PrintToday's "Moment with Mark" (117)
22 March, 2013
Very early in the morning the leading priests, other leaders, and teachers of religious law — the entire high council — met to discuss their next step. They bound Jesus and took him to Pilate, the Roman governor. (Mark 15:1 NLT)
Ah, yes! Pilate, the Roman Governor!
Since the Jewish leaders did not have the right to implement capital punishment while they were under Roman rule, the next step for the religious hierarchy was to bring Jesus before Pilate and to do whatever it took to have Jesus sentenced and executed.
Pilate was a strange mixture of justice and cruelty, weakness and fear. From what he had heard he already believed that this Galilean preacher had done nothing that was worthy of any kind of punishment, let alone death. He was astute enough to recognise that these religious leaders were motivated by nothing more than sheer envy. However, he was weak enough to be "rolled" by the crowd; a crowd which, in turn, was manipulated by their religious leaders.
Let's stay with Pilate a while longer. I'm sure he realised that he was caught between a rock and a hard place. He could remain true to this conviction that this man had done nothing amiss and let Him go. To do so would further inflame the locals who bitterly resented the presence of their Roman overlords.
His only other option was to compromise his belief about Jesus' innocence and hand him over to the Jewish leaders and the Roman execution squad. To succumb to the pressure of the Jewish leaders would appear as weakness to those who didn't think much of him anyway.
Have you ever been caught in a bind like that? What did you do?
While all of this was going through his mind, there was a knock at the main door . The prisoner had arrived.
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