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SUBJECT: 27. Chapter 27: Christ’s Blood Being Shed By Human Agency the First Time
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C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - S E V E N
Christ’s Blood Being Shed By Human Agency the First Time
Then Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged him.
And when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered him up to be crucified.
Joh_19:1; Mat_27:26 b.
WE have now arrived at the shedding of blood, without which, according to Biblical testimony, no forgiveness is possible. The story of Christ’s suffering in the presence of the judge is hastening to its conclusion. Thereupon will follow the third volume of this study, which is devoted to a consideration of His blood as it flows away into the ground. But even before the subject matter of this third volume is reached, Christ’s blood is being driven from Him. It is being driven from Him by men. This is significant.
You have discovered that this study divides the suffering of Christ into three volumes. The first volume presents Christ as He enters upon His suffering. In that volume we observed Him when He was still unbound, and when He went to and fro among men at the behest of His own will, when He had not yet been delivered into the hands of His judges. This second volume considers Him as He passes through His suffering, while standing over against the court. In this study we are devoting our attention to the bound Christ upon whose suffering the human will, the will of justice as maintained by the authorities, must make a decision. The third volume will presently deal with Christ as He is at the conclusion of His suffering. It will study Him as He takes upon Himself the results of the sentence pronounced upon Him, and as He drinks the cup of passion to the dregs of death.
Now the remarkable thing is that in each of these three divisions the blood of Jesus Christ was forced out of Him. In the first section we observed that He sweated blood in Gethsemane. In this second section we observe that His blood is pressed out by the scourging, and, as we shall see presently, by the crown of thorns which was used to mock Him. Later, in the third volume, we shall note that His blood is driven from Him when it flows out of His hands and feet, out of the wounds inflicted upon Him, and out of His side when the spear is thrust into it. Obviously, we need not argue for the fact that this does not represent an accident, or the byplay of fate. Accordingly, we shall try to comprehend the meaning of these three moments in the shedding of the blood of Christ.
Before we take up this task, however, we must outline the course which things took in the presence of Pilate. We know from what has been said already that Pilate released Barabbas, and that in this matter he therefore satisfied the wishes of the Jews. Christ’s name—to use a phrase which is absurd but nevertheless painfully accurate—was removed from the ballot which had been drawn up and announced. Christ was formally returned to His position at dead center. We noted previously that Pilate resorted to the custom of amnesty in his effort to escape from his uncertainty. He had constantly attempted to rescue himself from the choking grip of the hate and envy of the Jews. Inasmuch as this method did not meet with success he was forced to return to the plan he had originally had in mind, namely that of chastising Jesus first and releasing Him then. As a matter of fact, that too had not been a plan but merely a suggestion. From the cry of the throng which had brutally demanded that the Nazarene be crucified, Pilate became aware of the fact that, unless he added to it, the proposal to chastise Jesus and then release Him would not meet with the approval of the crowd. Accordingly, he does not put the question in the nice form of a dilemma, for he knows that his auditors will be indisposed to listen to that. Anyhow, dilemmas are dangerous on the tongue of spineless people. Nevertheless he proposes to make one more attempt. He issues the command that Jesus be scourged.
Now one difficulty which arises when we try to arrange the several data which the Bible affords in this matter is that we cannot be sure just which chronological order is intended by the narrative as it is related in Matthew, for example. Matthew reports that after Pilate had scourged Jesus he delivered Him up to be crucified; in other words, Matthew relates the scourging and the sentence of death on the cross to each other. The question arises whether this was the formal condemnation which definitely determined that Jesus should die on the cross. If Pilate intended it to be such, we are confronted by the peculiarity that John in the 19th chapter of his account of the gospel plainly indicates that Pilate after he had scourged Christ made another effort to set the Saviour free. According to John, then, a deliberate discussion took place between Pilate and the Jews after the scourging had been inflicted.
This variation in the accounts seems to indicate that the surrender of Christ to death on the cross as it is recorded by Matthew at this point is not to be regarded as the definitive, legally formulated, and official sentencing of Jesus but as a preliminary penalty which, should crucifixion prove to be inevitable for Him. would be a beginning of the infliction of that penalty and would at the same time leave room for substituting a more lenient treatment later.
