Pontius Pilate

I like how our pastor does chapter by chapter Bible studies rather than subject sermons.  We've been in Luke for months and today was Jesus' trial before Pilate.  It got me to thinking - (of course it did...) - about the knee jerk reactions to Bible characters that christians seem to have.  They're either GOOD or BAD, nothing in between, no understanding of what made them take the path they did, how God would view their lives.  So often we force God to respond like we would respond.

So, Pilate.  He came from an equestrian military family who got him well placed in his youth.  He caught the eye of Tiberius and advanced straight up the ladder, hoping to reach the top.  Tiberius knew he could trust his prefect, Pilate, and so, in 26 BC he sent Pilate to, basically, the  armpit of Judea.  There was a lot of unrest in the area because of the long standing, hated Roman occupation. Rebellion was bubbling just under the surface, about to explode. So the emperor sent the meanest, cruelest, most dangerous man he knew to keep the peace.  Pilate of the Pontii family of Rome.  And he lived up to his promise.  He planted his heel on the Jewish neck and squeezed.  He was hated by Roman and Jew alike but the Jews had no choice but to work with him if they wanted to maintain their religious and political standing.

Jesus.  An wandering messiah, one of many, from a tiny village in Judea.  So how did he come to be such a threat that the Jews wanted him dead?  The Judeans wanted freedom from their Roman oppressors.  There was a vast underground of rebels, growing stronger every day.  This prophet, Jesus, was speaking about freedom as well, but from a different perspective.  He meant freedom from religion, a personal God, personal spiritual responsibility and he claimed that his authority to teach such a novel idea came from his 'father' God.  This is what made him dangerous to the Jewish authorities - Theirs was a highly political religion.  This man could quite possibly gather enough support that political rebels would ride his religious wake into an uprising against the Romans.  And if that happened, the whole religious and political structure would come down  For the sake of the nation, Jesus couldn't be allowed to continue.

Jesus and Pilate cross paths.  The Jewish authorities had to kill Jesus in some spectacular, horrendous way to send a very clear message to any who would come against Rome and the established religion.  But the religious court couldn't do that, only the Roman court had that authority.  The plan for a public execution was put into place.  Jesus and Pilate were swiftly coming toward one another.

Jesus was arrested in the garden and taken to the priests to be tried.  But he wouldn't cooperate and give them a secular reason for the Romans to execute him.  Next step, bring him before the Roman prefect and accuse him of insighting riot.  I can see Pilate being awakened from his sleep.  The Jews that he hated were yammering again, demanding that he give his consent to some stupid religious matter.  He threw his clothes on and stroke angrly into the court.  And there was this beaten, half unconscious filthy beggar, the priests babbling on about his claiming to be God, saying he was forming a kingdom and he their king.  Pilate was furious.  Perhaps he decided in that moment to be oppositional to get back at the priests?

And then he heard the name of the man - Jesus of Nazareth.  Pilate had heard of him.  Miracle worker, preaching peace and obedience to the powers that be.  He had been wanting to meet the prophet.  And now was his chance.  He ordered Jesus taken inside.  They spoke.  Pilate was impressed.  Why would he want to have this man killed?  "No," he said.  "This man has done nothing to warrant death."  But the priests shouted louder.  So Pilate had an idea - he would send this Jesus to his enemy Herod who was the next highest in authority.  There was no love lost between them and if shuffling Jesus off would get Pilate back to bed and off the hook it was worth a shot.  Within the hour, the crowd was back.  Herod didn't want the job either so he had Jesus beaten severely and returned to Pilate. 

Now Pilate was really mad, but not at Jesus.  He sensed that the prophet wasn't any danger to Rome but the priests were.  He tried to reason with them - "I see nothing over which to condemn him.  I'll have him beaten again to teach him a lesson."  No, the priests shouted.  "Execute him!"  Still trying to get out of a bad situation that was growing worse, Pilate remembered that these people had  a custom, to release one prisoner as a good deed for their Passover.  He asked the head of the prison who they had down there and the name Barabas came up.  A minor criminal, perhaps on the fringes of rebellion.  Barabas was dragged out of his cell, sure that this was it, his execution had come.  He was thrust out into the prefect's court beside another poor soul.  "I will release Jesus, as is your custom!"  The shouting became more frenzied - Release Barabas!  Crucify Jesus!"  And they wouldn't stop, their voices become louder and louder.  By this time a crowd had gathered.  The priests sent men through the crowd to whisper lies about Jesus until the innocent onlookers thought the calls for execution were their own idea.

