A Life Remembered

Mark 15:1-5

And as soon as it was morning, the chief priests held a consultation with the elders and scribes and the whole council. And they bound Jesus and led him away and delivered him over to Pilate. 2 And Pilate asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” And he answered him, “You have said so.” 3 And the chief priests accused him of many things. 4 And Pilate again asked him, “Have you no answer to make? See how many charges they bring against you.” 5 But Jesus made no further answer, so that Pilate was amazed.

Pray

There is a movie called Troy, I will admit to you that I don’t think I watched the whole thing, but I believe it is at the very beginning of this movie that Achilles, the main character played by Brad Pitt, is approached by a messenger boy. Achilles is about to go into battle and the boy says to Achilles,

“Are the stories about you true? They say your mother is an immortal goddess. They say you can't be killed.”

Achilles responds, “I wouldn't be bothering with the shield then, would I?”

The boy says, “The Thessalonian you're fighting-- he is the biggest man I've ever seen. I wouldn't want to fight him.”

And Achilles responds with one of the most memorable lines in cinema, “That's why no one will remember your name.”

We remember certain people because they were valiant in battle like Joshua Chamber that turned the tide at Gettysburg, or Carlos Hathcock, the elite American sniper who made a name for himself in Vietnam. We also remember those that worked hard or had great business acumen and etched their own name into our culture and history like the Rockefeller, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, but sometimes people are at the right place at the right time and they just so happen to be involved in something of great historical significance, in this case, that has historical reverberations throughout millennia.

Today we meet a person who just happened to have a position that he worked his way into and he just so happened to be at the right place at the right time to meet Jesus and be a part of this story.

Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor of the area known as Judea. This post as Governor of this region is not highly sought after, it was very far from Rome. He was surrounded by people that hated him, the Jews, and he held this post for 11 years. The significance of his time served is often over looked. He was either, as some scholars believe, really good at his job that he was irreplaceable in that region or as most history suggest, very bad at his job that he could not get promoted. He and his Jewish subordinates did not get along.

Philo, the Jewish thinker and philosopher that lived during that time, said of Pilate, he is “a man of an inflexible, stubborn and cruel disposition,” known for “his venality, his violence, his thievery, his assaults, his abusive behavior, his frequent executions of untried prisoners and his endless savage ferocity” In one of Pilate’s many leadership blunders, he took the money from the Jewish temple and used it to build an aqueduct to bring a new water supply into the city. When the people rose up against him for doing this, Pilate had them beaten, some to death.

We do not know much about his early life before he became governor and we do not know much after he was dismissed from his office. Some say that he committed suicide, some say that he became a believer and was martyred for it. We can’t know for sure, but one thing we can know is that he was immortalized in our bibles and in the the church creeds as the man who tried Jesus, found him innocent but sent him to death to appease the crowds.

From Judas to the High Priest to Pilate, this was all prophesied by Jesus in Mark 10:33-34

“See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles. And they will mock him and spit on him, and flog him and kill him. And after three days he will rise.”

Judas sells out Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, the high priest make a mockery of their law and legal system to condemn Him to death and now he is delivered over to the Gentiles just as he said it would happen. This was always the plan. Peter preaching in Acts 2:23-24 says,

this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.

It reminds me of Genesis 50, where Joseph forgives his brothers for selling him into slavery with one of the best lines in the bible, “What you meant for evil, God meant for good.”

Jesus, by this time, has had a trial before Annas, the previous high priest, then a trial before Caiphas, the reigning high priest, then onto the Sanhedrin counsel, which was a collection of Jewish leaders of the day. These are the three trials before the Jewish people and before any one of these trials had started, they already knew that they wanted him to die.

They know what the verdict will be and so they just need a law that was broken. After coming up short with false accusations they finally ask Jesus if He is the Christ and He answers, “I am.” That was all they needed. They were going to charge Him with blasphemy. Because Jesus said that He was the Son of God, Jesus was claiming equality with God. To the Chief Priest and the Sanhedrin, that was disrespectful to God because no one is God’s son and Jesus, in their eyes, did not fit the mold of the Messiah. In Leviticus 24, the punishment for blasphemy is death. This is a problem for the Jews. They were not allowed to kill anyone so they needed a government agent of Rome to carry out the death penalty. This is where we find ourselves today.

