Father Stephen De Young: And when we start here in just a minute, we’re going to be starting at the beginning of Chapter 23, the Gospel According to St. Luke. And I will give my usual non-introduction introduction that still to this day the first Bible Study on Luke remains available on the Internet. If you want to go back and listen to that, Lord willing, as I said, we’re going to be concluding the Gospel of Luke tonight. So if you want to have a marathon, if you want to binge, listen and try to do the whole book at once, I wouldn’t recommend that, but especially if you’re driving, you might end up going right off the road, but that is still available.

We are, as I just mentioned, coming to the very end of the Gospel According to St. Luke. Last time we talked about Christ’s arrest, and after his arrest, he was brought before the Chief Priest and the Sanhedrin, which was the gathering of the leading religious figures in Jerusalem at the time. They convicted Him for blasphemy, which, according to the Torah, is a crime that demands death as the penalty. But of course, they’re not allowed to just execute people, even their fellow Jews, because the Romans, as little as they cared about the Jews, again, their main concern was maintaining order. And if you have the People living on your land killing each other, that leads to feuds, that leads to all kinds of problems that lead to disorder.

And so, while they didn’t really care whether the average Judean lived or died on a day-to-day basis, they weren’t going to sanction them killing each other, especially over religious disputes, because again, that’s a recipe for future disturbances. And so if they’re going to do away with Jesus, as has been their plan, they’ve now finally got a hold of him. They’re going to have to get the Romans to do the dirty work for them. They’re going to have to get the Romans to execute them.

As we mentioned before, that wasn’t all that difficult because the Romans really didn’t care if the average Judean lived or died. And so basically, it’s just a question… Now, while the Romans wouldn’t kill someone to do the Jewish officials a favor, because they don’t owe them any favors, if they could be convinced that Jesus continuing to live is going to cause any kind of disturbance to the social order, going to cause any kind of problem. Remember, we’re in Jerusalem at the time of the Passover feast. So there are Jewish people from all over the Roman Empire all converging there in Jerusalem, the population, most people estimate, roughly tripled around the feast of Passover. So there’s a lot of people crowded into the city. If they could convince the Romans that Jesus is there to cause some kind of unrest, they’ll kill him without a second thought.

So, they are pretty confident that they’re now going to get what they’ve been wanting, which is to get rid of Jesus as a threat to their power. So that’s where we left off last time. So did anybody have any questions, comments, requests? Okay, we’ll go ahead and get started. Chapter 23:

Then the whole multitude of them arose and led Him to Pilate.

So the whole multitude of them, being the chief priest, the scribes, the religious leaders. Pilate, of course, is Pontius Pilate, who is the current governor of the Roman province of Judea. We’ve talked before about how the Romans governed, that the idea of a nation of laws did not exist yet in the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was not governed by a system of laws where we have the idea in our modern politics that we have a system of laws and nobody, even the leaders of the country, are above those laws, at least in theory; that concept did not exist. This is rule by men. There is no law that applies to Caesar because in their mind, Caesar is a god, essentially, and so he could do what he wishes.

So, the way in which provinces were governed, where someone was sent by the emperor to govern that province, his job was to keep order of that province, keep the tax money flowing from that province, keep the material wealth in goods and slaves, in timber and stone, whatever else the Romans were trying to get from that province, keep all of that flowing and just maintain order. And in order to do that, he could do virtually anything he wanted to. There was not a legion headquartered in Jerusalem, but he had sufficient troops to wipe out the local population a couple of times over if you wanted to.

And so, Pontius Pilate has one job: maintain order, keep everything operating smoothly. And in order to do that, he can kill as many people as he needs to. There’s no right to a trial. Most of the people he executed never had a trial. And so that’s his only concern. And we know historically what happened to Pontius Pilate many years later was during one of the Jewish revolts, because there was a revolt, because they rebelled against Rome. He, having allowed that to happen, meant he had failed at his job. And so, he was taken back to the city of Rome and beheaded.

So, the same sort of rules applied. He was to execute whoever he had to execute. If he didn’t do his job right, well, then it was his turn, and the emperor would send somebody else to do a better job. Having seen what happened, what happened to his successor. And this wasn’t just that he was done away with when the Romans executed someone. I mean, we’ve talked about crucifixion, obviously, where you have someone naked who’s hung out, they leave the bodies to rot to make a display of it. They did the same thing with beheadings. If you were a Roman citizen, crucifixion was such a horrible form of death that it was banned from Roman citizens. The emperor could crucify whoever he wanted to, but by and large, Roman citizens were not allowed to be crucified. Roman citizens were beheaded because it was seen as more humane than crucifixion.

