A Look at the Manner of Jesus Christ’s Trial

Even the most superficial glance at the manner of Jesus Christ’s trial reveals at once that it differed in many respects from ordinary, and even extraordinary, human trials. To endure, over the course of several hours, torment from three different authorities—Jewish, Galilean, and Roman—for a matter none of them would own as properly its own; to be stubbornly accused by the Jerusalem Sanhedrin and the people for the very thing the Sanhedrin and the whole people had impatiently awaited; to find a zealous defender of His innocence in the Roman procurator, though everything seemed to work against the Prisoner in his eyes—His poverty, His silence, the strength of His enemies, the danger of the charge; to hear from the judge’s own lips, more than once, a solemn declaration of His innocence, and immediately afterward, from that same judge, a sentence of death by crucifixion, coupled with the title of Righteous One; to have at hand a multitude of both natural and supernatural means of self-defense, and to use them no more than was needed to make His innocence plain—these are circumstances found only in the history of Jesus Christ’s trial!

Each tribunal displayed its own particular character. In the Sanhedrin, Jesus Christ was judged by His own personal enemies—as lawlessness judges. In Herod’s palace, His fate lay in the hands of a despot who knows no law for himself but his own whim, and whose whole justice consisted in not being too unjust. Pilate’s praetorium could serve as a refuge for human innocence, but could not contain divine righteousness. Here, alongside justice, sat the spirit of worldly, pagan power, before whose tribunal the voice of innocence either went unheard, or had to speak in terms of advantage. Heavenly Truth, in the person of the Son of God, seems now to have visited every human tribunal, to see «whether there is one who understands, or seeks after righteousness». And now, as in David’s time, it turned out that all had turned aside and become corrupt: «there is none who does good, not even one» (Ps 13:3).

The blindness and turbulence of the Jewish people, and especially of its leaders, showed itself in full force. Had John the Baptist risen from the dead, then too—now, when all Judea was filled with the fame of Jesus Christ’s miracles, when the chief priests themselves had repeatedly heard His discourses, examined His person and His work, and were preparing to raise Him up on a cross—even now the preacher of repentance might have said again to the whole Jewish people: «There stands among you one whom you do not know!» (Jn 1:26.) One could not reject the Messiah more treacherously than He is rejected now; one could not persecute Him more savagely than He is persecuted now. Let us not suppose that Jesus’s enemies acted against Him in plain, firm defiance of a conviction that He was the promised Messiah: that would mean ascribing to human nature the malice and hardness of the devil, who hates truth because it is truth. Yet it must be said that, on the part of the leaders of the Jewish people, everything was done to leave themselves without excuse one day. How unworthy and dishonorable their conduct was at the very moment of Jesus Christ’s arrest! How rash and reckless their council’s decision on the case of the Messiah—a person with whom the temporal and eternal good of all Israel was inseparably bound up, in whom they might have recognized their own King, Judge, and Lord! Suppose Jesus Christ’s poverty offended them: but had they not heard of His miracles? Had not the raising of Lazarus taken place, only a few days before, almost before their very eyes? If even this event could not convince the Sanhedrin that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, it should at least have made it act more cautiously, and not rush to execute a man who, by common opinion, bore so many marks of the Messiah in Himself. The very slowness with which the Lord’s trial dragged on in the praetorium seems to have been permitted by Providence so that His enemies might have time to see their error and come to their senses. One might say that Pilate was, in this case, a preacher of repentance to them. And yet, to what base means did the Jewish elders not resort, to achieve an end so blindly chosen! They bribe a disciple, go out after the Passover supper with swords and clubs to Gethsemane, gather like robbers at midnight to confer; they pass from one tribunal to another, incite the people, feign zealous service to Caesar, threaten the judge with slander, even shout along with the mob—is this the watch of the house of Israel, the precious stones of the sanctuary, the successors of Moses and the prophets?.. Never had the supreme council of the Jews degraded itself to the degree it degraded itself now, buying, at the price of its own disgrace, a shameful execution for its own Messiah.