Hence, in agreement with the opinion of many others, we also interpret the data of the Bible to mean that Pilate was acting more or less officially when, after Barabbas’ release, he sentenced Jesus to death by crucifixion. The scourging constituted a suitable part of such a program, for the Romans adhered to the practice of scourging a prisoner before nailing him to a cross. This bloody introduction to the crucifixion is called by one writer: praeparatio ad crucem and also medea mors, or medium supplicium.[1] Interpreted, these phrases mean the formal preparation for the cross sentence and the transitional phase in a process designed to culminate in death. At the same time, we may think it very likely that the judge who hoped by means of this scourging to quiet the excited emotions of the mob, secretly hoped also that he would be able presently to return to the proposal he had suggested at first, and after the severe “chastisement”—which had not been supplanted by this scourging—to set Jesus free. At least, this would account for the fact that when Jesus stands before him later in abject misery, suffering grievously because of the scourging, Pilate accompanies the pathetic figure out of doors and attempts to stir the feelings of the crowd by his well known: Behold the man. Only when that last appeal to humanity failed to elicit sympathy did the formal, definitive, and officially registered surrender to death on the cross ensue. Whoever pictures the historical sequence of the several events which took place here to his mind in this relationship will find in them an uncoerced alignment of the Biblical data.
[1] Titus Livius 33, 36. Referred to by Groenen, op. cit., p. 372.
In this way, then, the scourging was inflicted upon Jesus. We must know that this scourging in itself constituted terrible suffering. The Romans had named this the proper punishment for numerous breaches of law, but found the punishment so gruesome that they permitted it to accrue to Roman citizens only in the most extraordinary cases.
The manner in which this punishment was inflicted is not known well enough. We may accept the fact, it is true, that Jesus was not scourged in the Jewish manner (in which case the person being punished lay face forward upon the ground, Deu_25:2,) but in the Roman way. According to the descriptions given in numerous books, the scourged person was stripped down to the loins and was bound fast to a post or pillar in such a way that he had to stand with bent back and with his head bowed toward the ground. “In that way the first stroke had to succeed in drawing blood. Accordingly, we can easily understand that in some descriptions of scourgings which took place, we read that the strokes of the whip sometimes tore the flesh so badly that the human skeleton became visible as a result. . . . In order to aggravate the pain even more, barbs, pieces of bone, or knots were woven into the scourge, and in later periods, during the time of the persecution of the Christians, for instance, leaden bullets were fastened to the thongs.”[2] We do not know to what extent these particulars held true of the scourging which was inflicted upon the Saviour. Scripture speaks very soberly of these things. It is not by means of an enhancement of the details of Jesus’ physical suffering, but by an accentuation of the majesty, the love, the will to sacrifice on the part of the Christ of God that the Bible tries to delineate the Christ to us. By these means the Scriptures conduct us from the external things which are seen to the spiritual things which arenot seen. Spiritually considered, the feature which needs to be accentuated at this time is that now the blood of Christ was for the first time being driven out of Him by men. God had demanded that blood in Gethsemane. Now it is the people who cause it to flow.
[2] Groenen, op. cit., p. 375.
Inasmuch as we are speaking about the blood of Christ at this time, it may not be out of place to say a thing or two here about the manner in which the blood of Christ is frequently raised for discussion in the church.
There are those who usually speak of the blood of Jesus Christ in a way which gives us the impression that for these the shedding of blood constitutes the whole of the suffering of Christ. For the spiritual conflict, for the life-long ministration of Christ’s offices, for the struggle of His soul, for the tension of His active and passive obedience in such instances as these, which do Him no physical harm, these observers have no eye whatever. Always and again they are talking about the blood, about the dear and precious blood. Those other things they regard as merely being aids to the memory jotted down upon the blueprints of Christian dogmatics. But their mystical musing, their meditation and their temptation have no bearing on this.