But this is why later on, under Nero, St. Peter was crucified because he was Jewish, right? So he was not a Roman citizen. St Paul was a Roman citizen, as we find out in the Book of Acts. And so, he was beheaded. That’s the reason for the difference in their mode of execution. Because St Paul had Roman citizenship, he was entitled to be beheaded instead. But the way they did state execution specifically, and this is a little gory, but there may be some teenage boys listening to this on the Internet who will find this really neat. The way we think of beheadings now is the way beheadings in the Middle Ages, where they take a sword or an axe and cut someone’s head off. That’s not how the Romans beheaded people, the way the Romans beheaded people, because, again, I don’t want to get too graphic with it, but there are problems with that, if you don’t have a very sharp sword and a very strong man, that could get really gross. So the way the Romans did it is they’d have two very strong men. They’d wrap a strap around someone’s neck and they both pull in opposite directions. And they did this at the top of this set of stairs that led down into the Tiber River of the city of Rome, so the person’s head would roll down the steps into the river. So again, they made a big display of it because their goal was for it to work as a deterrent. So Pontius Pilate didn’t do his job. “You other governors, pay attention. This is what happens when you don’t do your job”. And so, after seeing that, the other Roman governors were going to be twice as ruthless now, in order to make sure that that wasn’t going to happen to them.

We also know Pontius Pilate. In the quest to maintain order, as we’ve talked about a couple of times at one of the preceding Passovers, several years before this, had randomly crucified 150 Jews because he got wind that there might be something that happened at the Passover to cause a riot. And so he just had his soldiers round up 150 people off the street, men and women at random, and crucified them along all the roads leading into the city on both sides, so that everyone coming to the city for the Passover would see all of these bodies hanging with the message, again, if you come into the city and cause trouble, this is what’s in store for you. So this is the kind of reason I’m going through all this. And even some of the more graphic stuff is you need to have an idea of the kind of man that Pontius Pilate was. Sometimes we see him in our illustrated story Bibles, he’s sort of wearing a toga and he’s got the little wreath, and we had this kind of idealized that he’s some sort of statesman as a governor. And the reality is he’s a lot more of a thug, he’s a lot more of a butcher than that picture might imply.

Interlocutor: What happened with his wife?

Fr. Stephen: His wife, according to the tradition… we don’t have any record of his wife in secular history, but that’s not uncommon because she was a woman, and in the Roman Empire, they didn’t really care. She was there to give them a male heir and that was about it. But in the tradition of the Church, she actually ended up converting to Christianity and is a saint. She’s a saint, depending on which tradition you read, some say she was martyred, some say she was executed when Pilate was, that it wasn’t strictly for being a Christian. So, we know she was killed. We don’t know if it was because of the political situation with her husband, because some things will say that and then some other traditions say it was because of her Christianity that she was executed.

Interlocutor: They beheaded women also?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, most of the time when they executed women, if they were Roman women, they would also be beheaded. There are some exceptions. There were women who had a position of, I don’t really want to say position of authority, because it’s not position of authority the way we think of it, but like the Vestal virgins in Rome, women who were involved in the religious life, they had much stricter penalties. So, for example, if one of the Vestal Virgins… Vesta, was one of the Roman gods, she was the goddess of the hearth. And so in Rome, her temple was served by these dedicated virgins who are sort of like nuns today, except for, of course, for this pagan goddess. And if one of them was found to not be a virgin, they were buried alive. So there were some exceptions to that, but that was because, again, they wanted even more of a threat than just being beheaded to get across the point that you’ve been put in this special position, now, these are your responsibilities.

But yes, they would execute women, and non-Roman women, they’d execute by crucifixion or however they are tortured to death, or however they felt like. Again, there are a lot of things we take for granted in the modern world. One of those is that at least tacitly, we would probably all want to say that all human lives are equally valuable, but that comes from Christianity, that doesn’t exist in Rome. If you had said to a typical Roman, “All human lives are of equal value,” they would have said, “You mean all Roman lives, right?” Because slaves and non-Roman citizens weren’t really people in the same sense.

And the best example of that is that in Roman law, someone who was not a Roman citizen, the categorization of them in terms of all the laws was non-persona. They’re literally a non-person according to Roman law, so it didn’t matter.

So, this is the man, and this is the type of man who the Jewish leaders are bringing Christ to for execution. So you can see why they would be pretty confident that Jesus isn’t going to make it out of this alive.

Interlocutor: Why is his name mentioned in the creed?

Fr. Stephen: Oh, Pontius Pilate? Pontius Pilate’s name is mentioned in the creed to reinforce the fact that the incarnation of Christ is a real historical event. It’s not like, for example, you look at Hindu mythology, you have gods and goddesses, you have a god like Krishna, that was quote-unquote “incarnated”. They say this because they believe in reincarnation, of course, but there were these different lives that Krishna led in these mythic battles and this kind of thing. And so, when they’re writing the Creed, they want to make the point that when it talks about Christ, who is God the Son, very God of very God, light of light, that when he becomes man, it’s not just sort of a mythological story or like when Zeus would take on the form of a human being to go mess around with a human woman. It’s not like that, that this is a real event that happened in history. And by pointing out that he suffered under Pontius Pilate, that locks you in on exactly when it happened. That gives you a time, a place. The idea is that this really happened in our actual world that we live in. And you could get on a plane today and fly there and see the places where this happened and stand in the same place and walk in the same place. So that’s why Pontius Pilate, his name being mentioned, they were so important, is that that’s the one thing that gives us a time and a place and a date marker in the Creed, that says this is real history that we’re talking about here, not just mythology or theology or that kind of thing.