It is hard to imagine that, among the crowd demanding the Lord’s death, there were no people devoted to Him at all. But their own safety kept them from declaring their opinion, at least in the presence of the chief priests. Otherwise they would have become victims of the unchecked servants and partisans of the Pharisees, who carried their insolence so far as to threaten even the procurator himself. And so the evangelists’ silence about anyone among the Jews coming forward to defend Jesus Christ before Pilate must be taken as decisive testimony that no such defenders existed; and the so-called Gospel of Nicodemus, in which Nicodemus, the man healed at the Pool of Siloam, the woman with the flow of blood, and the centurion of Capernaum recount before the procurator the teaching and miracles of Jesus Christ, does not deserve historical credence. The crowd that demanded the Lord’s death showed unmistakably what the voice of the people amounts to, and how easily its force can be abused by men of ill intent. Instead of being the loud but peaceable voice of God, the people’s voice now became the savage howl of Beelzebub…

Pilate’s conduct serves as a striking example of what may be expected from a judge of weak character, faced with the necessity of renouncing, for truth’s sake, every personal advantage. In him the Lord’s words found their full justification: the eye is the lamp of the body: «if then your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness» (Mt 6:22-23). The eye of Pilate’s soul—the source of his actions—was bad: it was not the eternal, unchanging law of righteousness that lay at the bottom of his heart and dictated the course of his conduct, but an unclean love of self, an attachment to earthly advantage, cloaked in a love of justice; and so Pilate’s whole body appears dark, and all his acts, for all their commendable side, carry something worthy of pity and contempt. The procurator’s very first act was already stamped with a betrayal of the truth: he wishes to avoid condemning an innocent man by handing the matter off, now to the Jews, now to Herod—as though letting others commit a crime one has the power to stop were not the same as committing it oneself! Then, purely to gratify prominent and powerful accusers, the Righteous One is subjected to an agonizing scourging. Never mind that He might die under the lash: for the judge it is enough that he meant to save Him from death. Such is the justice of the men of this age. They think they have done everything on their part, while refusing to do the one thing that was actually required. And all of Pilate’s other efforts to free Jesus Christ present a pitiful struggle between self-interest and a sense of duty. One sees a man tormenting himself, rushing in every direction, turning from crossroad to crossroad to climb out of an abyss he fell into of his own will—yet unwilling to return to the royal road of righteousness, which lies directly before his eyes, and to which conscience calls him.

In the end, fear and self-interest won out; but Pilate, having trampled on justice, wants to keep its mask upon himself: the judge washes his hands, and thinks himself clean of the Righteous One’s blood!.. At this spectacle, a feeling of pity turns involuntarily into indignation…

We have, however, no right to extend our own judgment of Pilate beyond the sentence already pronounced aloud by the Lord Himself. «Greater» (greater in every respect) «is the sin of the one who handed» the Lord over to him—of Judas, of the Jews, above all of the Jewish elders. For while the chief priests were, it seems, drawing near the terrible extremity (some, perhaps, actually fell into it) of sin against the Holy Spirit, which, by the Savior’s own word, will not be forgiven either in this age or in the age to come (Mt 12:32), Pilate sinned openly only against the Son of Man, and so belonged to the number of those sinners for whose salvation the Son of God, now condemned by him, was going to the cross.

The magnanimous act of Pilate’s wife redeems, in some measure, her husband’s base conduct. What a striking contrast between this pagan woman and that Jewish woman, Herod’s concubine, who showed so little regard for John the Baptist (Mk 6:17)! That John was a righteous man, even a prophet, worthy to be taken for the Messiah, all believed; and yet Herodias, without hesitation, sacrificed him to her own shameless passion. Procula, by contrast, though a pagan, had a heart open to everything true and good. She sees an extraordinary dream, takes it for a revelation from heaven, and hurries—even against her own nation’s law, which forbade wives to meddle in the affairs of their husbands, the governors—to save the Righteous One from death. The difference of religion, which so often, unhappily, keeps people apart from one another, does not stop her from seeking salvation for a Jewish Prisoner. It was not for nothing that she took her dream as a sign from above. Had it been the product of mere imagination, why would it have produced, on that very night, a combination of thoughts so precisely matching Pilate’s and the Lord’s actual situation? No! Imagination would sooner have suggested to her that a convenient occasion had now come for her husband to win the Sanhedrin’s profitable friendship by condemning the poor Galilean to death. But it seems no such unclean fancy could arise in Procula’s noble soul.