1 And as soon as it was morning, the chief priests held a consultation with the elders and scribes and the whole council. And they bound Jesus and led him away and delivered him over to Pilate.

This is the handing over from the Jews to the gentiles. Jesus came before his people, the Jewish people, and they reviled him and so they gave him over to Pilate who is a gentile, or a non-Jew.

Mark’s account is the shortest version of this account in the Gospels. Jesus is taken to the Governor’s headquarters where Pilate was. These Jewish leaders that spent the entire night lying and plotting to kill an innocent man, breaking their own laws, in the day time had to keep appearances and were unable to go into the Governor’s building because he was a Roman and it would make them unclean and they would not be able to celebrate the Passover. John’s Gospel gives us these details.

John 18:28–29 (ESV)

Then they led Jesus from the house of Caiaphas to the governor’s headquarters. It was early morning. They themselves did not enter the governor’s headquarters, so that they would not be defiled, but could eat the Passover. So Pilate went outside to them and said, “What accusation do you bring against this man?”

This is the time of day that Pilate would hear these cases. To appease their feast, Pilate goes and meets them outside. This has probably happened multiple times that a crowd would bring a criminal to him. He was the final say as to what happened to the charged person. Their fate was in his hands, so he asks a question to the crowd, “What accusations do you bring against this man?”

The Jews knows that Pilate will not put Jesus to death for breaking Jewish law so they must come up with another accusation to get Pilate to see that this man, Jesus, is dangerous to Rome. These accusations are given to us by Luke’s account.

Luke 23:1–2 (ESV)

Then the whole company of them arose and brought him before Pilate. And they began to accuse him, saying, “We found this man misleading our nation and forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that he himself is Christ, a king.”

The Jewish leaders had to present a case to Pilate that he was breaking Roman law and trying to get more people to do the same. Pilate doesn’t seemed concerned about the misleading of the Jewish people by Jesus or the forbidding of giving tribute, but Pilate is curious about the last accusation, “He is saying that he himself is Christ, a king.”

2 And Pilate asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” And he answered him, “You have said so.”

We get a better look at this story in John’s Gospel.

John 18:33–34 (ESV)

So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?”

This is the first recorded time of their meeting but it is likely that Pilate has heard and knew of Jesus for years. Jesus answers this question in such a way to show us that it really is not Jesus before pilate, but Pilate before Jesus. It is almost as if Jesus is asking Pilate what he believes about him. Pilate responds in John,

“Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me. What have you done?” 36 Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.” 37 Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” 38 Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”

Jesus could have stayed silent. He could have not said a word and the cross would have still been in his future, but what Jesus chooses to answer are not the lies that He could have shown to be false by several witnesses, but, instead of trying to save his life and beg before Pilate, which I am sure was what happened in most cases as a condemned person stood before this mighty judge of Rome, Jesus chooses to answer the questions that could get to the heart of Pilate.

Jesus tells Pilate that his kingdom is much higher than this earthly court and earthly rulers. Jesus is not pleading to save His life, He is speaking to Pilate to save his. If Jesus’ kingdom is higher than Pilate’s, who is the real judge? Who is on trial here? Pilate has a choice to make, what will he do with this man, Jesus?

I am sure Pilate has never seen anything like this before. A man that is obviously innocent, and Pilate knows it, standing before Pilate’s mighty judgement throne and willingly going along with his own death without once defending himself against these false charges. That is why at the end of our text in Mark for the day,

4 And Pilate again asked him, “Have you no answer to make? See how many charges they bring against you.” 5 But Jesus made no further answer, so that Pilate was amazed.

It is an amazing thing when you see someone with amazing power not wield it for their own good. Pilate had never witnessed anything like this. Power was the currency that he dealt in and he used it for personal gain as often as he could.

He came face to face with the truth, manifested in the flesh and the question, “What will you do with Jesus?”