Pilate's wife, Claudia, whom many scholars believe was a secret follower, called her husband aside and warned him of the danger he was facing.  She knew the man Jesus and she knew he wasn't an ordinary criminal of any kind.  She knew that condemning him would be her husband's downfall and so she warned Pilate not to listen to the priests but to quickly release Jesus.  Pilate strode back out and the crowd went wild, screaming that they were going to report him to Tiberious and have him recalled if he didn't do what they wanted him to do.

And right then, Pilate made a decision that changed the course of history, a misjudgement that, on another night he might have made differently if he hadn't been tired, mad and harried.  He caved in to pressure.  What was one more wandering Jew more or less?  But he got his last licks in - the death warrant was always written and nailed to the cross.  He ordered the death warrant to say "He is the King of the Jews".  No, said the priests, not he IS the king of the Jews, he SAYS he's the king of the Jews.  Pilate snapped.  "I've written what I've written!" and he ordered his soldiers to clear the court, which they did with all the hardness of the Roman guard. 

We know what happened after that.  Jesus was executed, he rose the third day.  When word came to Pilate, what did he think?  What did his wife say?  He knew in that moment what a terrible mistake he had made.  But what was done was done and he went back to his terrible and cruel reign, wiping out men, women and children, whole villages, crucifying hundreds of innocent  people.

Five years later, Tiberious died.  By this time, Roman and Jew alike had had their fill of his cruelites and Pilate was recalled.  Emporer Caligula was crowned.  And Pilate was in severe disfavor along with his family.  He was stationed in a worse place, Gaul, which became France in later centuries, where he commited suicide rather than face the rest of his life in disgrace.  The people  threw the body into the river where he was eaten by fishes.  (How ironic - eaten by fish, the christian fish symbol).

And now, ta da, the thought I had in church on Sunday about Pilate.  We're supposed to hate him, righteously of course.  He condemned the son of God!  He didn't choose to do the right thing!  But you know, on this side of heaven, how many of us have a perfect record?  How many of us make right decisions all the time?  Do we make misjudgements that change the world in their own small ways?  This was one small man in his speck of time, who uncharacteristically tried to do a good thing, but who, in the end, made a choice he lived to regret.

 I can see myself doing exactly the same thing.  He didn't know this man was the Son of God.  How would he?  All these prophets claimed divine right, this one was perhaps more popular than most, more compelling.  Pilate acted according to his life pattern -

Just like most of us do, just like I do all the time.  And I think that if my misjudgements were written down and somebody published my story two thousand years from now, I might be viewed in a terrible light as well.

And beside all that, he, like Judas, was part of a plan - the role of the bad guy who advanced the plot.  Without them, the whole story fell apart.

Mother Theresa said, "I can't judge you because of the Hitler in me."  And I'm thinking, I can't judge any of these historical figures because the same capacity for horrible choices is in me.

Remembering 9-11

Named by it's date, it's our generation's national horror story.  All through history the world has had them.  Eve endured the sadness of her first son carrying on the family legacy;  Noah's family endured the deluge; the Black Plague; Mongol hoards; Burning of Catholics then Protestants back and forth for a century; World War 1, the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, the deaths of the Kennedys and now 9-11.  We all remember where we were when we heard the news and we sat transfixed in front of the TV unable to look away.

We had just moved into our new home in Willow Grove.  Baby Brianna and I were the only ones home and I had taken her to nursery school.  A friend called and I couldn't understand what she was saying, she was crying so hard.  She made me understand to turn on my TV, America was under attack!  I ran to look and got there just in time for the second plane plowing into the tower.  My mind covered up what I couldn't believe.  A plane - flew into a skyscraper - full of people - and it wasn't an accident.  Nah, of course it was an accident.  Some poor pilot got way out of control.

Except it wasn't.  It really was an intentional act of foreign mad men.  I drove frantically to the daycare to get Brianna.  I called my family who were out on the road and couldn't come home.  I was sure, like the rest of America, that this was war and we were going to die today.  I wanted to die with my family around me.  But it was not possible for them to get home and so I watched, tears pouring down my face, horrified, all day, with Brianna sitting in her playpen, burbling and playing, in her innocence, not knowing what life changing event was unfolding before our eyes.  I don't make fun of George Bush's expression when the secret service man walked into that classroom and whispered in his ear.  I felt the same way he did.  You can't take it in.