So they bring him to Pilate,

And they began to accuse Him, saying, “We found this fellow perverting the nation, and forbidding to pay taxes to Caesar, saying that He Himself is Christ, a King.”

Now, did they establish that Christ was doing any of that? No. Remember, the trial at the Sanhedrin was they asked him, “Are you the Son of God?” That’s what their trial’s about. He said, essentially, yes. They said, “Okay, well, that’s blasphemy.” Well, we can understand why they wouldn’t bring up blasphemy. Because Pilate doesn’t care about blasphemy. Pilate would blaspheme the Jewish god all day and all night and not care, right? I mean, that means nothing to him. This is about twelve years before Caligula would go and try and put a statue of himself in the Holy of Holies. So, the Romans don’t care about the Jewish god and about blasphemy.

What do they care about? They’re saying he’s trying to pervert the nation. He’s trying to cause trouble. He’s trying to stir up trouble. That’s bad, right? Romans don’t like that. He tells people not to pay taxes. That’s real bad, right? And he’s saying that he himself is Christ. Now, again, the word Messiah doesn’t mean anything to Pilate. So they explain a king, he’s saying he’s a king. And we talked once before. At least about the fact that not only would Jesus saying he’s a king be a challenge to Caesar’s authority, but remember. “King” is a dirty word for the Romans. Because before the Roman republic was founded. Before they became a republic governed by the Senate in the 6th century BC. Before that they were ruled over by kings. And those kings were referred to by the Latin word tyrannus. You could probably imagine what English word we get from: tyrant.

So those were like the dark ages in the Roman mind. Those were the dark, bad old times when we had a king. Then we found enlightenment. Now we’re governed by the Senate. So even when Augustus became emperor, the one title he never took for himself was king. The title Emperor comes from the Latin “imperator”, which means conqueror. So he presented himself as this victorious general who had conquered the world, and the empire was what he had conquered, but he never took the title king. Julius Caesar got stabbed 23 times on the floor of the Senate because people accused him of trying to set himself up as a king.

So, “king” is a dirty word. So in addition to… if Jesus is really calling himself a king, in addition to this being a challenge to Caesar’s authority, he’s also using the dirty word on top of everything else.

Then Pilate asked Him, saying, “Are You the King of the Jews?”

That’s a pretty straightforward question, okay? Because if he says yes, they Pilate’s mind what they’re telling me is true, and that would be enough to get you killed as a Jewish person.

He answered him and said, “It is as you say.”

So Pilate said to the chief priests and the crowd, “I find no fault in this Man.”

Now, how does that make sense? Are you the king of the Jews? He says, yes.

There are folks out there on the National Geographic Channel and the History Channel, when they still show documentaries who based just out this detail will say none of this ever happened, because, see, Pilate wouldn’t have done that, Pilate would have just killed him. He probably wouldn’t have even asked them that question. They probably said, this guy set himself up as a king. And Pilate would have said, “Okay, crucify him,” bang the gavel, right? Another case solved.

There’s a couple of things here. There’s a detail that we don’t get here from St. Luke that we do get, that we do get in the other Gospels. Do you remember what that is? That’s about Pilate’s wife, who we were discussing earlier. Pilate’s wife had sent word to Pilate saying, “There’s a man who’s going to come before you today on trial. I had this dream. He’s a righteous man. Don’t kill him.” So we know that’s in the background of this.

But also, as we’re going to see, there’s some mockery that’s going to ensue. So in addition to that, we have the idea that Pilate may not be taking this guy very seriously. You have to remember, I mean, again, we were illustrated picture Bibles where Jesus is sort of a nice WASP-y fellow with long shampooed hair, but that’s not how Jesus actually looked, right? Jesus is Jewish, He’s from Galilee, He’s from a rough area, He’s a peasant, people didn’t bathe very frequently. He only owned, as far as we could tell, one set of clothes that he wore every day. So this person standing in front of him and saying, “Oh, yeah, I’m the king of the Jews,” There’s also an element of Pilate just not taking this all that seriously. The Jewish leaders come to him and say, this guy, he’s claiming he’s a king. He’s going to stage a revolt against Caesar, tax revolt against Caesar. And Pilate’s looking at him going, “Really? This guy?”

