilate did not care about the Jews’ religious squabbles. He asked Jesus, “Are you the king of the Jews?” (Mark 15:2). Pilate cared about this question because if Jesus was indeed the King of the Jews, then Jesus would replace Pilate as the ruler of Jerusalem and Judea. Jesus was a threat to Pilate’s political power and position.
Jesus is, in fact, the Messiah, the ultimate prophet, priest, and king. (“Messiah” in Hebrew and “Christ” in Greek mean “anointed,” and prophets, priests, and kings were anointed with oil to establish them in their role.) And so the high priest and Pilate (the leaders of church and state) conspired together to crucify Jesus. They thus chose evil and death over good and life. The apostle Peter later summed up what they had done: “You disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you. You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead” (Acts 3:14-15).
We are not that different from the high priest and Pilate. As fallen human beings, we all want to be our own god, to have the authority to decide what is true, good, and important. And we all want to be our own kings, to have the sole authority over what we do and don’t do. And we, too, often choose death and evil over life and good. The better alternative is to submit to the true God and King and find life and good.
Put another way, we all want to be the hero of our own story when in reality, like the high priest and Pilate, we are (and should be) minor characters in Jesus’ story.
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Be careful about Pilate’s guilt. Peter did not indict him as a co-conspirator, for he wasn’t that: he had tried hard as Rome’s employee to do justice, but would have lost his job if he’d let a riot develop. It was the Jewish leaders who put him on the spot, with their rented crowd.
Lk. 23:34 Father, forgive: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/meditation-good-friday-1994-dr-priscilla-turner/
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I would not let Pilate off so easily. He did not know he was condemning the Son of God, but he knew he was condemning an innocent man to death for the sake of political expediency. As Jesus said, if you do it to the least of these, you do it to Me. The Jews at least had convinced themselves that Jesus was guilty. Pilate knew he was condemning an innocent man and did it anyway.
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What I was responding to was the idea that the Lord was up against government. Pilate wasn’t government, but a local official whose duty it was to keep order and keep the taxes flowing. And if you read the whole Passion narrative, the truly corrupt Jewish leaders manipulated him very cleverly. He resisted them through several stages. He even gave them a scourged Jesus (that hideous punishment was frequently fatal), but even so they were not satisfied.
See detail in my address already linked.
In his indictment, Peter lays no blame at the Roman government’s door. “YOU by wicked hands …” That fact needs to be taken seriously.
As for “As Jesus said, if you do it to the least of these, you do it to Me”, the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats has strictly nothing to do with the case. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141124013550-135532881-the-sheep-and-the-goats-who-are-they/ . I would however link that teaching with the Lord’s indictment of Saul on the Damascus Road: Saul was hurting Jesus in the person of His disciples.
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