It is unlikely that Claudia Procula belonged to the ranks of Jewish proselytes. By whom could she have been converted to Judaism? By the sort of zealots for the faith the Lord described the Pharisees to be (Mt 23:15)? But from such teachers she would not have received a favorable notion of Jesus Christ, and, taught by the Pharisees, would most likely have agreed to support them in their struggle against the Righteous One.

It is more likely that Procula, of her own accord, possessed a noble cast of mind and feeling, and was worthy that Providence should reveal its will to her, as it had once revealed it to other pagans too—to Abimelech (Gen 20:3), to Job’s friends, and so on (Job 20:7).

«But what came of this dream—someone will ask—if it was not a mere play of fancy? The warning came too late; it could not, at any rate, change the course of events; and it did not change it».

Indeed, Pilate’s wife’s dream did not change the fate awaiting the Lord; and perhaps, had it been able to change it, it would not have been sent at all; but nonetheless it was needed, and it did its work. Pilate’s wife, of course, did not remain indifferent to the later fate of the Righteous One, who had so deeply moved her soul; she took part in the events of early Christianity that followed, came into contact with Jesus’s disciples, and came to believe in Him. A very ancient tradition holds that the Procula found in the Greek calendar of saints is none other than Pilate’s wife, who converted to Christianity and suffered torment for the name of the Righteous One she had been unable to save from execution.

Pilate himself was not deaf to his wife’s warning, though, to his own misfortune, he did not follow her advice. It was this warning, most likely, that moved him, before pronouncing the death sentence, to confirm his own conviction of the Lord’s innocence by so striking an act as the washing of his hands; it was this that moved him to solemnly call the Prisoner condemned to death the Righteous One—an expression he had evidently taken from his wife, who had called Jesus Christ by that name. Such testimony to Jesus Christ’s innocence from the lips of a pagan judge redounds to the credit of the Christian religion, silences the mouths of Jesus’s enemies, and could in time have worked on the hearts of the Jews themselves.

Besides this, Providence, by sending Pilate’s wife this wondrous dream, showed that it never allows a man to be tempted beyond his strength (1Cor 10:13). The greatest of temptations lay before Pilate: to renounce, before the whole people, the title of friend of Caesar, in order to defend an innocent Prisoner. His conscience, weak in itself, without support from true religion, was bound inevitably to give way under the weight of this temptation. And yet Pilate had, up to this point, followed its faint glimmer fairly faithfully, it seems. And so Providence sends it reinforcement from above. Pilate did not make use of this heavenly warning; but Providence justified its own ways. Without this, some of us might perhaps have regretted that Pilate, who made so many attempts to be just, was left entirely to himself in such an extreme situation.

Amid His accusers and judges the Lord appears in inimitable greatness of spirit. Plato himself, perhaps, would now have recognized his own righteous man, whose image had so filled his soul, had he witnessed Jesus’s trial. Now not a single trace remains visible in Him of that bloody, exhausting struggle with Himself which He underwent in the garden of Gethsemane. Now is seen the «lion of the tribe of Judah» (Rev 5:5), who, bound by the invisible fetters of heavenly justice, appeared as a «lamb that does not open its mouth» (Is 53:7) as it is led to the slaughter. While the judges and accusers claimed everything as their own doing, the Lord looks on them as instruments governed by a higher power. In spirit He stood, unseen, before another tribunal—the tribunal of the Father, who «sanctified Him and sent Him into the world, that He might bear up the sins of mankind in His own body» (1Pet 2:24). This unseen judgment, taking place in the counsel of the triune Godhead, no longer concerned the person of Jesus alone, but the whole world, whose redemption the Son of God had taken upon Himself. Here the Lord’s enemy was the prince of darkness, who was to lose his dominion over the human race (Jn 12:31-32); the accuser was the very righteousness of God, demanding satisfaction for the sins of men now being freed from eternal death. Here, before the foundation of the world, a sentence was pronounced which was now being carried out before the face of heaven and earth. From this divine height, what did Pilate, with his praetorium, the Sanhedrin, with its false witnesses, or Herod, with his courtiers, mean to the Son of God?..

