GOOD FRIDAY STATIONS OF THE CROSS

Meditation on the First Station:

Jesus is Condemned to Death

Good Friday, March 29, 2024

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Warwick R. I.

 

In a few minutes we shall follow together in the Way of the Cross, a devotion brought back to the Western Church by pilgrims to Jerusalem who retraced our Lord’s steps on the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows. I’ve discovered 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 is the Roman Procurator Pontius Pilate? Historians have rendered widely varying assessments. Some portray him as a beleaguered administrator doing his best under difficult circumstances. According to this interpretation, 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.

 

The truth probably lies somewhere in between. The important point is that it’s 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 be judged for the judgment that he rendered.

 

None of us wants to be judgmental. But 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 render ourselves liable 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 of rooms that often occupied other visitors for days on end, he announced to the old guard at the entrance: “Well I certainly don’t think much of your old masters.” Unfazed, the guard calmly replied, “Yes sir, and they don’t think much of you either. But unfortunately, it’s 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 faculty committee would convene to evaluate each seminarian’s progress. They would then write a report to be sent to the seminarian’s Bishop and diocesan Commission on Ministry. In the 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 been evaluating me. And while your judgment 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 sooner or later I will face the consequences.”

 

We were all impressed by his humility. Here was a senior academic administrator presiding over a process that systematically evaluated people’s fitness for ordained ministry. Yet he acknowledged that in this position he was simultaneously 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.

 

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. People in the ancient world approached the divine as accused criminals approach their judge: confessing their sins and begging for mercy. For modern people, however, the positions are reversed. We’ve put ourselves on the judge’s bench and God in the prisoner’s dock. We fancy ourselves quite kindly judges, and if God has a reasonable explanation for being the sort of God who permits war, poverty, disease, and famine, then 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. We put ourselves in Pilate’s place whenever we presume to judge God. But judgment has this odd boomerang effect. As we evaluate God, so God evaluates us. As we question Christianity and find it wanting, so Christianity questions us and finds us wanting. As we reject the Church, so the Church rejects us. Our Lord himself says 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 always has the last word; and in the Cross of Christ God’s final word is not condemnation and death, but forgiveness and life – made possible by precisely the judgment that Jesus underwent for our sakes. On Good Friday, Jesus stands before Pilate and receives a judgment that he doesn’t deserve, namely condemnation and death. We don’t know, but on the Last Day it’s entirely possible that Pilate may stand before Jesus and receive a judgment that he doesn’t deserve, namely forgiveness and life. And if that can be true for Pilate, it can certainly be true for us.

 

In the first Station, Jesus stands before Pilate and accepts his judgment. In so doing, he enables us to face our judgment. He calls us to repent of our sins and place our faith and trust in his mercy. If we do so, then at the last Judgment we shall receive the verdict of forgiveness, acquittal, and life—all on account of the very death to which Jesus was condemned for us on the first Good Friday.