Tuesday, November 28, 2006 AD
Pilate vs truth
Great essay from Michael Spencer on The Final Deposition: Pilate and the Cynicism of Contemporary Truth Seeking.
The encounter between Jesus and Pilate in John's gospel, and in particular Pilate's question, "What is truth?", was one of the key texts in bringing me back to faith in 1994. Not just because it is such a contemporary question - the Sunday Telegraph that Easter had a great editorial picturing Pilate as a retired British colonial administrator, reminiscing at his club about that rum business with the Jewish teacher back in Palestine - but because it leapt out of the page at me as something that actually happened. (Two other verses that had a similar impact at the time - the sudden conviction that this happened - are John 20:16a and Acts 17:16.)
Michael Spencer picks up on this theme of Pilate as a "recognizable voice to those of us in the contemporary world", as "the voice of one confronted with Jesus, one asking questions about Jesus", but one who never "considers a surrender to Jesus as Lord and God":
The encounter between Jesus and Pilate in John's gospel, and in particular Pilate's question, "What is truth?", was one of the key texts in bringing me back to faith in 1994. Not just because it is such a contemporary question - the Sunday Telegraph that Easter had a great editorial picturing Pilate as a retired British colonial administrator, reminiscing at his club about that rum business with the Jewish teacher back in Palestine - but because it leapt out of the page at me as something that actually happened. (Two other verses that had a similar impact at the time - the sudden conviction that this happened - are John 20:16a and Acts 17:16.)
Michael Spencer picks up on this theme of Pilate as a "recognizable voice to those of us in the contemporary world", as "the voice of one confronted with Jesus, one asking questions about Jesus", but one who never "considers a surrender to Jesus as Lord and God":
Pilate is not presented to us in the Gospels as one who was on the way to faith in another King, Jesus ... No, Pilate is the voice of the faux Jesus scholars, the t-shirts,the television specials and magazine covers asking curious questions about Jesus; questions meant, in the final analysis, to bring Jesus down to our level, not to reveal truth we will embrace. These are questions, investigations, fascinations and presentations not meant to bring anyone into submission to the crucified one and his eternal empire of the Son, but meant to bring him down to a level where we can understand, manage and categorize Jesus in our own world.But as Michael goes on to point out, the meeting described by John is not the last meeting that Pilate and Jesus will have:
Pilate is the voice of the person intelligent enough to know that Jesus must be considered, but not spiritually hungry and thirsty for the bread and water this world cannot give; the bread that comes from heaven. Pilate is the one who will not drive the nails, but who is willing for the nails to be driven as long as he can return to the imagined sovereignty of his own existence.
One can only imagine what the final deposition will be like. Not the deposition of Jesus by Pilate, but the opposite: the moment when Pilate stands before Jesus, as we all must. Here is the proud, the curious, the one who laughed at truth and presumed that Jesus needed to know a few things about how the world really works. Now he stands in the light of that one whose wounds and humiliation are still recognizable.
What is truth now, Pilate? Where are the kingdoms of this world? Where is the power to crucify or to pardon? Where does judgment finally lie?