Knowing that the cup of suffering could not pass Him by, the Lord looked on calmly as it filled to the brim before His eyes. Yet His holy silence did nothing at all to hinder the trial’s rightful course. To His own personal enemies, the chief priests and scribes, He twice said more than they wished to know: that He was the Messiah, and that from now on they themselves would see in Him a divine Judge. Their own blindness was to blame that they paid no heed to this fearful warning. The killer of John demanded miracles, not words, though he deserved neither. The Forerunner had already told him everything that might have planted a love of justice in his heart, and his head, cut off to please Herodias, bore witness to what could be expected of Herod’s heart. Pilate went unanswered only when he asked out of curiosity, not out of duty, and he knew the truth well enough that, even in condemning Jesus Christ to death, his own conscience forced him to call Him the Righteous One. A Roman knight would have yielded to the necessity of condemning a righteous man, even had he heard the most eloquent speeches in his defense. «It is expedient that one man should die for the people» was a rule more Roman than Jewish in its own government. To keep the people from an uprising, to keep hold of the title of friend of Caesar, a Jewish procurator would have spared neither a Demosthenes nor a Cicero…

Jesus Christ’s answers to His judges, for all their brevity, consistently express the highest wisdom. He who searches hearts saw the state of their conscience, and measured His answers by that far more than by their persons or their questions. This is why some of His words may seem to us not entirely clear; something in them, judged by the circumstances in which they were spoken, may even seem somewhat out of place, while in fact every word of the Lord’s was forceful and persuasive, as Pilate’s own case best proves.

The Lord’s very outward appearance, despite the torment and abuse, was without doubt marked by an inexpressible majesty and pathos. If the crowd of people was less moved by Him than one might have expected, it was because, incited by the scribes and inflamed with malice, it had, so to speak, lost sight of itself. But look at the pagan judge! Every time he enters into personal conversation with the divine Prisoner—even without getting an answer to his questions, even feeling insulted by His silence—he always returns to the accusers with a fresh conviction of the Accused’s innocence. What took the place of words for him in such moments, what overcame his own self-regard, if not the gentle majesty of purity and holiness that shone, despite all outward humiliation, in the face and gaze of the God-man? Was it not this same thing that also restrained the Galilean tetrarch from harsher measures, whose own self-regard had suffered so much from not being honored with a single word in answer to so many questions?.. In general, the manner of Jesus Christ’s trial shows with perfect clarity how wisely Providence governs human deeds: how, without infringing on human freedom, it carries out its own purposes through the very persons who resist that fulfillment. Everything, it would seem, happened by chance: each acted according to his own will, even his own passions, each the very opposite of the others—the money-loving Judas takes his silver, the ambition-driven Sanhedrin avenges its wounded pride, the capricious Herod wants to see a miracle, the man-pleasing Pilate fears Caesar, the coarse soldiers give themselves over to mockery; and yet, through it all, «vision and prophecy are sealed up, everlasting righteousness is brought in, the anointing is cut off, and the city and the sanctuary of the Jews are betrothed in advance to destruction» (Dan 9:24-26).

«No! — let us too say, in the words of a famous preacher-shepherd—it is not men who here mock the majesty of God; Divine Providence laughs at human folly, and, without infringing on freedom, makes it serve its own highest wisdom. It is not cunning servants who outwit the Lord: the all-good Father does not spare the Son, so as not to lose His wicked servants. It is not earthly enmity that wounds heavenly love; heavenly love conceals itself within earthly enmity, so that by the death of love it may kill enmity, and spread the light and life of love through the darkness and shadow of death.» «God loved the world, and gave His only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in Him would not perish, but have eternal life.»