During these six Friday evenings of Lent, I want to reflect on some themes associated with certain stations in the traditional Way of the Cross. I begin this evening with the first Station: Jesus is condemned to death. The theme associated with this station is Judgment.
What kind of person is this Roman Procurator Pontius Pilate, who renders judgment on Jesus? Historians have offered widely varying assessments. Some have portrayed him as an honest and honorable military administrator doing his best to do the right thing under difficult circumstances. According to this version of the story, Pilate strongly suspects that Jesus is innocent and wants to let him off, but ultimately yields to the political pressure of the Jewish religious authorities and crowds who are seeking Jesus’ death.
Others dismiss that reading as a whitewash. Pilate, they argue, is a callous and cruel military governor who wouldn’t have given any more of a second thought to condemning an accused man than to brushing a fly off his arm – especially when the charge is subversion and treason. Those who take this line argue that by the time the Gospels were being written, the early Christians wanted to get along in the world of the Roman Empire, so it was in their interests to emphasize the responsibility of the Jewish religious authorities for insisting on the death of Jesus, while minimizing the role played by Pilate in imposing the death penalty.
The truth probably lies somewhere in between. That is a matter for historians to debate. In the end, it’s still Pilate’s decision. He bears the authority of judgment. And all four Gospels are unanimous in suggesting that Pilate makes his final decision in the interests not of truth or justice but of political expediency.
It’s just possible that Pilate initially hesitates to condemn Jesus just as the Gospels say. New Testament scholar N.T. Wright suggests that if the Jewish religious authorities were recommending this man’s execution, Pilate would on principle have tried to do the opposite of what they wanted: not out of any moral scruples regarding the truth of their accusations, but just to be difficult. But then Pilate capitulates when the Jewish authorities implicitly threaten to report the matter to Rome. If Pilate fails to condemn and execute someone accused of claiming to be the King of the Jews, then he’s no friend of Caesar.
The deep irony of the scene is that in presuming to condemn Jesus, Pilate is judging his own Maker and Judge. Just as Jesus stands now before Pilate, so in the Last Day the roles will be reversed. Then Pilate will stand before Jesus and have to render account for the judgment that he has here rendered.
Judgment is an inescapable dimension of human relations. Our choice is not between judging and not judging, but between judging badly and judging well. To have any meaningful interactions with other people, we need constantly to exercise our critical faculties, sizing up those with whom we have to deal, assessing their strengths and weaknesses, their virtues and shortcomings. And one of the key ingredients of good judgment is the humility borne of recognizing how often we ourselves so often fall short by the very same standards we use to judge others. Only in this way do we begin to gain the self-knowledge necessary to exercise good judgment.
What I like to call “the paradox of judgment” is that every time we render judgment we simultaneously render ourselves liable to judgment. This principle is illustrated by the story of the brash young American tourist who visited one of the great art museums in Italy. After breezing in the space of half an hour through galleries that often occupy other visitors for days, he remarked to the guard at the entrance: “Well I certainly don’t think much of your old masters.” Unfazed, the guard replied, “Yes sir, and they don’t think much of you either. However, it is not the old masters who are on trial here, but the viewers.”
The Dean of my seminary had a stock speech he used to give about student evaluations. Every year, a committee of the faculty would be convened to evaluate the progress of each of the seminarians, in consultation with the seminarian’s faculty advisor. They would then write a report of the evaluation, which would be sent to the seminarian’s bishop. In the third and final year, the evaluation would include the faculty’s recommendation for or against ordination.
Every year, however, at least a few seminarians would object to being evaluated and judged in this way. It seemed so unfair and, well, judgmental. Who were the faculty to judge them? Only God knew what was in their hearts. But, said the Dean, we all evaluate each other all the time. “From the moment you entered this seminary,” he continued, “you’ve all been evaluating and forming a cumulative judgment of me. And while your evaluations of me don’t have the immediate effect on my future that the faculty evaluations have on yours, nonetheless if enough of you form negative judgments of me in my role as Dean, there will be consequences I will have to face.”
We were all impressed, I think, by his honesty and humility. Here was a priest who presided over a process that systematically evaluated and judged people’s fitness for ordained ministry. Yet at the same time he acknowledged that in the very act of rendering judgment he was rendering himself liable to judgment by the very people it was his responsibility to judge, not to mention their bishops and standing committees, the seminary board of trustees, and so on.
Most of all, we need to remember that ultimately God is our judge. In rendering judgment on Jesus, Pilate was certainly aware that he was rendering himself liable to the judgment of Caesar if he failed to satisfy the demands of the local Jewish authorities. But he needed to be more worried about God’s judgment than Caesar’s.
In his essay “God in the Dock,” C.S. Lewis remarks that by the middle of the twentieth century, human beings had adopted an entirely new posture towards God. Ancient men and women, he writes, approached the divine as accused criminals approach their judge: confessing their sins and begging for mercy. For modern men and women, however, the positions are reversed. They have put themselves on the judge’s bench and God in the prisoner’s dock. They are quite kindly judges, Lewis continues, and if God has a reasonable explanation for being the sort of God who permits war, poverty, disease, and famine, they are prepared to give him a fair hearing, and possibly even acquit him. But, Lewis concludes, the important point is that we have made ourselves the judges and God is in the dock.
But of course that is the very scene we see anticipated two thousand years ago at the judgment seat in the place called the pavement, where Jesus stands before Pilate to be examined, tried, judged and condemned. In a sense, we all stand in the place of Pilate when we presume to judge God. If we presume to evaluate God, so God evaluates us. If we presume to question the Christian faith and find it wanting, so the Christian faith questions us and finds us wanting. If we presume to reject the Christian Church as a community worthy of our membership, so the Christian Church is liable to reject us as individuals worthy to be its members.
All this may seem a terrifying picture, and so it is. But God has the last word; and in Christ Jesus that word is not judgment and condemnation, but grace and forgiveness – made possible precisely by the condemnation that Christ undergoes for our sake before Pilate. In the first Station, Jesus stands before Pilate and accepts the judgment that will result in his death. In so doing, however, he makes it possible for us to stand before him as our Judge. He calls us now to repent of our sins and place our faith and trust in him. Then, at the last Judgment, we shall receive the verdict of forgiveness, acquittal, and life on account of the very death to which he was unjustly condemned.
