THE FIRST STATION:

JESUS IS CONDEMNED TO DEATH

 Noonday Prayer & Stations of the Cross

Good Friday, April 7, 2023 

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury N. J.

 

In a few minutes we shall participate together in the Stations of the Cross, a devotion brought back to the Western Church by pilgrims to Jerusalem who retraced our Lord’s final journey carrying his cross on the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows. Rather than trying to cover the whole waterfront, I’ve discovered over the years that reflecting on just one of the Stations can have the effect of illuminating them all. So, I will here confine myself to the First Station: Jesus is condemned to death. The theme is judgment.

 

What kind of person was the Roman Procurator Pontius Pilate? Historians have rendered widely varying assessments. Some have portrayed him as an honest and honorable administrator doing his best under difficult circumstances. According to this version of the story, Pilate knows full well that Jesus is innocent and wants to let him off, but ultimately yields to political pressure from those seeking Jesus’ death.

 

Others dismiss that reading as a whitewash. Pilate, they argue, is a callous and cruel military governor who wouldn’t give a second thought to condemning an accused man – especially when the charge is sedition and treason. Those who take this line argue that when 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 Jesus’ death, while minimizing Pilate’s role in imposing the death penalty.

 

The truth probably lies somewhere in between. But in the end, it was still Pilate’s decision. He bears the responsibility and authority of judgment. And all four Gospels are unanimous in suggesting that Pilate made his final decision in the interests not of truth or justice but of political expediency.

 

The deep irony is that in condemning Jesus, Pilate is judging his own 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 render account for the judgment that he rendered.

 

Judgment is an inescapable dimension of human interaction. To have any meaningful relations with other people, we constantly exercise our critical faculties, sizing up those with whom we have to deal, assessing their strengths and weaknesses, their virtues and vices. Our choice is not between judging and not judging, but between judging badly and judging well. One of the key ingredients of good judgment is the humility borne of the recognitions of how often we ourselves fall short by the very same standards we use to judge others.

 

What I like to call “the paradox of judgment” is that every time we render judgment we simultaneously subject ourselves to judgment. The story is told of a brash young American tourist visiting the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. After taking half an hour to breeze through the dozens and dozens of rooms that often occupied other visitors for days on end, he announced 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. Unfortunately for you, however, it’s not the old masters who are on trial here.”

 

The Dean of my seminary had a stock speech he used to give about student evaluations. Every year, a faculty committee would convene to evaluate the progress of each seminarian. They would then write a report to 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.

 

Now, the Dean would say every year, this process might seem unfair and, well, judgmental. Who were the faculty to judge the seminarians in this way? Only God knew what was in their hearts. But notice, said the Dean, that we all evaluate one another all the time. “From the moment you entered this seminary,” he continued, “you’ve all been evaluating me. And while your judgment of me may not have the immediate effect on my future that the faculty evaluations will have on yours, nonetheless, I know that if over time enough of you form negative judgments of my performance as Dean, then I will have to face the consequences.”

 

We were all impressed by his honesty and humility. Here was a senior academic and ecclesiastical administrator presiding over a process that systematically evaluated 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, the seminary trustees, and so on.

 

But whatever judgements we render or receive in this life, we need to remember that ultimately God is our judge. C. S. Lewis remarked in his essay “God in the Dock” that by the middle of the twentieth century, human beings had adopted an entirely new posture towards God. Ancient men and women, he wrote, 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. We have put themselves on the judge’s bench and God in the prisoner’s dock. We fancy ourselves quite kindly judges, Lewis continued, and if God has a reasonable explanation for being the sort of God who permits war, poverty, disease, and famine, we’re prepared to give him a fair hearing. But, Lewis concluded, the important point is that we’ve made ourselves the judges and God the defendant.

 

That is the very scene anticipated two thousand years ago at the judgment seat in the place called Gabbatha, the pavement, where Jesus stands before Pilate. And we put ourselves in Pilate’s place when we presume to judge God. But judgment has this odd boomerang effect. As we evaluate God, so God evaluates us. If we question Christianity and find it wanting, so Christianity questions us and finds us wanting. If we reject the Church as unworthy of our membership, so the Church rejects us as unworthy of its membership. Our Lord himself said as much in the Sermon on the Mount: “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure that you get.” 

 

This picture may seem terrifying, and so it is. But God has the last word; and in the Cross of Christ God’s word is not condemnation and death, but forgiveness and life – made possible by precisely the judgment that Jesus underwent for our sakes. In the first Station, Jesus stands before Pilate and accepts the condemnation of death. In so doing, however, he makes it possible for us to stand before him as our Judge. He calls us to repent of our sins and place our faith and trust in him. Then, having done so, 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 for us and for our salvation.