If you called the Secret Service and said, “Hey, I got this guy here who’s going to try and overthrow the American government,” and they show up and it’s a homeless guy, you know, they’re probably going to look at you like, “He may have said that, but I don’t think we need to worry.” So there’s an element of that, too, of Pilate not taking this very seriously. But as we’re going to see as this advances, what his wife said is in the background, well, why would that be so important? I mean, probably half the people who the Jews got dragged in front of who he executed, didn’t do what they said they did. It’s not like he really tried to find out. He didn’t go and investigate, right? He would just execute people. So why would he be so concerned about executing a righteous man?

Interlocutor: Do you think his wife already had Christian beliefs?

Fr. Stephen: It’s possible, but also you have to take into account the popular culture of the Roman Empire. If you read Sophocles or any of the other the Greek tragedies, these are the theatrical presentations of the myths. They don’t have movies. They don’t have TV. What they have is theater to sort of bring these things across. And when you look at those stories, most of those stories involve someone accidentally or under poor circumstances or without knowledge thinking there’s someone else killing someone they shouldn’t kill. Classic Oedipus Rex, he kills his father not knowing it’s his father. You look all the way down the line, somebody kills someone they’re not supposed to kill. And then because of that, their lives end up being destroyed. Sometimes they end up getting dragged down to Hades. I mean, horrible things happen to you after that.

So, Roman religion is very fatalistic in the sense that they believe in fate and their view of the gods, remember, nobody’s singing “What a friend we have in Zeus.” The gods don’t love people. That’s Christianity, again, the idea that God loves us was a revolutionary idea in Christianity. They didn’t think Zeus loved them or Aries loved them or Hermes loved them. They didn’t even think Aphrodite loved them, and she’s the goddess of love. But what the gods did was the gods would get angry if you crossed them and strike you down.

And so, your goal with the gods, most of the sacrificial system and that kind of thing was aimed at kind of keeping them away, keeping them at a distance, keeping them placated, keeping them calm, keeping them from getting involved, because the last thing you wanted was them getting involved in your life, because when that happened, all these horrible things would unfold.

So, don’t think that Pilate, number one, has much of a moral conscience, because he doesn’t. And don’t think that he, at least at this point, has any understanding of Christianity or even who Jesus is. But based on his Roman religion, if he puts a man who is righteous and who is innocent to death, he has full belief that there will be consequences for him from his gods, that this could go very, very poorly for him. So it’s more superstition than anything that would make him want to stay his hand. So he just says, “Look, why are you bothering me with this? Why are you bringing this?”

But they were the more fierce, saying, “He stirs up the people, teaching throughout all Judea, beginning from Galilee to this place.”

So he says, no. They say, “No, you don’t understand. He’s traveling around, stirring up trouble. He’s not just going to stir up trouble here, in Judea. He stirred up trouble all over Judea, your whole province. He’s going to bring this whole thing crashing down.”

When Pilate heard of Galilee, he asked if the Man were a Galilean. And as soon as he knew that He belonged to Herod’s jurisdiction, he sent Him to Herod, who was also in Jerusalem at that time.

So Pilate sees an out here. “I don’t want anything to do with this guy.” He says, “Wait a minute. This guy’s from Galilee?” Galilee is north of Judea. And remember, Herod is the ethnarch. The Romans, again were only concerned with the land and the natural resources. They didn’t care about the people there. They didn’t even consider them people. So Herod was technically the quote-unquote “king”. He was the ruler of the people there. So he sees an out. He says, “Oh, good, forget about it. He’s from Galilee. Okay, Herod’s here in town for Passover. Send him over to Herod and let Herod deal with them. Herod can execute him for you.”

Now when Herod saw Jesus, he was exceedingly glad; for he had desired for a long time to see Him, because he had heard many things about Him, and he hoped to see some miracle done by Him.

So Herod gets excited. “Oh, wow, they’re bringing Jesus over here. I’ve heard he does… Maybe he’ll do some tricks for me.” So apparently he thinks Jesus is Doug Henning. Too dated a reference? David Copperfield? [Laughter]

Then he questioned Him with many words, but He answered him nothing.

So Herod says, “Oh, good, now we’re going to get a show.” So he starts asking questions, trying to get him to do some miracles. Jesus just stands there and doesn’t say anything.

And the chief priests and scribes stood and vehemently accused Him.

So meanwhile he’s standing there saying nothing. All the chief priests saying, “You got to get rid of him. You got to kill, you got to get rid of this guy.”

Then Herod, with his men of war, treated Him with contempt and mocked Him, arrayed Him in a gorgeous robe, and sent Him back to Pilate. That very day Pilate and Herod became friends with each other, for previously they had been at enmity with each other.

So Herod goes and consults with his troops, with his soldiers. “What do we do with this guy? What do we do with this guy?” And he says, “Well, I don’t want to be the one to kill him.” Remember, we heard before that after he had executed John the Baptist, that he becomes sort of paranoid about it. He thought John the Baptist was going to come back from the dead to haunt him or to get revenge. So he doesn’t want to execute anybody else. But he also is apparently pretty unimpressed with Jesus, despite having heard all these stories. So they mock him. They put a robe on, “Oh, he’s the king of the Jews here.” Put him in a fancy robe, right? So he looks like a king, and then sends it back to Pilate. Apparently, Pilate thought that was funny because he and Herod bond over this. “That’s pretty funny how you put the robe on him.” You could see Herod is no better than Pilate.