Such is, however, a gruesome shortcoming. It can be explained in part by that general spiritual apathy which has a keener eye for the visible than for the invisible, and in part by the profound aftereffects which the Roman Catholic leaven still exercised in the post-Reformation period. Nor has the epoch in which we live made good the defect. For while, on the one hand, the church has become lax in its dogmatic thinking, on the other hand, a group of “mystical” poets and artists—first by permission, later by request —are placing their esthetic loaves of shewbread upon the table of dedication in those many temples which an extra-ecclesiastical religion has established. In each of these groups a certain, so-called spiritual eroticism resides which prefers to accentuate the blood of Jesus rather than His soul, His soul rather than His spirit, and the humanity of Jesus as it is in its suffering rather than the hidden powers which inhere in Him as the Christ. That this is a disease in fact, we should not hesitate to say a sin, and that this represents a decadence in thinking needs no argument.[1] Hence, when we in this connection point emphatically to the blood of Jesus Christ we are not, we hope, thereby committing ourselves to the course pursued by the one-sided observers to which we have just referred. Surely, if we had wanted to go in that direction, we should have been denying the very trend of thought which has governed the content of this book. We would continue to insist on the fact then that the labor of the blood of Christ means nothing more than the labor of His soul. In the Bible those two terms are not separated from each other. If we acknowledge that Christ’s passive and active obedience are of equal worth we must be willing to take upon our lips a statement which may sound rather blunt but which should seem very actually true to every Christian among us: namely, that a sermon of Jesus is of no less worth than an impaled hand of Jesus, and that a miracle of healing is as potent a messianic act of redemption as is the sweating and shedding of blood in Gethsemane and at Golgotha respectively. Or, to limit ourselves to the trial: the silence which Jesus maintained no less than three times is not a less influential act of redemption or a less productive act of mediatorship than is His experience of this terrible punishment of scourging. We may not put that asunder which God has joined together. Faith and eroticism may not for one moment be joined together.
[1] See my essay “Eros of Christus,” which is included in Christelijk letterkundige Studien, Volume 2, U-M. Amsterdam.
Accordingly, when we in spite of these considerations ask that emphatic attention be given to the moment in which Christ’s blood was first forcibly driven out of Him, we do so for a good reason and in obedience to the demands of the Scriptures.
We know that we may never segregate Christ from the place, and the time, and the stage of the history of revelation in which He appeared as our Mediator. God did not send Christ into the world at an arbitrarily determined time, but at the time chosen beforehand. Accordingly, God had all epochs issue in Jesus, and had all preceding eras serve as preparatory epochs for the coming of Christ. Just so God did not send Jesus to an arbitrarily determined place in the world, but revealed Him in Israel. And that people, too, was introduced in the world by God so that its life and its land might serve as a stage for messianic wonders, andin order that Christ might become manifest among that people and outside of it.
Observe from this point of view, Israel’s entire service of worship is a shadow-service. Israel’s religion had to point to Christ. That is why so much is said of the sacrifice. For the idea of sacrifice, the idea of shedding blood, is a separate moment in Israel’s liturgy, and as such is strongly accentuated. We cannot for one moment understand the sense and meaning of that dark stream of blood which for centuries painted the road along which Israel traveled a deep red, and which drenched with gore the very ground on which this people had to walk, if we do not acknowledge that all this blood was pointing to Christ. His blood had to be shed, for without the shedding of blood, say the Scriptures, there can be no forgiveness. His blood had to be shed, for, say the Scriptures, the soul is in the blood. The blood of the second Adam had to flow, for the blood of the first Adam, say the Scriptures, began to flow the moment the soul entered into the clay-formed human body of the first. When the human body had been created on the sixth day, and God had breathed the soul into it, the blood began to course through its veins at the very moment in which life entered the dust. And just as the blood begins coursing in the human body at birth in a way quite different from the circulation which was present before, so in Genesis 1 the last act of the creation of God was the beginning of the circulation of the blood of humanity. God breathed life into the first Adam, and he thereby became “a living soul.”
Nevertheless blood cannot continue flowing forever. The circulation of the blood began in Paradise, but must sometime have an end.
This is an immutable decree. If the person who was created in Paradise is to keep his ways uncontaminated by sin, he must attain to a different form of life. At the end of God’s way there is a human being who according to body and spirit is mature. He is the heavenly man, the perfect man, who is no longer in process of becoming, but who is. This heavenly man must sometime exist without the earthly, circular movement of his created and pulsing blood. He is the man of the future. And this future man, this man of things perfected and completed, will no longer marry nor eat food. His entire form of life, his whole law of existence will differ from that which he has in time. Hence the circulation of blood will not take place in heaven. Such circulation is properly a part of the beginning of man, but not of his perfection.
