He awakes, with his tongue hot and dry and his whole chest
raw like a wound. So even before
breakfast he makes his first major decision.
While still in his pajamas, he walks downstairs to the closet where he
keeps his extra cigarettes, takes out the two and a half cartons that he finds
there, and puts them out with the trash.
There are the remains of a pack in the pocket of his suit coat and some
loose cigarettes lying around the house in various places. All of these he carefully destroys, slitting
them with his thumbnail and flushing the tobacco down the toilet, so he
wouldn’t be tempted to fish them back out of the garbage. After dinner the evening before, the talk had
turned to politics and they had been up for hours, talking and smoking. This morning he is paying the price for
it. He knows all about the surgeon
general's warning. He has seen the usual
photographs of a smoker's lungs. He has
been a three-pack-a-day man for over thirty years. So his prebreakfast decision is a decision
for life against death, and he sees it as his death that he slits open with his
thumbnail and flushes away.
He is Pontius Pilate, of course: the procurator of
Judea. His day is starting out well, and
he feels better for it. He has just
taken a step to become a new man, a better man, a man who can handle whatever
the world brings without relying his tar and nicotine. Not even the morning
paper, filled with stories of poverty, crime and corruption, upsets him as he
leafs through it in the back seat of the limousine that carries him through the
city. As the car rolls along he glances
out at the world from time to time through the tinted windows. Children are playing in the dirt, heavily
armed policemen patrol the streets, and beggars crowd the temple gates. Other people could carry on about how rotten
everything is. But Pilate's business is
to keep the ship afloat from day to day.
And he is not doing a bad job of it.
There are no major complaints from Rome.
The Jews are content. And he
himself, if not exactly happy, is happy enough.
When he was a young man, he dreamed of greater things than
being a provincial procurator, but he could have done a lot worse. His sons had the best education money can
buy. His wife keeps having troubling
dreams, but she is in the hands of a good therapist. Their marriage isn't what it used to be, but
he keeps looking forward to the day when they can retire to the villa outside
Ostia. That will be relaxing. But in the meantime, he has appointments to
keep, and he keeps them. When he arrives
at the office, the sitting area is full of people waiting to see him, texting
and tweeting on their phones, and reading old copies of Time Magazine.
The chief of the occupational forces is in a sweat because a
Jewish festival is upon them and he expects trouble from the fanatics. The Jewish God, not knowing which side his
matzoh is buttered on, wants Rome out; he wants the peace that passeth
understanding instead of the peace of Rome.
Pilate starts to reach for a cigarette, and then remembers. He picks up a pencil instead and starts to
chew on its eraser. What passeth his
understanding is the Jews themselves, who have never had it so good. What passeth his understanding is how they
can knock themselves out for a God who supposedly runs history, when history
has run over them and left them as beggars in this strip of rock and desert
that they call the Promised Land. He
orders the guard doubled around the temple and the whole garrison put on alert
until the Passover passes over.
And the appointments continue. The tax people are full of excuses for why
the quota wasn't filled last quarter. A
man has a scheme to solve the city's water problem, which so happens to include
Rome buying his property to build an aqueduct.
An epidemic is raging through the old slave district, and there are
complaints about packs of orphans scavenging on the streets for food. A few days ago there had been some kind of
demonstration at one of the city gates with an up-country preacher at the
center of it, and the Jewish leaders want to handle this troublemaker before
things get worse. But of course, because
of some arcane religious requirement that Pilate really doesn’t understand,
they can’t come into his office to speak to him. With a grunt and a grumble, still clenching
the pencil in his teeth, Pilate gets up from his desk and walks out to meet
with them.
Once outside, he takes the pencil out of his mouth and asks
matter-of-factly, "What are the charges?" One of the ringleaders stands up and said,
"If he wasn't a troublemaker, we wouldn't have brought him
here!" Pilate sighs. The day may have started out well, but these
pesky Jews are enough to drive anyone to distraction. With all of their strange customs, Pilate
never comprehended the things that get them worked up. And he didn’t particularly care, either. Now
they bring a man in, someone who was supposed to be a messiah, whatever that
is, and they won’t even tell him why he is such a menace. But Pilate agrees to see the man if that’s
what it will take to keep the peace. If
they want him to see their God, he will see him too. The more the merrier.
As Pilate walks back to his office, he gets a call on his
cell phone from his wife. She’s had
another night of bad dreams. As she goes
on, he can hear that she's crying. And
Pilate can picture her, sitting there with the phone cradled between her ear
and her shoulder so she can light a cigarette like she always does when she
starts to cry. He can almost smell the
smoke as she lights it and then starts talking again. He tries to distract himself, to keep from
thinking about the cigarette. As his wife talks, he stares out the window. Down in the courtyard a ragged child is
talking to a soldier. On the windowsill
a pigeon preens her feathers. Finally
his wife hangs up, and he swings back to the desk.
While he was talking, they had brought in the up-country
preacher for questioning. Pilate is caught off-guard, and before he knows what
he is doing he takes a cigarette from the box on his desk and lights it. The man stands in front of him with his hands
tied behind his back. You can see that
he's been roughed up a little. His upper
lip is puffed out and one eye is swollen shut.
