Jesus as Pontius Pilate

by Richard Dieterle

For reasons that I have yet to discover, some of the Eastern churches have declared Pontius Pilate to be a saint. That Pilate practiced imitatio Christi is not as far fetched as one might think. However, the conventional view of the Latin West is that Pontius Pilate was an accomplice to deicide: he could have personally granted Jesus amnesty, but decided to "wash his hands" of the matter. To this day Pontius Pilate stands in our tradition as an exemplar of a kind of moral nihilism: the willingness to stand by and allow an evil to occur that could be easily prevented. The failure to intervene is buttressed by the flimsy excuse that others are responsible for the injustice, and that no moral imperative compels an outsider to intervene. Pilate is like one of the passersby in the parable of the Good Samaritan who sees the victim but chooses to do nothing. Such people share heavily in the blame for the evil that precipitates.

When we examine the career of Jesus as judge, and view the matter in the context of Pontius Pilate, bizarre and paradoxical consequences arise. Jesus, as we know from Christian mythology, is destined to sit in judgment of humanity as a whole "at the end of the age." In the Last Judgment the "Son of Man" must pass a sentence on the larger part of humanity which exceeds in severity any punishment ever imagined under Roman law. According to Christian mythology, the judgment rendered in the final scene of the apocalypse separates one group of souls from another according to a somewhat peculiar criterion of excellence, which besides weighing moral worth, takes into consideration certain metaphysical opinions held by the deceased at death. And what fate awaits those parted from the Elect? According to Mark (9:43 - 44), the oldest gospel, the souls of the rejected burn forever, and are eaten by (asbestos?) worms with extraordinarily healthy appetites. Setting aside the metaphysical issue of how incorporeal substances can be gnawed, and the biological limits of heat tolerance in worms, what must we think of the ethics of Jesus as a judge under these circumstances? We can fairly imagine these crispy munchies crying out to him for mercy. The usual Christian stance on this matter is that Jesus very much wants to save the unrepentant and/or unbelieving souls, but he cannot. Why not? Well, it turns out that they did this to themselves, and Jesus is not personally responsible for their misfortune. Since we have free will, and can only be true persons if we retain it, Jesus cannot intervene to stop us from acquiring bad morals and bad metaphysics. All this is fine, I suppose, but why can't Jesus intervene at the end and save the condemned from so heinous a punishment? This punishment is proportionate to no crime, not even to the worst agonies inflicted by the most deranged criminal. Jesus, like Pilate, won't intervene to stop an almost unimaginable torture. Given all the free time available in eternity, couldn't these poor bastards be rehabilitated? What about, say, 20,000 years spent making license plates, and 300,000 visits to the prison chaplain? I should think that in a million years even Hitler could be reformed. Apparently not: "that's just the way it is" (metaphysics again). The guilty can only be so guilty, yet Jesus washes his hands of them with fewer moral scruples than Pilate showed him (imitatio Pilati). Picture Jesus at the Last Judgment leaning over his washbowl, rub-a-dub-dub: "Hey, you did it to yourselves, my hands are washed free of your blood."

The worst part of all this is that he has the gall to say, "but I still love you." This has got to fall under the twisted love category. Damn good thing (excuse the play on words here) that he doesn't hate us. Imagine the person who loves you most saying, "You've made a lot of moral mistakes in your life, and I've never liked your position on the Mind/Body Problem, so I'm going to have to dump a bucket of fire-proof leaches on you, with a chaser of gasoline and a lighted match. But I want you to know that despite your many failings, I still love you with all my heart." Now if a leach infested human fireball were seen screaming down the street, it would surely be a matter for Amnesty International. But apparently not in the Kingdom of God, a place that makes East Timor look pretty good. I realize that Jesus has some kind of multiple personality problem, but how someone can love you more than is humanly possible yet allow you to be tortured for eternity is a feat of split personality uncomprehended even in the most fictional forms of psychoanalysis. In the end the "Redeemer" takes the same ruthless attitude as Pontius Pilate, and unlike the good Samaritan, stands by while others commit unspeakable acts that he could have prevented. But maybe we can take our cue from the East after all: if Jesus is good, then Pontius Pilate must be a saint.

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