Interlocutor: Was that the robe that they cast lots for?

Fr. Stephen: No, that was Jesus’s own clothing.

Then Pilate, when he had called together the chief priests, the rulers, and the people, said to them, “You have brought this Man to me, as one who misleads the people. And indeed, having examined Him in your presence, I have found no fault in this Man concerning those things of which you accuse Him; no, neither did Herod, for I sent you back to him; and indeed nothing deserving of death has been done by Him.”

So he says. “Look, he’s not seeing it. Oh, yeah, he claims he’s the King of the Jews, but frankly, I find that kind of funny. He’s not doing anything.” He sent him to Herod. Herod laughed at him and sent him back to me. But now notice Pilate’s response is not “Okay, I’m just going to let him go, forget about this.” No Pilate’s response is:

“I will therefore chastise Him and release Him” (for it was necessary for him to release one to them at the feast).

So there’s this tradition that they release somebody for prison at the Passover feast. Again, this is the carrot as opposed to the stick, right? “We want people to be happy. Okay, well, we’ll release a prisoner at your Passover” to kind of ingratiate with the crowds. But now when he says he’s going to chastise them, that doesn’t mean he’s going to scold him, doesn’t mean he’s going to give us some harshly worded rebuke. “Now you stop causing trouble!”

“Chastise” here means he’s going to be flogged. Many people did not survive a Roman flogging, so he may be killing him anyway by ordering this. The way these floggings were done, it was not like a bull whip, like a belt or something like that. What was used was it was a leather handle with a whole series of leather thongs. And tied to the ends of those leather thongs would be bits of broken glass, sharp rocks, sharp pieces of metal, and they’d be long thongs. And the person would be tied or chained to a post with their back exposed, and they’d whip with it and wrap it around a person so that those bits of glass and metal and everything would dig into the person’s skin and then rip it off. And they would do this repeatedly. And so, as I said, many people did not survive.

You’ve got to remember, there’s no antibiotics to prevent infection. And when they would flog someone and release them, that was it. They would flog them and then toss them out on the street. So, a good proportion of the people flogged by the Romans didn’t survive that. And if they did, they were physically crippled for life by the after effects of it. So don’t think Pilate here is being merciful. This is more, “Crucifixion is more trouble than he seems worth. And I don’t need to really make a statement with this guy, so we’ll just beat him nearly to death, toss him out on the street. Who cares what happened to him after that?”

And notice also he has this tradition of releasing a prisoner. Well, they’re going to flog him first. So are they really releasing a prisoner? But when he says he’s going to release him because he’s going to release someone:

And they all cried out at once, saying, “Away with this Man, and release to us Barabbas”

Now, Barabbas, even though we pronounce it that way, is actually the Aramaic name Bar Abbas. Bar means “son of”; it’s equivalent of “Ben” in Hebrew. So this is Bar Abbas. His father’s name is Abbas.

who had been thrown into prison for a certain rebellion made in the city, and for murder.

So he actually did what they’re accusing Jesus of and worse, because he murdered people. But they’d rather have him. They’d rather have him than Jesus. Now, since he was responsible for a rebellion, the person he murdered was probably a Roman. So you can kind of understand why the Jews wouldn’t care so much about that. But, you know, this is the person… they want Pilate to convict, notice here the people are crying out to Pilate to convict the righteous person and let the guilty person go free. That’s what they want. That’s what they want.

Interlocutor: Most of the folks there were Sanhedrin?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we know that the people were there, too. The crowd. There’s a big crowd of people there, too. But the Sanhedrin, the Jewish leaders, because they didn’t have actual power, became masters of whipping up a crowd. We’re going to see the Book of Acts, you know, that’s how St Stephen gets martyred. Basically, a group of Pharisees, including Saul, who would later become St Paul, whipped up the crowd into a frenzy. “This guy’s a blasphemer.” And they ended up stoning him to death.

So, they couldn’t execute someone, but if they could get a crowd riled up and then get the crowd to tear somebody apart, well, same result, right? Same result. And so the picture we’re getting here from St Luke is that this is what the Sanhedrin this is what the chief priests and Jewish leaders are doing with the crowd. They’re getting the crowd riled up against Jesus to force… to apply that pressure to Pilate to do what they want him to do.

Pilate, therefore, wishing to release Jesus, again called out to them. But they shouted, saying, “Crucify Him, crucify Him!”

Then he said to them the third time, “Why, what evil has He done? I have found no reason for death in Him. I will therefore chastise Him and let Him go.”

He said, “Look, I’m going to flog him. You hate him so much he’s going to be punished for something, right? And then we’re going to let him go. Why do we need to crucify him?”