She's twelve now and studies history in school.  Yes, the kids think 9-11 is terrible.  But they can't possibly understand the real horror behind the story.  My husband is a Civil War buff.  It's his hobby to read about the battles and go to re-enactments.  But for those men, it was hell come to life.  I read about Pearl Harbor and watched the movie with Ben Affleck but I'm not as moved as was my father in law who lived through it.  I'm interested in World War 2 from a historical viewpoint and it does horrify me, but not like it did my parents, or my uncle who was an army private who liberated one of the death camps or my friend Mary who missed being gassed by days.  I'm sure the people of the seventeenth century looked back with unbelief at the burnings of religious people who didn't fit the current mold but went on with life where all could worship as they wished.

I know that the real gut wrenching, visceral reaction to 9-11 will fade with each year that passes.  I know it will still make future generations shake their heads, not believing that terrorists were allowed to get that close.  I know people will specialize in this era in history and play it out over and over like a Civil War enactment.

But for today, for us, it's good to feel the horror and to watch the pictures.  It's good to have remembrance services and make the kids sit through lessons or videos.  As has been said of World War 2, "Never forget, never forget."

Party Politics

I'm frustrated, angry and sometimes bemused about the party conventions!  I want to watch my regular shows but feel a responsibility to know what's going on in my own country's politics. 

I'm an Independent and usually an Undecided.  My vote is a paradox - I realize that the man (or hopefully one day, woman) can only do what his party tells him, and I know the basic party lines don't change.  And yet, I come down on the side of the man and not the party!  I guess I'm more group think that I think I am.

Their platform "planks" don't move me.  Promises made don't move me.  Republicans have to be pro-life although the president has no authority to do anything about abortion and even if he could, wouldn't touch that hot potato.  Democrats have to be for social programs although it costs citizens dearly in taxes to pay for them.  Year after year each party candidate shouts about being for or against abortion, gay marriage, gays in general, government spending, immigration and then does nothing when they finally get in.  I remember George Bush at his convention, speaking Spanish to his Hispanic voters, promising all kinds of perks to their communities.  Yeah, that happened.  And Obama promising a change and hope - not so much.

Some of my friends vote along moral lines.  The Christian (from the right denomination); the one who champions pro-life; the one who is anti "gay agenda".  Drives me up a wall.  How does a man's moral compass make him a credible CEO of the company known as USA?  Some people I know go for the man who looks good,  who represents to foreign governments, who is conciliatory.  Again, how does a nice guy apply to global finance and war?  Reagan was everybody's grandfather, Kennedy was a handsome playboy wink wink, Bush was the quintessential cowboy, Clinton was cool, Palin was 'just like us' soccer mom, Obama is, well, ethnic and a nice family man.  None of which fits them for the job!!

And yet, they did a credible job with what they were allowed to do by handlers and the opposition.  They had their hits and they had their misses, like the rest of we unwashed masses.

So the RNC just ended, the DNC is tonight.  There will be comparisons, we'll like and hate some of what we hear from both.  Party faithful will cheer for their guy no matter what he says and criticize the opposition.  Both will accuse the other of telling lies.  Both will trot out some sentimental character who steals the show with a goofy speech meant to make the candidate look human.  Their wives will tell us all what a loving husband she has.  We'll be told that he wants to return us to the Real America... uh, and that is???  50s?  20s?  Beaver Cleaver?  Thomas Jefferson???

But basically, who doesn't already know who they're voting for?  Between now and November gobs of money will be spent and miles clocked for last minute campaigning - when 9 out of 10 of us have already made up our minds.

Based on.......????  Promises are empty, it's all a show... In the end, we continue to vote for the man, not the party platform.  Hopefully not for his religion, or because of ridiculous smears (put out by the candidate himself to garner hype), or because he plays the sax, reminds of of the good old days or has either an assertive or 'purty' little wife.

I hope the vote is based on experience, integrity and balance.

The Little Boo Boos of Life

I clearly remember taking a skid on the pavement outside my home in Mayfair and scraping both knees.  It couldn't even be classified as an injury - just a little skin missing and a trace of blood.  But I went crying to my mother as if both legs had been broken off at the stems!  First she hugged me, then she sat me on the kitchen table, washed the scrape and drew a Mercurochrome dog on my knees.  Sent me back out with a kiss and that was the end of it.

