A PRAYER TO START
We are to remember the gospel. The good news that is a tragic death of sinless man, and a divine treasure gained for us through his suffering. Though we are prone to avoid the pondering of death and affliction, we must not forget. With that in mind, let us pray with John Ballie this prayer…
O Father, your eternal love for all people was most perfectly shown in the blessed life and death of our Lord Jesus. Enable me now to mediate so deeply on my Lord’s passion, that as I have fellowship with him in his sorrow, I may learn the secret of his strength and peace.
I remember Gethsemane;
I remember how Judas betrayed him;
I remember how Peter denied him;
I remember how all of them deserted him and fled;
I remember the scourging;
I remember the crown of thorns;
I remember how they spat on him;
I remember how they struck him on the head with a staff;
I remember his pierced hands and feet;
I remember his agony on the cross;
I remember his thirst;
I remember how he cried, ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’
We may not know, we cannot tell,
What pains He had to bear;
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffered there.
Grant, O most gracious Father, that as I kneel before you I may be embraced in the great company of those whom you have saved and brought to life through the cross of Christ. Let the redeeming power that has flowed from his suffering through so many generations now flow into my soul. Here let me find forgiveness of sin. Here let me learn to share with Christ the burden of the suffering world. Amen.
GETTING THOUGHTFUL
By the time we arrive at this point in Matthew’s gospel story (chapters 26-28), the details are more familiar to us. Many have heard the particulars of Jesus’ death countless times, some of us even seeing these once experienced atrocities portrayed on a screen for our viewing discomfort. While we, probably, are in little danger or romanticizing the final few hours of Jesus before the cross; we are however prone to sensationalize the events in a way that we miss the subtle power of these several interactions that proceed Jesus’ final breath.
Removing these precarious instances from the context of real people, in real moments; we are prone to read them too quickly as merely props for the action to come. For instance, when Jesus finds himself before the Roman representative ruler, Pontius Pilate, who is there to determine the validity of the accusations against him, Jesus responds with a silence that leaves the ruler “greatly amazed” (Matthew 27:11-14). In John’s gospel account, we find a little more detail to the conversation which you can (need to) read here (18:33-40).
There is a profoundness to both the response of Jesus and Pilate to the latter’s question, “What is truth?” And, in order to appreciate the silence of truth, perhaps a refreshing of the scene is necessary. Frederick Buechner retells this reflective encounter in a rather colorful manner. Take some time to read through Buechner’s (8-16) descriptor and observations, and let the pregnant silence of the gospel settle upon you.
“…at the deepest level all hearers of the truth are the same hearer, and when I try to picture him or her, what I picture is the one who is famous for having asked to hear, who took a long drag on his cigarette and through narrowed eyes asked, ‘What is truth?’…
He is Pontius Pilate, of course. He is the procurator of Judea. On the day that he asks his famous question, there are other things too that he has seen and done. He makes his first major decision before he has even had his breakfast. While still in his pajamas, he walks downstairs to the bar closet where he keeps his cigarettes, takes the two and a half cartons that he finds there and puts them out with the trash. There is the remains of a pack in the pocket of his dinner jacket and some loose ones lying around the house in various cigarette boxes. All of these he carefully destroys, slitting them open with his thumbnail and flushing the tabacco down the toilet. After dinner the evening before, the talk turned to politics, and he was up for hours, talking and smoking, so that when he awake, his tongue felt hot and dry, his whole chest raw inside like a wound. He knows about the surgeon general’s warning. He has seen the usual photographs of a smoker’s lungs. He has been a three-pack-a-day man for better or worse than thirty years so his prebreakfast decision is a decision for life against death, and he sees it as his death that he slits open with his thumbnail and flushes away.