He looks unwashed, and he smells unwashed. Pilate is not sure if the man looks
ridiculous, or if he looks pathetic. If
it were just the two of them, he would give the man busfare and send him back
to the boondocks where he came from. But
the Jews think he’s trouble, so Pilate stands up and takes a good look at the
man. He can't quite explain it, but even
with the swollen eye and torn clothes, the prisoner seems to carry himself with
dignity. There seems to be more to this
fellow than there is to the ordinary fanatic.
Pilate has to sit down.
The day had started out well, but now everything is giving him a splitting headache. Maybe at a different time, in a different
place, with a different person, Pilate would enjoy talking about truth. Philosophy is one of his hobbies, after
all. But not with this fellow, who
doesn't act the way prisoners are supposed to act. Truth.
Why talk about truth? Where did
this guy get the idea of talking about truth?
Pilate takes a long drag on his cigarette, and with narrowed eyes and a
cynical smirk he sneers, "Truth?
What is truth?" He asks it
half because he would love to hear an answer to the question, and he hopes this
man has one. He asks it half because he
is certain that there is no answer, and that would mean he has one less thing
to worry about. But this man with the
split lip gives Pilate no answer. No
answer except, with his one good eye, he stares Pilate straight in the
face. Pilate cannot match his gaze, and
he hurries out to speak with the Jewish leaders again, leaving the man with the
swollen lip and unsettling presence behind in his office.
He finds the Jewish leaders just outside the lobby,
impatiently pacing on the sidewalk in front of the building. When they see Pilate come out they gather
around with angry, challenging expressions on their faces. “Well,” they ask, “are you going to crucify
him or not?” Crucify?! Who said anything about crucifying this
fellow? They save that kind of
punishment for the worst of the worst.
At most, he needs to be gotten rid of quietly, not be made into some
spectacle. But no matter what he says,
Pilate makes no headway with these stubborn men who surround him. They demand nothing less than crucifixion.
It occurs to Pilate that perhaps it was not the best idea to
leave the prisoner alone in his office, so he hurries back inside. All this running back and forth takes a toll
on him, so he pauses a moment to catch his breath before going back into the
office. Maybe it’s because of what all
those years of smoking have done to his lungs, or maybe it’s because he simply
doesn’t want to have to face the man again.
What was it about him? Not even Caesar himself could unnerve Pilate the
way this – what was his name? – Jesus – did.
When he enters, Pilate finds the man staring out of his
office window at the city below. He
looks sad, but oddly not for himself. He
seems to be more concerned about the people below than he does for what might
happen to him. He turns to Pilate as he
closes the door, with the same piercing, inscrutable gaze. By now Pilate is beside himself. He desperately wants another cigarette to
calm his nerves, but he knows it won’t do any good.
Exasperated and frustrated, he shouts at the man, “Who are
you? Where did you come from?” But the only reply the prisoner gives is that
unsettling look, before he turns to stare out the window once more. “Don’t you understand?” Pilate practically
screams. “Don’t you know that I could
have you crucified if I wanted to?” The
man turns back, with an amused look on his face. “The only power you have over me is what God
has given you. The people who brought me
here are worse criminals than me.” And
then again, he goes back to looking out the window.
In his younger days, Pilate had fancied himself an athlete. But all these years of smoking cigarettes and sitting behind desks have taken a toll on his health. Wheezing and breaking into a sweat, he makes the trip back to the elevator, down to the lobby, and out the door again to confront the pompous fools who were making today such a nightmare. “Fine! If you want to string this man up, go right ahead. Here he is! I don’t care what you do, just get that man out of my office!” And under his breath he adds, “And get him out of my life.”
Back in his office, some time and several cigarettes later,
Pilate gets out of his chair to look out the window: the same window that the
mysterious man had been looking out of earlier.
By now, he supposes, the troops are probably done beating the man and
are on their way out the city to crucify him.
Sure enough, in the street below he sees the procession going outside of
town. He is surprised to see how many
people are following behind. Apparently
this Jesus is more consequential than Pilate had given him credit for.
His mind goes back the question he had asked earlier in the
morning: “What is truth?” Not truth as
in “what is right and wrong?” But a
different kind of truth. The truth that
shapes reality and brings meaning to existence.
What is truth? What really
matters? What is at the center of what
makes life worth living? What gives
purpose to governing a province, or trying to quit smoking, or saving up for a
retirement villa in Ostia?
As Pilate continues to look out the window at the man being
led to his execution, he is startled to see the man pause, for just a moment,
and look up at Pilate as he is watching.
There is that look, one more time.
The gaze that penetrates to the depths of Pilate’s soul that he does not
even know that he has. This time, it
drops Pilate to the ground, sobbing in tears.
At that moment he realizes that he had asked the wrong
question. Instead of asking “What is
truth?” he should have asked “Who is truth?” Now he knows the answer. And he has sent him out to die.
