“Pilate's Seven Questions”
The meaning of the cross
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Delivered on Good Friday
at Deer Park United Church, Toronto
Text: John 18:29-39; 19:1-11
Sometime during the 1940s, Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian writer, visited James McLaughlin at his home in Utah. Now, Nabokov is not known for writing nice prose, nor having an uplifting and inspiring attitude towards life. Anyone who has read any of Nabokov's works, from Lolita to Pale Fire, knows he is hardly a guest you would invite for a little fun and levity.
Nabokov went to the McLaughlins with one, singular thing in mind: he was a collector of butterflies. He knew that in Utah there were many different varieties and species that he would normally be unable to capture. And, so, one afternoon while visiting his friends, Nabokov went off on his own into the woods. He went into a deep gulch called Bear Gulch and as the evening was beginning to descend he saw a rare butterfly, one he'd never been able to catch before. Almost at the same time as he was about to catch the butterfly, he heard a scream, a human voice in need. Intent on getting the butterfly, he put it into his net and returned to McLaughlin's home. When he got there he recounted his day and McLaughlin said to him, “Did you go to see what happened to the person who was screaming?”
Nabokov said: “No, I couldn't do that and catch the rare butterfly that I'd wanted all my life. So, I caught the butterfly.”
The next morning, to everyone's chagrin, word came out that a man had died a terrible death following an awful fall. Had someone been there to help him and drag him to safety, he probably would have survived. So bad was it, that the gulch Nabokov had been in was later renamed “Dead Man's Gulch.” Nabokov became known as the man who spent his time chasing butterflies.
My friends, on Good Friday, it seems to me there were many Nabokovs around in Jerusalem, many people who were more intent on chasing their own butterflies than on caring about the death of a certain Galilean from Nazareth. It seems that nearly everyone who was present in Jerusalem was more absorbed in themselves than they were with the suffering of Jesus of Nazareth. No one chased butterflies more on Good Friday than Pontius Pilate.
You can see that in our text from John's Gospel, but it's in all the texts, in fact. The fact is, Pontius Pilate, no matter how some may try and paint him otherwise, was a self-interested, self-absorbed cynic. A man who was more interested in asking questions, not to get answers, but to validate his own opinions. The seven questions that Pilate asked Jesus and the crowd on that Good Friday were a way of protecting himself, a way of ensuring that he would not have to come face to face with the reality of a dying man, but rather could maintain his life chasing his own butterflies while Jesus of Nazareth was put to death.
Tom Wright, the Oxford New Testament scholar, wrote these words to describe Pilate's performance on Good Friday: “Pilate not only put cynical power games before justice, but also on this occasion put naked self-interest before the truth.” Chasing after butterflies.
Now, Tom Wright suggests that if you look at all the stories that encompass Pilate's performance on Good Friday, it is evident that Pilate believed a number of things. It is clear he believed that Jesus was no ordinary revolutionary. He did know that the man he was putting to death was not like everybody else. We will give him that.
He also knew that Jesus' accusers had their own reasons for putting Jesus to death, although deep down, he really didn't understand what they were. But what is also true about Pilate is that his desire to find Jesus innocent, his desire to make the crowd or the religious leaders look culpable, was actually born out of his desire to let the people know that he was still in control.
Every time he asked a question, he tried to wriggle out of the situation but the people wouldn't let him. He didn't want to be the one who received others' wrath. He wanted to placate them, but in placating them also to remind them that he was ultimately in control - Rome was in power. That is why he asked this telling question at the end of the discourse in John's Gospel: “Don't you know that I have the power as to whether you live or you die?” You Galileans, you Judeans, you Jewish leaders, you, the Nazarene on the cross, I want all of you to know that I, a Roman, have that power.
It is also true that he feared the accusation of disloyalty to Caesar. He knew that if he didn't give somebody up, he would suffer the wrath of his boss Tiberius. So, then, out of self-interest, recognizing Jesus was no ordinary revolutionary, realizing that the people had their own reasons for putting Jesus to death, but wanting to preserve his power, wanting to maintain his situation, frightened that he might be thought disloyal to Caesar what did Pilate do? He chased butterflies.
Pontius Pilate is not just an historical figure, frozen in time, and Good Friday is not just a play acted out at a distance with various and different players. Pilate represents something much deeper, just as Good Friday represents something much deeper. It speaks to the very heart of each and every one of us as we gather on Good Friday 2,000 years later. There is something about Pilate, just as there is something about all the others who participated in the death of Jesus, that tells us the danger of chasing butterflies and not hearing the cry of the dying.
We all do it. One of the ways that we chase our own butterflies is to get this Jesus and that cross on which he died and form them into our own image so we can deal with them, handle them, and be comfortable with them. You can see that there have been many reconstructions recently of the life and the ministry of Jesus. Some paint Him as an Essene mystagogue. Some paint Him as a Galilean chasid, a miracle worker. Some think He was nothing more than a mystic peasant. Others have suggested that maybe Jesus was no more than a self-help guru who makes us all feel better about ourselves and some have suggested that He was just a wise teacher with a few wise sayings, who was put to death accidentally.
We all make up our Jesus in our images so we can handle Him. We all play with Him in the way that Pilate played with Him, so that we do not have to come face to face with the reality of the cross ourselves but we create Him in an image that we are comfortable with so we can continue to chase our own butterflies. Ultimately, all these reconstructions fail if they do not take into account the cross. The singular incident, the central moment of the crucifixion of Jesus will not let us create Him in an image with which we are comfortable. It says to us, in our chasing of our butterflies, “No.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it the crux probit omnia, that the cross is the question that makes all other questions need to be answered. The cross stands as the one single sign of the ministry of Jesus at its most raw and bare and simple: a dying man crying out, asking the world to make a decision.
