In any of the crucifixion narratives in the Gospels, the character that intrigues me most is Pontius Pilate. In many ways, he’s often cast as the villain of the story. He’s the Claude Frollo in this classic tale, with the quiet, unassuming Jesus, of course, standing as our consummate hero. But when you examine Pilate’s activity within the accounts of Jesus’s execution, he’s far more of a complicated figure than we like to remember. Especially according to John’s Gospel, Pilate seems to assume the role of a very reluctant executioner.

By the time Pilate’s judgement had been rendered, a conspiracy to get rid of Jesus had been brewing for years, waiting for the opportune time. In a stroke of luck for the conspirators, one of Jesus’s disciples turns on Jesus and their plot begins to take shape, arresting him under the cover of nightfall. Bringing Jesus before the high priest, this Rabbi is found guilty of blasphemy and passed off to a higher court for the stamp of approval. Knowing full well that arraigning Jesus on the charge of blasphemy wouldn’t bear any weight with any Roman magistrate, they quickly search for an alternative indictment that would boil the blood of the godless Pilate. They settle on charging this would-be messiah, who doesn’t even own a sword, with insurrection.

That’s only the tip of the ironic iceberg, though, especially considering how fast-and-loose the chief priests and Pharisees handled the law throughout this entire saga. Look no further than their insistence on not crossing the threshold to Pilate’s villa so as to remain “undefiled” for the Passover proceedings. From a distance, they try convince a Roman official that this Galilean pest has to go (Jn 18:28-31). The self-proclaimed piety of the priests and Pharisees contrasts sharply with their under-the-tables dealings and covert trials with bribed witnesses and vague accusations. Oh the irony … for all their righteous plotting, they miss that they were putting God on trial.

Pilate, though, quickly concludes that there’s no reason for him to sanction capital punishment. Throughout the proceedings, he insists on Jesus’s innocence on three separate occasions. “I find no guilt in him,” he replies to the conspirators (Jn 18:38; 19:4, 6). “What the heck do you want me to do with him?” Pilate was no dummy. To him, this was a religious squabble and he had no interest expediting the execution of some backwoods Teacher from Nazareth — even if Jesus had garnered a reputation for being a “rabble rouser” and an instigator. Pilate then decides to survey the mob, who request the release of Barabbas over Jesus (Jn 18:38-40).

The Passover often saw the release of a convicted criminal, Rome’s way of offering a token of goodwill to the people they were occupying. “So, what,” Pilate inquires, “you want this Jesus to be the recipient of this year’s pardon?” His error, though, is his reference to Jesus being “the King of the Jews.” The mob recoils at such a suggestion. Although Jesus’s ministry had led many to believe that he, in fact, was the messiah, he had failed to live up to the people’s messianic expectations. No army had been marshaled, no movement had been started, all of which had frustrated the assumptions about who the messiah was.

So the crowd called for the release of Barabbas, who’d already been waiting on death-row for his role in an insurrectionist movement (Mk 15:7). In many ways, though, Barabbas — not Jesus — was living up to the familiar idea people had in mind when it came to the promise of the Messiah. Barabbas was a fighter who was taking action against Roman tyranny, which is what many expected Jesus to do. But for Jesus, that’s not how the kingdom of heaven would be realized. “My kingdom,” he declared, “is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world my servants would have been fighting” (Jn 18:36). 

With Barabbas released and Jesus still in Pilate’s custody, Pilate decides that Jesus would be flogged as a spectacle of Roman authority. He is then led before the crowd in a cruel display of pretended honor (Jn 19:1-5). After this, Pilate wanted to call it a day. So far as Pilate was concerned, flogging and humiliation were more than a sufficient punishment. The crowd, however, was not appeased, so Pilate sentenced Jesus to death (Jn 19:13-16).

Though he appears to acquiesce to the crowd’s demands, Pilate would never sully his honor by such a debasement of his office. He was the one in charge, not — as he thought — this barbarous, uncivilized people. If Jesus was to be crucified, he would be executed on Pilate’s terms, as the King the crowd seem to so disdain. So this adept politician saves face by fashioning a plaque with an inscription that read “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews” in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. A usurper King crucified among criminals. What better way could there be for Roman prefect to demonstrate Roman power?

 

The Jewish leaders wanted no affiliation with the Teacher from Galilee. He definitely wasn’t their king. Pilate, though, seizes this opportunity to restore his honor. “Behold your king,” he says, in effect, “naked and ashamed, like any other common criminal.” But what Pilate meant as a form of ridicule was actually all according to God’s plan. Similar to the Pharisees scoffing at Jesus for being “the friend of tax collectors and sinners!” (Lk 7:34), Pilate’s hanging Jesus in between two enemies of the state is exactly what God had in mind. Jesus was “numbered with the transgressors,” just as  the prophet Isaiah foretold.

As a transgressor, Jesus then “makes intercession for the transgressors” (Isa 53:12). This, of course, was his mission from the very beginning: “I have come to seek and to save the lost” (Lk 19:10). “I came not to call the righteous but sinners” (Mt 9:13). And there’s no better portrait of what that looks like than Jesus taking his place among the lost, dying their death. Sinful, seditious man might have been doing his worst to Heaven’s Best, but, even so, something deeper and truer was at work. What appeared to be the ruin of all the hopes and dreams of all of Jesus’s followers was, in fact, the fulfillment of their deliverance. The entire scene at Golgotha’s bloody hill is a continuous fulfillment of the Word of God (Jn 18:9, 32; 19:24, 28, 36). Despite all the chaos and corruption of that horrific afternoon, nothing was out of order. 

What makes the Christian faith so beautifully strange is that it invites you to find as the lynchpin of your faith and the ground of your hope the brutal murder of the very Lord of the faith. “Christ and him crucified,” that is our creed; which, from a certain point of view, is a pretty awful notion. There’s nothing pretty about a cross-focused message. If you think about it, it makes about as much sense as having an electric chair pendant on a necklace. But we need not shy away from or avoid all of that brutality. The shame and embarrassment of the cross is exactly how God endeavors to show us who he most truly is: our one and only Savior. 

Pegged to a Roman tree of cruelty, Jesus finishes the world’s salvation by taking the world’s sin on himself. This is what he intended to do from the very start. He is God’s Lamb, the One who “takes away the sin of the world!” (Jn 1:29). “He has appeared once for all,” the Hebrew writer says, “to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Heb 9:26). He took on flesh “in order to take away sins . . . [and] to destroy the works of the devil” (1 Jn 3:5, 8). Like the father of prodigal who runs out to welcome his wayward boy, embracing his shame in the process, so, too, does God in Christ embrace the shame and embarrassment of all our sins and shortcomings by becoming sin for us, in order that “in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). And so it is that what Pilate meant as the ultimate humiliation is, in fact, our only hope.

The cross is a beautiful irony. It is a place of death and a place of life. It is a place of divine wrath and infinite love. It is the place where “steadfast love and faithfulness meet,” where “righteousness and peace kiss each other” (Ps 85:10). “It is honor, yet it is shame,” writes Scottish churchman Horatius Bonar. “It is wisdom, but also foolishness. It is both gain and loss; both pardon and condemnation; both strength and weakness; both joy and sorrow … It is grace, yet it is righteousness; it is law, yet it is deliverance from law; it is Christ’s humiliation, yet it is Christ’s exaltation” (140-41). And by entering into and embracing our devastating conundrum of sin and death, Jesus sets everything right. 

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