But they were insistent, demanding with loud voices that He be crucified. And the voices of these men and of the chief priests prevailed. So Pilate gave sentence that it should be as they requested.  And he released to them the one they requested, who for rebellion and murder had been thrown into prison; but he delivered Jesus to their will.

It’s worth noting here again with our friends who show up in the documentaries about Jesus. When they talk about this story with Pilate, some of them outright accuse this story of being anti-Semitic because they will say the Jewish people had no authority to execute anyone. Pilate is this brutal tyrant. So why is St Luke here putting all the blame onto the Jewish people and taking it off of Pilate, and the Romans were the ones who actually crucified him? They’re saying he’s trying to shift blame, trying to show Pilate as being innocent and just being forced to do this by the crowd.

My response to that is that is a very shallow reading of what’s going on here, because you notice St Luke mentioned Barabbas’s crimes twice over the course of two verses. So he’s portraying Pilate as someone who, because of pressure from a crowd, was willing to murder an innocent person, a person who he believed to be innocent, he’s just said was willing to execute him and was willing to release someone whom he knew to be guilty. Based on this crowd, is that making Pilate look innocent? Not really.

The Old Testament, as we read in the prophets in Isaiah, when he describes an unrighteous judge in Israel, the mark of an unrighteous judge is that they punish the innocent and let the wicked go free. This is the textbook case of what a wicked ruler is. That’s how St Luke’s portraying Pilate. He’s portraying Pilate as craven, as someone who doesn’t care about justice at all, who is perpetrating this injustice and now is going to go and eat lunch and won’t give it a second thought.

So, I think those folks who want to make that case here probably have an agenda going and need to read a little more closely what St Luke is saying and how he’s saying it, because the point he’s making is the exact opposite. It’s the exact opposite: that the people who most prided themselves, the Romans, they prided themselves on the fact that their empire established justice in the world, and yet they are completely unjust and they’re just as complicit as the Jewish people.

Remember, St Luke is writing his gospel to churches that include Gentiles and Jews who have come to faith in Christ. And so what has he just said here in the story of how Jesus was convicted? Who convicted Jesus? The religious Jews, the nonreligious Jews, because you’ve got Herod, and the Romans, the Gentiles, everyone is complicit. Everyone is complicit. And that’s the message that St Luke’s sending, that we were all complicit.

So, if you’re a Gentile in one of those churches, you can’t sit there and say, “Oh, you Jews, you killed your Messiah,” because they were involved too. And the Jewish Christians can’t sit there and say, “Oh, you no good Romans, you killed the Son of God.” Because they were complicit too. Both are the case. And that’s what St. Luke is weaving together here in these sort of three and a half trials where we go back and forth between the Jewish authorities and the Romans, that everyone is complicit to the point that Herod and Pilate bond and become friends over this.

Now as they led Him away, they laid hold of a certain man, Simon a Cyrenian, who was coming from the country, and on him they laid the cross that he might bear it after Jesus.

Why would they do that?

Interlocutor: Because they beat him to the point he couldn’t carry it.

Fr. Stephen: That’s exactly it, because this wasn’t “Okay, I’ll crucify him instead of flogging him”. They flogged him and again, He probably would not have survived it anyway. And now they’re going to take him and crucify him also. So you’ve got to remember what they did to his back before they nailed it to a piece of untreated wood. And so he’s unable. And now we usually have in our heads this picture of Jesus sort of dragging the whole cross. That’s not actually how it was normally done. What would be carried would be the crossbeam. They’d put it over someone’s shoulders to carry it out there. And then that crossbeam would either be hoisted up and nailed onto a tree, or they would have a standing post that was reused and they’d hoist the crossbeam up and nail it to that. And then when the body eventually was taken down or fell down under its own decomposition, they’d go and take the cross beam down and reuse the standing post.

So, Jesus is unable at this point to carry that crossbeam. And so you notice the Roman soldiers just grab somebody who looks young and strong enough to do it, this man Simon from Cyrene. And because they’re Roman soldiers, they can tell you to do whatever you want, and if Simon had said no, he would have been on the next cross over. So they grab him and they compel him.

Why is this detail mentioned here? It’s been a little while since I made this point. Remember what we had at the beginning of St. Luke’s Gospel? He talked about how he had made an investigation, how he’d talked to people who were witnesses of this, and from that he had put together his Gospel. He put together the story of Jesus’ life. So when we see St. Luke namedrop people like this, it’s because those are people who are still alive at the time this was written. So he mentioned this person’s name, Simon of Cyrene, to say if you don’t believe this is true or you don’t know that what I’m saying is true, or if you want to check it out, go ask him. He’s the one the Romans forced to carry Jesus’ cross. He could attest that this is what happened and this is how it happened.

So, when we see these names, you sort of go what’s the point of dropping that name in there? That’s why, it’s usually… they didn’t have footnotes or endnotes in Microsoft Word. So this is a way of sort of footnoting it of who it was, who he talked to, or who you could go ask.