Hence, if man had remained in the state of obedience, the circulation of blood would, according to modes of development which God has not revealed to us and concerning which we consequently will make no guesses, have ceased. Then, in a manner known only to God, the circulation of the blood would gradually have stopped, and man would have risen to that consummate form of life in which neither the sexual urge, nor the sense of hunger, nor the pulse-beat of the blood would have been the driving motives of life. The pulse-beat and the heart-beat are appropriate only in a world of time.
God’s ideal, then, is a bloodless human being. Until this world has reached its consummation, of course, bloodless man will remain the poor pale human being who has sunk beneath the plane of ordinary life. But the bloodless man who has transcended the need for blood is the full, the rich, the perfect, the healthy man. Had man remained in the state of obedience, God would have visited him in a fatherly way, would have come at His own time to quiet the feverish course of the blood, and to effect the transition of man to a state of immutable being. Circulation would then be unnecessary to a man’s body, inasmuch as that body would have transcended the need of it.
But—man fell into sin. Hence the stopping of that circulation of the blood which would otherwise have been normal was withheld. The sin which entered man’s being kept him from developing into that bloodless condition of perpetual youth.
Accordingly, sin avenges itself very severely upon the human blood. When man had sinned God told him that he should surely die. In other words, God announced that separation would come between the soul and the body. Thus bodily death was instituted. Even in this, however, God’s evangelical will unto grace was operative, for God introduced physical death into humanity: that is, God interposed physical death between the first sin and the punishment accruing to that sin, in order that in this way He might make room for a history lasting many epochs, a history consisting of cyclical movements, of the vacillations of life, of the circular course of blood and of those who bleed. And from the very beginning that history was directed to the Christ. That is to say that it was directed to Christ’s blood and spirit. For Christ must now make His appearance in history in order that, on the one hand, He may die “in the blood,” and on the other, that He may emerge triumphant over that blood. To suffer the penalty in the blood and at the same time to transcend the blood represents positive victory. Christ had to become the bloodless one in the sense that He had to become the absolutely poverty-stricken one. lie had to suffer the dire stress of the blood to an infinite extent. But on the other hand He had also to become the bloodless one in that other sense, in that rich sense of the word, in which it refers to a second Adam who no longer is a “living soul,” but who becomes a “life-giving spirit.” The Biblical sense of that phrase is in the main that He, the second Adam, will completely subject the bodily, earthly, temporal, and all that is moving, feverishly active, and in process of becoming, by force of the strong will of His perfect spirit.
You see, therefore, that the institution of physical death after the fall is a mighty act on the part of God. For by that act the stream of blood, and its continuous circulation, which originally should have been quieted in the blood-transcendent state of the blessedness of creation according to the covenant of works, is now being diverted to a different direction and is constrained to move toward death. It was God’s gracious will that the blood of Adam and Eve should not immediately be parched by the firebrand of the punishment of hell, but that it should be limited to that circular course, to that “vicious circle’’ concerning which Ecclesiastes very grievously complained and concerning which we have spoken so often. Accordingly we must apply everything that was said about that vicious circle in the preceding chapters of this book to the pulse-beat of the blood inherent in man and in mankind.
Yes, we may bring the whole of the teaching of that vicious circle to bear upon this discussion of human blood.
The circulation of the blood contains all the sorrow of the vicious circle. It represents a postponement of perpetual youth and perfect blessedness. But it also contains the joy and grace of the vicious circle. It represents the removal of perfect death and of existence in hell. Hence we can safely say that the law of the blood which governs and serves as a motive force to the life of all physical existence upon earth, is Christological, messianic, and subject to the law of the Gospel which Christ would send out into the world.
From this time on all movement of blood is directed to Christ. He is the first expositor of such movement. Accordingly, also, all shedding of blood from this time on is directed to Christ. Again He is the first expositor of this pouring out of the blood. And the whole of the long way of blood is the highway of my Lord Christ coming into the world.