What does it say to us this Good Friday? In what ways does it really challenge us? I think it's clear that the cross ultimately is God's humanity identifying with a dying world.
One of the mysteries of the cross and Good Friday for me is that when people are suffering they can look at Good Friday and find its greater meaning. People who find themselves in difficulty, poverty, or terror look to the cross and they don't need to be told what it represents - they know. They understand deep within their souls that there is something different about this Jesus of Nazareth's death. It is God's identification with their suffering and with who they are. And Lord knows the world still has and will probably always have a dying humanity that looks at the cross and cries out in need.
Just ask the family of Cecilia Zhang. Just ask the families of the young soldiers in Iraq. Just ask those who find their homes bombed in Palestine. Just ask those who find the streets unsafe in Israel. Just ask those from South Africa. A recent survey said 250,000 members of the civil service will be dead within 10 years due to AIDS - one quarter of all the people who work in the civil service in that country will die unless things change. Just ask them what the cross means. Just ask those who lie on cancer wards. Just ask those who are giving a helping hand to the dying and they will all tell you one thing: The cross of Christ is not something that we make into our image. It is God's image. It is God's self-image saying “I am identifying with a dying humanity.” That's what makes the crucifixion such a pathos: It is humans that put Him to death and it was for humans that he died.
So often when we look into the face of death we feel defenceless. When we look into the face of evil and of sin we feel we have no recourse. The cross of Christ says to a humanity that feels defenceless in the face of death, as Paul said in Romans: “While we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” In Galatians Paul said: “Christ became a curse for us.” In other words, no longer are we defenceless in the face of death, no longer are we left to a void of self-interest. Rather, Christ has come for us and while we are chasing our butterflies, Christ is the voice in the gulch dying for us, carrying us, and bleeding for us. The cross also speaks a prophetic word: It is God's humanity challenging our humanity.
Henry David Thoreau once said, “It takes two to speak the truth. One to speak and another to hear.” The truth has been spoken on the cross. The truth has been articulated clearly on the cross. Oh, the cynic Pilate wondered what truth was in his desire for self-interest, but Jesus still bore that truth. And the truth was that even in the midst of humanity's sin, He said, “Father, forgive them.”
That is the truth. The truth is the redemptive nature of what took place on the cross. And so, if the cross is the word we must hear, we must be the ones to listen if the truth is to speak. When we listen we must do a number of things. The first is to humble ourselves. If we are chasing butterflies that we think are more important than the Son of God we need to let those butterflies go, to release their hold on our lives, because if we don't, they will cause us to avoid the greatest gift we've ever been given: The one who is crying in the gulch from the cross saying, “Follow me.”
We must be bold and willing not to be ashamed of the cross but to proclaim it. Not to look away from it in disgust, not to find it offensive but to find in it a glorious statement of God's self-giving love for the world. We need to proclaim it.
We also need to be led by it. I was humbled this week. After my sermon on Sunday (which the people here at Deer Park didn't hear) in which I gloated that the Toronto Maple Leafs had beaten the Ottawa Senators, one of my friends from Ottawa which whom I talk and argue at great length with wrote me a very nice e-mail. In it he said, “I'm so glad you understand our suffering in Ottawa. May you experience it someday yourself.”
Last night I sent an e-mail back to him saying, “My brother, we are fellow sufferers. I pray that mine will now have ended once and for all!”
Sharing suffering with another is a powerful statement of what you believe to be true. This is not a trivial thing, it's a powerful thing. As Christians it seems to me that the cross speaks to us and says, “You, too, must now share and be concerned for the burdens of the world. You must sit beside those whose suffering is palpable. You must be willing to speak for the voiceless, to sit with the lonely, to hold the hand of the dying and to speak on behalf of life.” The cross says that to us. It says it profoundly. It is our ministry and it is our mission.
It was summed up in a beautiful story that I read a year or so ago about a minister who received a call from a school teacher saying, “I just wanted to let you know that your daughter is a most unusual little girl.”
The minister said: “Why do you say that?”
The teacher said: “Well, I always give this lesson where I read a story to the children and they are to finish it. Your daughter did something very strange. She said, 'I would like to do a drawing at the end of it. Is that okay?' I told her that if she must that was fine but she must still finish the story.”
The story goes, there was an ant and a grasshopper getting ready for winter. Throughout the Fall the ant gathered up enough food to survive through the winter. The grasshopper on the other hand was frivolous, playing games and doing what grasshoppers do - flitting around. Winter came and the grasshopper realized that he had no food and the ant had a great deal of food, enough to survive the winter.
“What do you now think happened?” The teacher said.
Some of the students said: “The ant shared the food with the grasshopper, but because the grasshopper ate so much it still didn't have enough and died. But the ant lived.”
Another group, the hard-nosed group, said: “The ant said, 'Look, I've worked hard all Fall, I'm responsible for my own survival. You're an idiot. I'll live and you'll die.'”
Then your daughter said: “That the ant said to the grasshopper, 'You have my food and I will die.' The ant died and the grasshopper lived.” The little picture at the bottom: three crosses.
God's self-giving love is the message of Good Friday. May we put aside the chasing of our butterflies and may we come to the One who died for us and for the world. Amen.