And a great multitude of the people followed Him, and women who also mourned and lamented Him.

So in addition to this crowd of people following on the way to his crucifixion, there’s a whole bunch of women from the city who are mourning and wailing in loud Middle Eastern fashion. This is not sort of a tear running down their cheek. They’re wailing and mourning over the fact that Jesus is being executed.

But Jesus, turning to them, said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For indeed the days are coming in which they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, wombs that never bore, and breasts which never nursed!’ Then they will begin ‘to say to the mountains, “Fall on us!” and to the hills, “Cover us!”’ For if they do these things in the green wood, what will be done in the dry?

This is Jesus referring back to, remember his last discourse to the disciples and the crowds before he was arrested was about what? It was about what was going to happen after his death, resurrection and ascension. The destruction of Jerusalem, destruction of the temple, all the things that were going to happen until the time came when he returned. And so, Jesus is saying to these women of Jerusalem, “If you really understood what was happening here, if you really knew what was going on, you wouldn’t be weeping for me.” Well, we now know about the Resurrection, but Jesus has already predicted the Resurrection. You wouldn’t be weeping for me. You’d be weeping for yourselves over what comes next. Because if they, “they” meaning who? The religious authorities, the Romans, everyone who’s killing Jesus. If they’re going to act like this now, when there’s no crisis, no trouble, no problems, what do you think is going to happen later on? The “green wood” is referring to spring. If they act this way in the spring, how are they going to act in the winter when things get dark, when things get bleak, how bad is it going to be for you who are still here in Jerusalem?

There were also two others, criminals, led with Him to be put to death. And when they had come to the place called Calvary, there they crucified Him, and the criminals, one on the right hand and the other on the left. Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”

Just a note, and this is purely a pet peeve of mine, notice it is “Calvary”, not “cavalry”. Cavalry is troops on horseback. Calvary is where Jesus was crucified. Because people mix those up. They’ll talk about “calvary units” in the military, which I guess would be the chaplains, and they will say that “Jesus died on cavalry”. There were no horses that we know of involved in Christ’s crucifixion. So Calvary and cavalry, two different words there.

So Jesus, as he’s being murdered, prays that God will forgive the people who are murdering him, for that murder. This is… and some of you have probably heard me say this. This is here because Jesus is God. Jesus is how we know who God is. So this is our picture of God’s perfect forgiveness. So when we talk about forgiveness as Christians, the forgiveness that we’re supposed to exercise, this forgiveness that we’re supposed to offer to others. What did Jesus tell us? “Forgive as the lord forgave you.” This is the kind of forgiveness that we’re to offer.

Now, obviously, this forgiveness is total and complete. Obviously, Jesus isn’t waiting for them to apologize for murdering Him, before he forgives them. But it’s also important that we recognize what he’s saying, because we hear “forgive and forget”. Is he saying, “I’m just going to forget this ever happened”? Obviously not. That’s obviously not what Christ is saying, that he’s going to forget that he was crucified. Is he saying that, “Oh, it’s okay, crucifying me, I’m innocent, but that’s okay, that’s all right, we’ll let it slide.” No, it’s not okay. It’s murder. It’s murder. Committing a horrible crime. So we say none of those things, which means when we forgive, we aren’t asked to forget that something ever happened, and we aren’t asked to say that what someone did is okay.

What Jesus is saying here is that despite the evil that they’re doing to him, despite the pain they’re inflicting on Him, despite the fact that they’re killing Him, his love for them is bigger than that pain and that suffering is. And so, this is what we as Christians are asked to do when we’re told to forgive. We’re not told to belittle what was done to us. We’re not called upon to forget what was done to us. We’re called upon to try to find enough love, and you’re not going to find enough in yourself, at least I never do. But to find enough of God’s love in ourselves that it’s bigger than the pain and the hurt that we’re trying to get past. So that as much pain as they’ve inflicted on us, as much hurt as they’ve inflicted on us, the love of God that we have for them is bigger than that. It trumps that is more important than that, because that’s what Jesus is saying here. As horrible as what they’re doing to Him is, his love for them is bigger is bigger than that. And that’s what he’s proclaiming even as they’re murdering Him.

And they divided His garments and cast lots. And the people stood looking on. But even the rulers with them sneered, saying, “He saved others; let Him save Himself if He is the Christ, the chosen of God.”

So you may notice here it mentions the soldiers dividing his garments and casting lots, but it doesn’t quote the Psalm. Remember, that’s a quote from a Psalm. And we’ve seen another Gospel that says this was to fulfill what was written by the Psalm. This is part of, again, what we’ve talked about all the way through the Gospel according to St. Luke, Luke doesn’t tell us things, he shows us things. So he doesn’t sit there and say, “Oh, by the way, this fulfills that Old Testament passage.” But he means you by giving you this picture to say, “Oh, this is a familiar picture,” so that you’re called back to that song he shows you rather than telling you. And notice again the mockery that Christ experiences. He saved others, but he can’t save Himself.