When God instituted physical death into the world (the returning to dust, understand, and not the triumphant transcending together with the dust to the perfectly blessed life such as was promised in the covenant of works), His act was an act of punishment —for it was the result of sin—but it was an act of grace also. It was done for Christ’s sake. The separation of soul and body— and this constituted the punishment—came in the place of that which had been promised at first: namely, the metamorphosis of soul and body, the glorification, the regeneration and renewing of both soul and body by the Spirit. But this again contains the element of grace: God fixes that returning to the dust as an inexorable law for many ages in order that in this way He might make room in the world for Christ. Why room for Christ, you ask? Because this Christ, later, would suffer the whole of death in His blood; because He would let the way of blood be figured forth in His own being, first through the law of punishment, and afterwards in order that as Prince of the Passover, as the second Adam, He with the “blood’’ (regarded now as the driving force of our physical life) might rise to victory and thus become the bloodless man of everlasting youth, of infinite power and of sound humanity. Thus would He become the blood-transcendent man of salvation.
That is why the blood of Christ is of such great significance. The course of death and life is perfectly described in the shedding of His blood and in its sacrifice. We cannot put the matter in a way which suggests that Christ’s suffering consists of “two parts”: a bodily—bloody—part, and spiritual-bloodless-part. The course of Christ’s “blood” is perfectly governed by the will of His “spirit.” “Bloody” and “bloodless” are opposite sides of the same thing. The soul is in the blood—that is the way the figurative language of the Old Testament expresses it in connection with the law of sacrifice. The Spirit is active in the blood—that is the statement which expresses the perfection of Christ as He fulfills the law of sacrifice in Himself and as He, by His blood, puts to rest the service of shadows.
The corollary of this promise naturally is that Christ’s blood, therefore, must be seen in relationship to the statements of the Old Testament and in harmony with the language of all those bloody sacrifices which the old covenant demanded. But this premise also protests that Christ’s blood speaks a language which far transcends the signs represented by those ancient sacrifices. Christ’s reality goes higher and farther than the shadow of the Old Testament. Shadows are always more meager than the realities they symbolize.
For this reason, then Christ as Mediator had to give His blood, and had to give it personally, consciously, and spiritually as Mediator. In this respect, too, He must completely work out the task assigned to Him as the second Adam. That task was to again subject the coursing of the blood-stream to the will of God in order that, together with God’s people—now included in the second Adam—He might attain to everlasting youth by the power and satisfaction of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Thus we can regard the restlessness of the blood of Christ as a separate element in His suffering, provided that we understand its direct relation to the labor of His spirit.
Blood and spirit. Both of them. It is in the blood that Jesus must fulfill the whole of the law of sacrifices. The circulation of the blood must in Him issue in death, be smothered in the bottomless depths of absolute death. He must descend into hell, and He must do that with the blood. To this extent the shedding of His blood represents passiveness, sacrifice, and the payment of penalty.
But because His eternal spirit must also exert its power in His shedding of blood, the dogma of His passive obedience in this matter must again remain united with the doctrine of His active obedience. True, His blood was taken; but it is also true that He Himself gave it, shed it, forced it out. He did this by the strength of His will, His personal, conscious will. Together with His blood, with the blood of the second Adam, with the blood of His whole church, with all the movement in the life of all His own, He labors in the direction of eternal youth, of eternal power, and of a blood-transcendent heaven. That also is the sense Paul would convey by his significant expression: the second Adam is the life-giving spirit. Hence we would not present the moment of Christ’s first shedding of blood by reason of the scourging of Pilate, that worldly judge, in a false light. Pilate does the scourging, yes, but God also does it. Pilate draws the blood, but God also by means of Pilate draws Jesus’ blood. God demands the blood of the second Adam. As the first drops of blood stream from the bruised and furrowed back of my Lord Jesus, time is striving towards eternity. The life of the Passover is already pushing its way through the narrow gates of death, is raging through Jesus’ swollen veins. Add to this the fact that Jesus sees approaching Him the terrible reality of that suffering which marks Him not only as sacrifice, not only as priest, but also as temple. For, according to the significant and well-conceived designation of one writer,[1] the law of sacrifice and its idea is comprised perfectly in Him. The concept of sacrifice is so perfectly comprised in Him because Christ is not merely the sacrifice, not merely the one who sacrifices, and not merely the temple in which the sacrifice is brought and in which the offer and the one who offers it come together, but because He is all three of these simultaneously. He is the sacrifice, for His blood must enter into death. He is the one who sacrifices, for He Himself must force His blood into the state of death. He is the temple, for His is not a partial possession of the spirit and consequently He, as the Bible itself tells us must through the eternal spirit offer Himself up to God blameless.
