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.