The soldiers also mocked Him, coming and offering Him sour wine, and saying, “If You are the King of the Jews, save Yourself.”

Notice once again you’ve got the rulers of the Jewish people and the soldiers basically both mocking Him at the same time, the same way everyone is complicit.

And an inscription also was written over Him in letters of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew:

THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS.

That was not just a sarcastic comment by Pilate. It was called a Titulus in Latin; it was hung over a convicted criminals head is their crime. Because remember, part of this horrible death of Crucifixion where someone dies basically of asphyxiation when their legs give out and they can no longer push themselves up enough to breathe, it takes hours, sometimes days. And part of the point of this horrible death was to make a point. And so you would put what they did up of their head. So you’d put “thief”, right? So someone’s coming to town, they see this, they say, “Well, I know not to steal anything while I’m in Jerusalem because this is what happens to thieves, or rebels.”

So Pilate is here making a point, this is the King of the Jews. This is what happens to somebody who’s going to come here and claim to be the King of the Jews. But he’s also, don’t let this slip away either, He’s also making a point to the very Jewish leaders who betrayed Jesus. “Here’s what I think of your king.” So Rome has no time, has no time for this. And notice it’s in Greek and Latin and Hebrew, why? So everybody walking by will get the message because everybody coming into Jerusalem is going to know one of those three languages.

Then one of the criminals who were hanged blasphemed Him, saying, “If You are the Christ, save Yourself and us.”

So notice he’s saying the same thing that the Roman soldiers and the Jewish rulers were. So he’s just joining in. But notice what he adds: he doesn’t just say “save yourself”. He says, “Save yourself, hey, and us too, while you’re at it.”

But the other, answering, rebuked him, saying, “Do you not even fear God, seeing you are under the same condemnation?  And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds; but this Man has done nothing wrong.”

So he’s being crucified too. But notice, notice what he says. “You’re going to sit here and denounce it. You’re about to die. You’re about to die in a horrible way. You’re going to die and you’re going to stand before God. This is what you want your last act in this world to be is mocking this man who is dying with us, who isn’t a criminal like us?” He says, “I know what crime I committed, you know what crime you committed, you know this is the penalty for that crime. What did he do?”

Then he said to Jesus, “Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom.”

So he clearly knows more about who Jesus is. Not only that he’s innocent, but notice here sometimes, you know, people think, “Oh, that thief on the cross, he got in easy, right? He got in easy. He just got in at the last minute.” And then sometimes they may think, “Well, maybe I could get in at the last minute. Let’s wait till I’m about to die and then repent really quick.” But notice the two pieces that are here, and this is important because the book of Acts, we’ll see St Luke, he has a way that he presents becoming a Christian. How do you become a Christian according to St. Luke?

And there’s basically two pieces. There’s two pieces. Piece one is repentance, right? Repentance. What’s the first thing the thief says? “I deserve what’s happening to me. I know what I did, I know the life I’ve led. I know the sins I’ve committed.” Repentance, that’s step one. For St. Luke, step two, and he gets this from St Paul. Step two is what? That they acknowledge Jesus as Lord. Right? They acknowledge Jesus as Lord, which is the second thing he says.

So, for St Luke, this becomes abundantly clear as you go through Acts and you see lots of people convert to Christianity. The thief on the cross, St Dismas is his name, the thief on the cross is not sort of this one-off, he’s not sort of this unique instance for St Luke. He becomes a Christian the same way everyone else becomes a Christian. He does it under much more dire circumstances, and more dire circumstances that frankly take a lot more faith, take a lot more faith. Because most of the other people who St Luke presents becoming Christians, they’ve just seen St. Peter or St Paul work a miracle, and so they decide to convert to Christianity, right? This thief, this thief who is dying, who knows that he has led a wicked and sinful life, is entrusting himself, is entrusting the destiny of his soul to a man who’s dying right next to him.

So, while it’s not unique in how he becomes a Christian, the level of faith that St. Dismas displays here is unique and profound. And remember, this is in the face of where are the twelve disciples right now? Who knows, right? Who knows. And what are they going to do even after Jesus’ death? Most of them are going to go back to fishing. We’re going to see one of the disciples. Next chapter is going to say, well, we thought he might be the one to restore the kingdom to Israel. Implied, but I guess we were wrong because he got crucified.

Interlocutor: A couple of them were there?

Fr. Stephen: Well, St. John, but it isn’t mentioned here in St. Luke’s Gospel because St. Luke wants to give us this picture that Jesus has just been abandoned, right?

But that’s the profound thing here, is his faith. He can look at Jesus even while he’s dying and see his Lord there when everyone else has decided, “Oh well, yeah, I guess he wasn’t the Messiah.”

And Jesus said to him, “Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.”

So Jesus tells him, you haven’t misplaced that faith. You haven’t misplaced that faith.