What if my mother had assessed the "injury" as nothing and told me to stop making a big thing out of nothing?  As I grew up with many more scrapes and insults to my childish dignity I knew where to come for help.  In my teen years the problems were a good bit worse than a papercut or sore finger.  But I knew where to go with them.  My parents set the foundation early as the ones who would always have my back no matter what.  Even as a wife, mother and grandmother, I still knew where to come for some tea and sympathy.  Giving attention to the insignificant problems of life sets the stage for asking for help with the significant ones.

I've heard it said that giving attention to cuts and bruises only perpetuates negativity and promotes hypochondria.  Actually, it's the opposite.  An injury is a question that asks for resolution.  If a person doesn't find resolution they'll repeat and repeat, searching for a different outcome, sometimes for the rest of their lives.  Completing the cycle by answering the question ends it. 

You don't want a child completing the cycle or looking for that resolution outside of the safety of their parents' home.  Many a parent has wept over a lost child - "Why did they go with that person?  We raised her better than this!"  Unfortunately, a roof over her head and 3 squares a day don't fill in the place that longs for someone to care.  Have we adults been overlooked so often that we forget what it feels like to need that caring touch?

Caring about the small hurts of life also teaches the child some important things they need to know about God.  'Is He really a God who cares about little me?  Or am I on my own in the cosmos unless the need is of epic importance, and even then...' 


My message to young mothers and fathers is - Have patience, keep your eye on the goal.  You're building something here that needs a stable foundation.  Be that foundation for your child.

An angry and changable God?

I was having a discussion with friends the other day and the subject came up - can God change His mind and do something entirely different from what was in the original plan? This was in the context of prayer - do our entreaties cause changes in the universe that might not have happened otherwise?

Adam and Eve - created to live in a perfect world until they disobeyed God's orders. The days of Noah when all humanity was evil in God's eyes. In both of these cases, there was an original plan that went awry. A & E should have lived carefree in perfect harmony with their creator, but after the fall, God had to go back to the drawing board and arrange a whole nother way. Humans messed up His plan. Or did they?

In Noah's day, sin had already entered the world and people, subject to it, sinned. The scriptures say that God "repented" that he had made man. Was sorry he had gone to the effort. Again, human beings messing up the plan. So God had to wipe the slate clean and start all over again with the only righteous person on the face of the earth.

The Babylonian captivity - those darn Jews! Just wouldn't follow the plan so God arranged for a slaughter and long captivity, once again, needing a Plan B.

One thing that gives me pause about these scenarios is that the Plan B's didn't work! The promise of a redeemer didn't work because the new human beings kept right on sinning without regard to the possibility of a savior. (Did they even understand what a savior was and why they might need one?) The flood had only just wiped out civilization when Noah's son Ham sinned in a big way and it all went downhill - again - because through the fall, we have a sin nature. How was starting over with flawed material supposed to help? After a century in Babylon wouldn't you think the Jews would have learned their lesson? Not. The city of Sodom was leveled supposedly because of their homosexuality. One would think Lot and his daughters would choose to live righteously. Nope. They got their father drunk, had sex with him and began their own tribe.

Isn't God a better planner than this. He's God after all, he should know what's going to work and what's not.

Here's the thing - God is all the omni's - Omnipresent, Omniscient, Omnipotent. He knows everything past, present and future, He's everywhere at once past present and future, and He can do anything in all of those three locales at the same time. While we're living our tragedies and sins on September 3, 2011, God is already in tomorrow and next week and next year and next century and millennia. He's not surprised or shocked by what we do. He knew it before we were born, even before the world existed. Does he need to change his mind about earth and see if something else works out better? And if He did, how would we know without a WayBack machine?

In our Bibles we read the words - "God repented", or God was angry and changed his mind about man. Those phrases, however, have been mistranslated. In the original language of the OT those words are written - "Nachum" which means to "cause a change of direction". You're walking down the road and see a McDonald's to your left so you "nachum" - change directions. You've been punishing your child for not cleaning up their room and it's only making things worse, so you decide to nachum. In the record of Biblical history God sees that the world's populace is getting farther and farther away from his plan, so he nachum - changes the direction that the world is going. Through a flood, a captivity, an explosion of salt and sulphur. Although they bear a similarity, changing direction and changing one's mind are not the same. One implies that a mistake was made; the other implies an ongoing plan.