It is a good start, and he feels better for it. Not even the morning paper upsets him, leafing through it in the back seat of the limousine as he is driven into the city. It contains the usual grim recital—poverty, crime, disease, corruption in high places, ignorance and superstition and indifference in low places and everywhere else—but he feels for the moment wonderfully insulated from it as the car rolls along the tinted windows. Children are playing in the street, heavily armed policemen patrolling the seedier neighborhoods, sightseers feeding pigeons outside the temple gates. He is essentially a law-and-order ma, and he is maintaining them as best he can. If the malcontents, the eggheads, and bleeding hearts, want to carry on about rottenness at the heart of things, that is their business. His concern is with rottenness in the streets, and his business is to keep the ship afloat day to day. All in all he is not doing a bad job of it. There are no major complaints from Rome. The Jews are happy enough with their Jewish puppets. And he himself, if not exactly happy, is happy enough.
When he was a young man, he dreamed of greater things than a provincial procuratorship, but he could have done a lot worse. He is a friend of Caesar’s. His sons have had the best education money could buy. His wife is subject to troubling dreams, but she is in the hands of a good analyst. Their marriage is not what it once was, but she lets him go his own way, and he has found other ways to go. He comforts her by saying that the day is not far off when they can retire to the villa outside Ostia to enjoy visits from the children and grandchildren, the evening martini, the walk along the beach. In the meantime he has appointments to keep, and he keeps them.
The chief of the occupational forces is in a sweat because the high holidays are upon them and he expects trouble from the fanatics. The Jewish God, not knowing which side his matzoh is buttered on, wants Rome out, wants the peace that passeth all understanding for his people instead of the Pax Romana. Pilate starts to reach for a cigarette and then remembers. He picks up a pencil instead. He says that what passeth his understanding is the Jews themselves, who have never had it so good. He says that what passeth his understanding is how they can go on knocking themselves out for a God who runs history when it is precisely history that has run them over and left them with their ancient superstitions as much an anachronism as an Egyptian mummy or a stone ax. Besides, he says, Caesar is God. The chief of the occupational forces is a straight party-line man with an eye for promotion, and Pilate does not quite permit himself a wink as he says it. Caesar is God, he says, with only the faintest flicker of a smile. It is not returned, and he orders the guard doubled around the temple and the whole garrison is put on the alert until Passover passes over.
The tax people come in full of the usual excuses. You can’t get blood out of a stone, they say, and you can’t make a Roman silk purse out of the ear of a Jewish sow. A man comes in with a scheme for an aqueduct to solve the city’s water problem. It will pass through land which he is prepared to sell at considerable personal sacrifice. There is some kind of epidemic in the old slave district, and there are complaints about bodies left in the streets to draw flies and packs of orphaned children scavenging among them for food. There has been some kind of demonstration at one of the city gates with some up-country messiah at the center of it, and the question is how to handle it without making it worse. The Jews are playing it safe by passing the buck to Caesar, and ‘There is no God, and Caesar is his name,’ Pilate permits himself to say this time but only to his secretary because she is young and pretty and stupid and won’t get it anyway. He says he will see the man himself if that’s what they want. If they want him to see their God, he will see him too. The more the merrier.
The secretary lowers her eyes under his steady, bland gaze like a girl in a convent, but he has reason to know that if there was ever a convent, she has come a long way since and wouldn’t need more than a nod from him to come a good bit farther still. He is tempted for a moment to give her that nod but is deterred by his knowledge that a man needs as much singleness of purpose to be unfaithful to his wife as he needs to be faithful to her, and for the moment the only purpose he can bring himself to take seriously is lunch, which he easts quickly and alone at his desk. Roman beer, cold chicken with mayonnaise, two hard-boiled eggs, and if smoking doesn’t get him, he thinks, cholesterol will. He is already older than his father lived to be, and bad hearts run in the family. When he is through eating, he would trade the Ostian villa for a cigarette, but cigarettes are death, and he has flushed them all away for the sake of life. It is a sacrifice, he hopes,that will prove worth the making.
A phone call comes through from his wife. She tells him that one of the horses has gotten foundered and has to be put down. She doesn’t give a hoot about horses, but as she runs on and on about it, all of the sudden her voice goes queer and thick, and he realizes she is weeping. He can see her sitting there with the receiver cradled between her ear and her shoulder so that she can light a cigarette as she always does when she starts to cry. He can almost smell the smoke as she lights it and then starts talking again. He closes his eyes and tries to think of something to distract her with, but nothing comes.
