But the Jews were quieted neither by these words nor by that spectacle. They demanded something quite other than a flogging and a masquerade before they would go their ways. Pilate thought that he could make mock of them, but he would realize that this was no time for feeble jokes. They had had the best of him twice already and they would again. A few bruises and a practical joke played by the soldiery were not enough to punish this enemy of God as He deserved; there were trees in Judea and nails to nail Him to them. And their hoarse voices shouted all together, “Let him be crucified! Let him be crucified!”
Too late Pilate realized that they had driven him into a tangle from which he could not disengage himself. All his decisions were combated with a pertinacity he had not foreseen. By a flash of inspiration he had pronounced the great words, “Behold the man!” But he himself did not understand that proclamation which transcended his base soul. He did not realize that he had found the truth he was seeking: a half-truth, but deeper than all the teachings of the philosophers of Rome and Greece. He did not understand how Jesus was really Man, the symbol of all humanity, sorrowing and humiliated, betrayed by its rulers, deceived by its masters, crucified every day by the Kings who oppress their subjects, by the rich who cause the poor to weep, by priests who think of their bellies rather than of God. Jesus is the Man of Sorrows announced by Isaiah, the man without form or comeliness, despised and rejected of men, who was to be killed for all men; He is God’s only son who had taken on man’s flesh, and who would ascend in the glory of power and of the new sun, in the midst of the blaring of the trumpets calling the dead to life. But now to the eyes of Pilate, to the eyes of Pilate’s enemies, He was only a wretched, insignificant man, flesh for rods and for nails, a man and not Man, a mortal and not a God. Why did Pilate lose time with those sibylline remarks before delivering Him to the executioner?
And yet Pilate still did not yield. Standing beside that silent man, the Roman felt his heart heavy with an oppression he had never known before. Who could this man be whom all the people wished to kill, and whom he could neither save nor sacrifice? He turned once more to Jesus, “Whence art thou?”
But Jesus gave him no answer.
“Speakest thou not unto me? knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee, and have power to release thee?”
Then the insulted King raised His head, “Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above: therefore he that delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin.”
Caiaphas and his associates were the guilty ones; the others were dogs incited by Caiaphas, mere tools of Caiaphas. Even Pilate was only an indocile instrument of priestly hatred and of the Divine will.
But the Procurator in his perplexity found no new expedient to free himself from the net about him, and returned to his fixed idea, “Behold your King!”
The Jews, infuriated by this repeated insult, burst out, enraged, “If thou let this man go, thou art not Cæsar’s friend; whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against Cæsar.”
At last they had hit on the right words to bring pressure on weak, cowardly Pilate. Every Roman magistrate, no matter how high his rank, depended on Cæsar’s favor. Pilate’s reputation might be ruined by an accusation of this sort, presented with ability, by malicious advocates—and there were plenty of those among the Hebrews, as was shown later by the memorial of Philo. But in spite of the threat, Pilate cried out his last and weakest question, “Shall I crucify your king?”