I’m going to let further discussion of Traherne wait for a week, or maybe two. A topic more appropriate for Palm Sunday occupies my mind today.
Pontius Pilate and the Infinitely Thin Line
This sentence, a brief aside in the Passion according to St. Luke which was read today at Mass, strikes me as one of the most dreadful judgments in the New Testament:
And the same day Pilate and Herod were made friends together; for before they were at enmity between themselves.
—Luke 23:12
When Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ was released, some of the hostile non- or anti-Christian reviewers mentioned that Pilate struck them as a decent and reasonable man. If I remember correctly, this became part of the complaint that the movie was anti-Semitic, because Pilate, the Roman, is portrayed more favorably than, say, Caiphas and other Jewish leaders. But as several reviews of the reviews pointed out, this complaint said more about those who voiced it than about the film: it says that Pilate seems to them one of their own, a worldly man of tolerant sensibility, puzzled by the fury of the apparently irrational quarrel which his position requires that he settle. One senses that he thinks they’re all crazy, the would-be King of the Jews with his tagalong rabble as well as those who want him executed. He’s a civilized man who wants a peaceful and equitable solution, so he offers compromises. How about I just have him flogged? No? Well, how about we kill this other guy who actually committed a crime that we can all understand? No?
One of the most striking things about the Passion controversy was its revelation of a very high degree of ignorance about Christianity on the part of pundits and critics who count themselves, and are generally counted, as educated. Anyone who understands Christianity ought to recognize that the Gospel portrait of Pilate is not an admiring one. A Christian ought to have at least as much sympathy for Caiphas, whose objection to Jesus is religious and whose outrage is very much in order if his judgment of Jesus is correct; Pilate, arguably, is further from God. But though Pilate fails the test to which many of the actors in the Passion story are put, he fails it in the way that a secular modern man would be likely to do, so naturally the secular modern man finds him a sympathetic character.
What strikes disturbingly home to me about Pilate’s complicity is that, although I understand that he is at least as much in the wrong as Caiphas, I share the impulse of the secular critics to like him. I’m one of those people who can always see both sides of any dispute, and almost always believe that each side is in possession of some truth. I’d rather look for the common ground than stay at sword’s point over the disputed. And I’m almost always ambivalent about any practical question (down to the most mundane, which is sometimes a trial for my wife: Would you rather eat in here or on the porch? may be followed by several minutes of mental gridlock).
This mental tendency is a good thing in some matters, and harmless in many, but a fault where serious life-determining questions are involved. Truth and falsehood are ultimately divided by a geometric line—not the proverbial thin line, but one which has no second dimension at all. It is infinitely thin. You can’t really stand on it. There is no surface, so even if you think you’re straddling it every atom in your body is on one side or the other. You’re divided, and you can stay that way indefinitely about many questions, but not on a matter or in a circumstance that requires a decision, because in the end there is no indeterminate state between action and non-action: you may hesitate for a while, but eventually you either do, or do not.
Pilate has to choose either to have Jesus killed, or not, which, because he alone has the power of capital sentencing, means either accepting (however passively) or denying the charge that Jesus deserves to die. The question will not go away, even if he is allowed to postpone his decision; he can’t simply tell everyone involved to go home and forget the whole thing, and even if he did they would be back the next day. So, against his will, or at least against his better judgment, he gives his answer, choosing to stand on the same side of the line as those who demand the execution.
Suddenly Pilate is not such a decent guy. It’s as if a light has gone out in him. He has joined a bloody tyrant on the wrong side of the line, and now finds that they have a lot in common. They can be friends, in fact; complicity in sin unites them, with each able to affirm (as we would say today) the other. Pilate may have meant well to begin with, but he’s ended up in the same place as Herod, a man who executed at least one of his wives and several of his sons. He will discover, like Lady Macbeth, that no amount of hand-washing can erase the stain of that fact.
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