She is apologizing for bothering him, for weeping, apologizing for her life. She has had a bad night, the same dark dreams…As she talks, he swivels around in his chair to look out the window behind him. Down in the courtyard a ragged child is talking to one of the soldiers, and he wonders if it can be one of the epidemic children, the disease clinging to its clothes like lice. A pigeon perched on the windowsill fans one wing out, then tucks it in again. When his wife finally hangs up and he swings back to his desk, he finds he is no longer alone. They have brought the up-country messiah in for questioning. Pilate is caught off-guard, and before he knows what he is doing, he takes a cigarette from an onyx box on his desk and lights it.
The man stands in front of the desk with his hands tied behind his back. You can see that he has been roughed up a little. His upper lip is absurdly puffed out and one eye is swollen shut. He looks unwashed and smells unwashed. His feet are bare-big, flat peasant feet although the man himself is not big. There is something almost comic about the way he stands there, bent slightly forward because of the way his hands are tied and goggling down at the floor through his one good eye as if he is looking for something he has lost, a button off his shirt or a dime somebody slipped him for a cup of coffee. If there were just the two of them, Pilate thinks, he would give him his carfare and send him back to the sticks where he came from, but the guards are watching, and on the wall the official portrait of Tiberius Caesar is watching, the fat, powdered face, the toothy imperial smile, so he goes through the formalities.
‘So you’re the king of the Jews,’ he says. ‘The head Jew,’ because there hasn’t been one of them yet who hasn’t made that his claim—David come back to give Judea back to the Jews.
The man says, ‘It’s not this would I’m king of,’ but his accent is so thick that Pilate hardly gets it, the accent together with what they have done to his upper lip. As if he has a mouth full of stones, he says, ‘I’ve come to bear witness to the truth,’ and at that the procurator of Judea takes such a deep drag on his filter tip that his head swims and for a moment he’s afraid he may faint.
He pushes back from the desk and crosses his legs. There is the papery rustle of wings as the pigeon flutters off the sill and floats down toward the cobbles. Standing by the door, the guards aren’t paying much attention. One of them is picking his nose, the other staring up at the ceiling. Cigarette smoke drifts over the surface of the desk—the picture of his wife when she still had her looks, the onyx box from Caesar, the clay plague with the imprint of his first son’s hand on it, made while he was still a child in nursery school. Pilate squints at the man through the smoke and asks his question.
He asks it half because he would give as much as even his life to hear and half because he believes there is no answer and would give a good deal to hear that too because it would mean just one thing less to have to worry about. He says, ‘What is truth?’ and by way of an answer, the man with the split lip doesn’t say a blessed thing. Or else his not saying anything that is the blessed thing. You could hear a pin drop in the big, high-ceilinged room with Tiberius grinning down from the wall like a pumpkin, the one cigarette a little unsteady between the procurator’s yellowed fingertips.
…We are all Pilate in our asking after truth…and the truth and the Gospel are one, and before the Gospel is a word, it too like truth is silence—not an ordinary silence, silence as nothing to hear, but…a pregnant silence in its ninth month, and in answer to Pilate’s question, Jesus keeps silent, even with his hands tied behind him manages somehow to hold silence out like a terrible gift…The Gospel that is truth is good news, but before it is good news, let us say that it is just news…the evening news…but with the sound turned off…no words to explain it or explain it away, no words to cushion or sharpen the shock of it, no definition given to dispose of it…
REFLECTION
Use the questions below to help you prayerfully reflect individually and/or discuss as a DNA group.
Buechner’s poetic license is clear, but so is the atmosphere created in which we can find ourselves having to ponder with Pilate, Jesus’ silent answer.
Why does Jesus respond to the question most us would love our friend or neighbor to ask by letting Pilate hang in the moment?
Why is Pilate “greatly amazed” by Jesus’ response, and sees in him nothing worth condemning?
Can you hear the pregnant silence of the Gospel; news observed but not explained?
What response does it draw out in you?