Do our prayers affect the direction of God's plan? Can we pray long enough and hard enough, enlist a thousand people to pray with us, fast and weep and it causes God to smack his head and say, "Of course! I was going to do it this way, but since you've got the right number of people helping you out, I'll do it your way?" How very human of God that would be. Which is probably why we believe it to be so. God carrying out His plan from beginning to end is such a difficult concept for us because of our limitations on this earth.

And yet, we continue to pray. Because prayer calls God into our every day lives. It's not a magic bullet or a vending machine - put your prayers in, get your wishes fulfilled. It helps to have something greater than ourselves involved in our trials and tribulations, no matter what the answer turns out to be.

Your God is Too Small - Part 2

This comes from the book Your God is Too Small by J.B. Phillips

Your God is too small if He's your Parental Hangover -

There are 5 ways to know about something, maybe 6. You see it, hear it, taste it, smell it or touch it. The 6th I would say is sometimes called The Sixth Sense. It's a spiritual knowing that's outside of provable, sensory knowledge.

On this earth plane we're faced with a quandry - how to know an invisible divinity when It doesn't show up in the 5 usual ways. Two ways to do that - we can sense It through spiritual sensitivity which doesn't give our human minds the photo file we need to make sense of It. Or we can use human world examples to form the images that we need.

The idea of the Parent is one of those. We assume God is bigger, stronger and smarter than we are. It follows that God is our authority figure. Who is our earthly authority figure? Our parents. Kids come to know who and what this thing called "God" is by making the connection between the heavenly and earthly parent.

That's an awesome responsibility, and I mean that contructively as well as negatively. A child is going to form their opinions about God, life, the afterlife, spiritual sensitivity - from experiencing life with Mom and Dad. The father who drinks, displays a violent temper, a cold, formal relationship with his children - will show by example that God is out of control, angry, prone to vengeance, and distant. A mother who is black and white, judgmental, and careless with the health of her children, teaches them by example that God doesn't tolerate mistakes, He's only concerned with the big events of their lives, and guilt is the best response to mistakes.

But God isn't the judgmental, cold, black and white, vengful, punishing, prioritzing parent. He's parenthood as it was meant to be in the best of all worlds.

If your God is a left over of your own parents' mistakes, He's too small.

Your God is Too Small - book report - Part 1

This comes from the book Your God is Too Small by J.B. Phillips.

I don't often read books that someone tells me I HAVE TO READ!! Usually, they aren't interesting to me at all. The Shack was one of those. I almost made a point of not reading it because friends pushed it so hard. Then I gave in and read the thing - and it changed my life - and now I'm the one who pushes it on others!

This book, Your God is Too Small was recommended over and over. So I wouldn't read it. Then, at the used bookstore, there it was in the dollar bin. Hey, for a buck I got it and kept it in the bathroom for short burst reading. And was captivated. It's one of the most touching, cogent, life changing books I've ever read.

So here I am, blogging it for you, in hopes that you'll hop on amazon and get it for yourself.

Our view of God tends to be that of a super human. He's like us, only really good at it. He's perfected our foibles. We tend to want a God based on childhood traumas and joys. If our own childhood was grim, or happy, or quiet, or isolated, that's how we relate to an invisible God.

But He is none of those. Basically, He is unknowable because He's outside of the reaches of our mental equipment. However, it benefits us to keep trying to understand Him. It nurtures the spirit to stretch our skills of perception. This then, is the God that most of us see at some point in our lives.

1. The Resident Policeman - A child who has grown up under the constant judgment of an authority figure spends his adult life looking over his shoulder for the handcuffs to clink on and the bars to slam shut. In every life situation they think they hear the whine of sirens, the authorities coming to get him and punish him for the wrong he has done. God is FAIR - He is JUST. You do wrong, you're going to be found out and punished, no exceptions. Any negative thing that happens to such a person is evidence of God's judgment and justice.

Except that God is not our judge, policeman, father with a strap or teacher with a birch rod. His justice is loving, his plan is for reconciliation. He doesn't use life's tragedies to test or punish us, He uses them to reconcile us back to himself.

He's not the one who says, "License and registration please. Step out of the car and spread em." He's the one who says, "This activity is going to hurt you and the last thing I want is for you to be harmed. If you choose to do it anyway and harm comes to you, I'll still look for you and bring you home and tend to the wounds."

People who see God as a policeman have made God over into their own image. Arresting and punishing wrong doers is what's been done to them and what they'd do to someone else. But God isn't us. He's quite outside of our retributory responses.