We all believe in truth until it hits up against something that we love. We like truth with numbers. The bank statement says I have this much money, you don’t want the bank to say, “Those numbers don’t really mean anything and they could change at any moment.” We like that there is a force that holds us to the earth and it happens everyday and night the same way. We do not want to live in a place where we don’t know if we will float into space on a second by second bases. We live on a planet governed by natural laws that are true and we like those. We like mathematics because it is true and with it we can know certain things like building bridges that won’t collapse if my care drives on it.

What we don’t like is when The Truth brings His light to shine on us. When Jesus shines His light on us, it reveals all of the places where we live in untruths. Though we may like external truths, we do not like the internal ones because the lies are often more comfortable.

We all have sin that we like or are more inclined to and we justify those sins by lying to ourselves. Pilate justified his cruelty by believing the lie that “might makes right” to explain that, Pilate has the might of the entire Roman government on his side so he can do anything that he wants at anytime because he is “all powerful”. We justify our sin by any number of lies, too. “I’m too tired to fight this temptation.” “It’s been a hard week, I deserve this…fill in the blank.” “I’ve already been forgiven so I can do this sin because He’s already taken care of it.”

1 John 1:5–6 (ESV)

God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.

There is a truth and a way of life in the truth that Jesus is calling us to. This Christian life is not, “Hey Jesus sounds pretty good. He forgave my sins and I get to go to heaven? Sign me up.” and then you go along with the rest of your life with no change, no heart for the things of God, no remorse over the sin you commit toward a Holy God. If that is you, you do not know him. Your unchanged heart is evidence that the Holy Spirit is not in you.

When we are face to face with Jesus as we see Pilate today, He is asking us, “Do you say that I am King?” “Do you submit to me?” “Am I worthy of your submission? The answer to all of those questions should be a resounding “yes” by all who hear them, but it isn’t.

Pilate, at that time, did not bend the knee, the Jews of that time did not bend the knee. In fact, at that time they did not have a Jewish king like a David or Solomon. At the beginning of that week, Jesus rode in on a donkey in an effort to let them know that He was their king, their Messiah, but faced with his kingship, when Pilate asked them, “Shall I crucify your king?” They all yelled, “We have no king but Caesar.” His own people knew Him not and they served another.

We think that it is for us to see Jesus and his merits and make the decision to believe or not, but we are not the judge, Jesus is. 1 Timothy 1:12-14,

I thank him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.

Our case goes before him, it is not Jesus before us but us before Jesus. I think a lot of us have a misunderstanding of this role. It is only by His love and grace that we even can be heard in front of an all powerful judge. We are sinful lawbreakers. We do not deserve everlasting life. We do not deserve to be an heir with Christ.

But we have a big brother in Jesus who saw all of our sin and took our place. He took the punishment for our sins against the Father so now when the Father sees us, He sees us through the finished work of Christ on the cross. We are sealed with the Holy Spirit to keep us in this righteousness. We have become sons and daughters of the Father through Christ the King.

Is this a King you want to follow? The only thing He requires from you is that you come and die. Die to your old sinful ways and live in the new life of Christ in righteousness. In this new life you become less and less everyday and He becomes more and more. This work is called sanctification. Do you like the life you are living without Christ, if you are not a believer? How is it working?

Pilate had no rest. He was in constant fear of the people around him, the people below him that were gunning for his job. In those days, if you wanted someones spot, you could kill them. It happened with several Caesars so it could happen with a lowly governor. He was also worried about his bosses above him. Always having to be political, do the right thing in every aspect of his life or he could be killed or fired. That is a lot of weight trying to be your own king and build your own kingdom. There is no glory in that life and no satisfaction in that kingdom.

Are you building your kingdom as your own king? Trying to look good for everyone and trying to make the right moves so no one figures out who you know you truly are. There is a freedom in realizing that you are a wretched sinner with zero capacity on your own to do good. There is freedom in taking your crown and bowing down to the one true king and giving your allegiance to Him. He takes the burden away. He provides for your needs and most importantly, He loves you not for anything that you can do for Him but just for the shear fact that you are His child. That’s the King I want to serve.