John 18
The philosopher Hannah Arnedt wrote an incredible book about her observation of the trial of Adolph Eichman, the Nazi who organized the transportation to the death camps in Germany during the Holocaust. When Eichman was finally put on trial after World War II Arnedt made this horrifying discovery. Eichman was a civil servant, a very plain and seemingly unideological man. He didn’t harbor extreme hatred for Jews. Instead, he began his career in Hitler’s government transporting Jews to Palestine. He thought of it has helping them achieve their Zionist dreams as a people.
Eichman’s movement to an accomplice in mass murder came about not through conspiracy and vitriol. It was an evil born of denial and acquiescence. At one point in his trial for war crimes in Jerusalem he made a fascinating confession. After he came to understand the full extent of Hitler’s final solution, Eichman told the jurors at his trial that he didn’t feel horror or indignation. Instead, he felt peace. He told the court, “At that moment I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt.”
The country agreed with Hitler. The government was aligned behind the plan, the whole system laid out with great rationality and thoughtfulness. Eichman reasoned, “who am I to have my own thoughts on the matter?”
Like Pilate. Free of all guilt. Eichman is referring to the story we heard today from the Gospel of John, of Jesus trial before Pontius Pilate. In Jesus’ day, the governors had almost complete control over their local jurisdiction. And their primary goal was to keep order, to keep the region under the control of Caesar, Palestine as one of the many vassal states that served the interests of Rome.
Crucifixion was the way this order was enforced. I’ve often heard people say that the cross as the equivalent of a modern day electric chair. But that’s not quite right. Crucifixions were ubiquitous in the ancient world, deaths by torture reserved especially for those who incited rebellion. They were not so much death penalties as they were a form of social control, bodies on crosses strategically placed at crossroads to remind the people of the power of Rome to crush their dreams of freedom. Be wary, all those who take a stand against the Empire.
James Cone helps us to rethink the place of the cross in our historical memory. He wants us to see that Jesus died not in an electric chair, but on a lynching tree. Every lynching tree is a cross, and every cross is a lynching tree, Cone tells us. It is a form of death that cements a social order of terror in the bodies of oppressed people, a way to fortify within human bodies a world order.
Like crucifixion, lynching was not done in secret. It was “a public spectacle,” one announced in advance in order to attract the largest crowd possible. Lynching reminded black people in the South that white people had the extra-judicial power to keep the order of slavery in place, even if national law had changed.
The charges against lynching victims were so spurious they were absurd — glancing at a white woman or being discovered in a consensual relationship with a white woman. Fear of white women’s sexual purity, her ability to carry on the white race without tarnish, was the predominate theme during Jim Crow. Lynching was a piece of the architecture of power over black bodies, a reminder that a black or brown body was never safe. An accusation, trial, and execution could occur in an instant.
Lynchings were meant to raise the specter that there was no true innocence because the crime was located in the body, in the blackness of a body, a crime the victim could not escape. And as we hear John again today we discover an equally innocent Jesus, a sham trial announced again and again by Pilate himself.
In this scene of the trial of Jesus, Pilate is actually moving inside and outside, negotiating with the religious leaders and with Jesus. He seems baffled by the very fact that Jesus has been brought to him. There is no accusation except that he is generically a criminal. No other explanation is given. And Pilate finds himself trying hold the middle, looking for the best possible solution to keep everyone happy. First he wonders, why can’t the religious leaders try Jesus by their own laws? Because they want death, and breaking religious law cannot be punished with death. Jesus must die by Roman execution, at the hands of Roman officials, on a Roman cross.
Pilate next tries to see if he can get Jesus himself to clear up the misunderstanding. But Jesus refuses to answer in a way that’s comprehensible to Pilate. There’s ambiguity here and Pilate answers with the famous phrase: “what is truth?” Without waiting for answer, Pilate goes back outside, once again trying his best to get out of this bind. He offers to release Jesus for the tradition of pardon during Passover. Ironically, the religious people gathered ask for the release of the murderer and political dissident, Barabbas. Even more ironically, Pilate grants the request, condemning to death one who lived a life of non-violent love, who never spoke against the state, who never raised a sword against Rome. Instead, an insurrectionist goes free.
It’s a farce, a parade of nonsense and cruelty. Jesus clears up any fears for Pilate about Jesus’ role in overthrowing the state. But what we know is that lives like Jesus’ cannot be allowed to exist. More powerful than swords or guerilla warfare was the possibility that God was on the side of the poor, was for the Jews, and that God was here among them, that a new world was opening up before them.
Jesus’ death was a lynching.
Lynching is so horrific that we can barely look at it, and yet it is deeply embedded in our formation as a country. It’s a history many of us would like to pretend never happened, one from which we want to turn our heads in disgust.
But Pilate reminds me that it takes good people to put such actions in to place. We have to remember that thousands of people would gather to see a lynching take place. Thousands stood by and watched. We also know that the majority of lynchings took place in the Bible belt, instigated by good church-going folk who also felt they had to be realistic about the threat caused by their former slaves. Whites in the south took this on as a religious mission – bearing witness to the God-given superiority of whites over blacks.
Hannah Arnedt called this the “banality of evil.” We hear it all the time. This is just the way it is. I’m just doing my job. Who am I to question my leader or my pastor or my legislator? It’s too risky. Who am I to change things?
Rowan Williams points out how interesting it is that in the ancient creeds, like the one we said today, that only three people are mentioned by name – Mary, Jesus, and Pilate. It’s strange isn’t it? Why not Herod, who murdered thousands of Jewish babies? Why not Caesar Augustus whose lust for power led this massive structure of occupation? Why would the creeds pull up this humble civil servant, simply trying to do his job, to stay in the middle, to try and keep everyone happy?
Perhaps the name of Pilate stands as a warning to us, a reminder that evil in its pervasive and haunting form does not look like white hoods or swastikas. Often evil is ordinary and ordered, pulling us into a posture of complacency, our hands thrown up in the air in resignation. Perhaps, we tell ourselves, this is what we need for the common good. Perhaps this is what keeps us safe, keeps us secure, keeps people in line.
On the other side of this warning stands Jesus, the one who refuses to follow the structures and social orders propagated by Rome. Throughout John’s Gospel we’ve seen his strangeness, God’s life opening up people to possibilities they cannot fully understand. Unlike Rome’s strategy of terrorizing control, Jesus is a slowly unraveling love. It’s a love that is incomprehensible, a love that gets swept up in cruelty and torture. And in the end, it is the love that finds a way, that offers up no resistance when faced with death.
But it is also a love that cannot be kept dead. It is a love that gets up on the third day, a body that cannot be controlled by princes and governments. Not a ghost, not a spirit, but a body that eats and breathes, a body that becomes your body and my body bound together, the work of naming the lynching trees around us, calling one another back to follow this Jesus who was killed on a cross – his life beckoning to us, calling us on.
Sign on the Window 