[1] Dr. Abraham Kuyper, Van de Voleinding, Volume 1, p. 47.
By revealing to us that Christ is also the temple, the Scriptures teach us the truth of what was said above when we stated that the issue of the blood of Christ may not be separated from the labor of His soul but that the whole struggle of His spirit is contained in His blood. Now there are two ways in which the sacred temple may be defiled. We have alluded to the first already. That is the way of those who speak only of Christ’s blood and who never or who at least never consciously speak of the spirit which labors in and through the blood. But we ourselves would be guilty of taking the second way to the profanation of the temple if we in our stress upon Christ’s spiritual struggle—think of the outlaw, of the negation, of the mockery on the official mountain, of the vicious circle and its breaking, of the maschil, of His repeated silence—should refuse to see His blood streaming from Him. True, we must not take Christ’s spirit out of His blood; but it is just as true that we should not take Christ’s blood out of His spirit. We must give both elements full consideration.
To return now to the beginning. We pointed to the fact that in each of the three periods of Christ’s suffering (the entering upon it, the passing through it, the conclusion of it), the subject of His blood comes to the foreground. And is there a difference? Yes, there is a difference, and a good reason for it in each instance. The reason is that in no single deed of Christ’s suffering may the elements of spiritual labor and of the shedding of blood be silent. As long as Christ is not bound and therefore may move around freely among God’s people, in God’s world, and in David’s city, He must fulfill His passion in spirit and in blood. That is why in the first division, the entire struggle of His passion simply had to be both spiritual and bloody. For it is God, and God alone[1] who drives that blood out of the Christ. Now Christ is bound and is brought before the judge. Again His blood is taken, and again a spiritual struggle has been fulfilled before that blood is shed. After awhile He will be crucified. That cross, too,—think, for instance, of His seven words, of the great stress which soul and spirit undergo because of His being forsaken— represents a spiritual conflict which issues afterwards in the sacrifice of His blood. The harmony, you see, is perfect; spirit and blood, invisible and visible sacrifice—the whole Christ.
[1] See Christ in His Suffering, Chapter 21, p. 370.
Now we can say this besides, about that difference between these three instances of the shedding of His blood. In Gethsemane Christ offers His blood only because He confronts the possibility of the cross. Upon Golgotha He offers it because of the bitter actuality of the cross. Between these two[2] comes the scourging: a situation in which the death on the cross seems to hover over the confines of possibility and actuality. For we observed, you remember, that Pilate seemed to be making a beginning of the execution of the death sentence, but that he also, both at the time of the first proposal[3] and the later one wanted to use the scourging as a means of averting the crucifixion. The cross, accordingly, remained a mere possibility. But Christ’s blood—and well He knows it—on this occasion falls upon the boundary line between life and death, between a return to life and a movement in the direction of death.
[2] That is why Golgotha also was placed over against Gethsemane in Christ in His Suffering, Chapter 21, p. 369.
[3] To chastise Jesus first and release Him then, Chatper 24, p. 418-19.
We see, then, that Christ strove to the point of shedding blood for this reason too: namely, that He might, while standing upon the border line between the two, make the good choice, the choice of obedience to God, and of faithful love to His people.
How sublimely great this matter! To make the good choice when He knew that no other was possible—that is difficult, but it is not the most difficult thing. That had been the situation in Gethsemane. There He had seen God’s might, and He had been bruised by it. He was compelled to do so. He simply had to. That would be the situation at Golgotha. There He would see the force of rams and bullocks, a very great host of them, and would be bruised. He would have to, simply have to choose death. But now, in the presence of these soldiers, it is possible for Him to turn back. He has read the uncertainty written in Pilate’s eyes. He knows it is possible for Him to soften the heart of the man. Meanwhile, He can now feel, keenly, what it means to give one’s blood to man, to dogs. Christ, wouldst Thou turn back still? The necessity of the crucifixion and the possibility of escape lie side by side; wouldst Thou still persuade Pilate to release Thee Christ, O Man, this hour can gratify Thee. Once Thou didst say that the scourging was most certainly the beginning of the crucifixion (Mat_20:19), but it seems now that the scourging may prove to be postponement first, and complete escape from the cross next. Is this not a pleasant surprise, O Christ? What of one unfulfilled prophecy! That is quickly forgotten, and life is very sweet. You have read the message gleaming in Pilate’s eye. Just notice—he is perfectly willing to risk another attempt to save Thee. He will tell the Jews: mark now, there is a law which says: pars pro toto.[4] Look, here is a part of His blood; see, it is gushing down His back—suppose we let this suffice; take the part for the whole: ecce homo—let Him go now—make Him a present of the rest of His blood. Pilate is still hesitating, Jesus. But He—nay, not He but God— wishes to keep Thee on that boundary line between necessity and possibility of escape. One word, a single impression upon Pilate’s soul, and—the world will go on as before!
[4] A part instead of the whole.
Then the whip screamed through the air. The body quivered: thereupon blood, more blood, and excruciatingly tortured flesh.
Christ stood on the boundary line between the land of freedom and the land of necessity, on the dividing line between the possibility of return and the necessity of laboring on to the point of blood. But, even as He stood here He fought the fight according to the Spirit. He said yea, to His God, and yea to the souls of the sheep. He confronted alternatives, and alternatives are always tantalizing to the human mind. But even as He stands over against those alternatives He makes the one good choice. He makes that choice while He is consciously expunging His blood, His own blood, the blood of all who believe. In this He is great and wonderful. Out of possibilities He creates God’s realities. To accept God’s will and to preserve God’s justice as He makes this choice is to be perfectly obedient as man. To change possibilities into God’s actualities, what is that but to be the Son of God, the ever-creating Word? How strangely warm it is becoming here in this public square. The air grows oppressive. I know that I am standing very near my Lord and God. I hear the crash of thunder; an act of creation is taking place. He speaks and it is done. He commands and it stands fast. Think! Suddenly a cross appears. The possibility of His cross which from eternity He has been conceiving, He now makes an actuality. The first word of the Bible has been superseded. What, pray, can a stroke of the whip do to Him now? He makes His angels flaming fires. On flying horses they sail high over the scourging. Protect me from the awfulness of this—a creative act is going on here. Hell is posting theses on its gates about possibility, and about Pontius Pilate, cunctator.[5] God be feared: neither the gates nor the ideas of hell have ever prevailed against Him. Not even the ideas, for He found that these weighed as heavily as gates. If I conceive it well, that also was present in my God when He created the world. Ideas were as concrete and as real as gates. One idea cannot outwit the Christ; a possibility cannot divert Him from an actuality. In His spirit He united possibility and actuality, for as Creator He first separated these two from each other. How troublesome He is to you, Pilate. Your wife is possessed of the devil, or is it of a demon? You feel a draft in your palace. A wind is blowing; I say it is the wind of the first day. Unless I put it that way, I cannot believe that I have any faith, any faith. . . . But go now, Pilate, and go, Claudia, and too, all ye devils. In His creative power He is perfect as God is perfect. He is that also in the art of living, of realizing the God He is in His humanity. Perfect in the art of living—and in the art of dying. His dying will presently become a creative act. The world revolves in its cyclical course. But the Logos was made flesh. Saint Augustine and the host of prophets and a small catechism and theology—offense and folly, power and wisdom.
[5] Play upon the phrase “Fabrius cunctator” — Fabius, the hesitant one who does not know which way to turn.
Be quiet now. Neither the gates nor the ideas of heaven have ever failed to prevail against Him. He has apprehended by Himself and by His own ideas. That is why He persists so obstinately: the Son of man must be delivered to the Gentiles, must be scourged, and then crucified.1 Make no further attempts, Pilate; you have not a chance against God. That which you have in your hands today is not a living soul but a life-giving spirit. The art of living! Yes, that is the power of the Creator!
The power of the Creator, indeed. The Creator clings to His ideas. He will not yield His honor to another, nor His praise to graven images, for these are but so many pieces of fiction departing from His ideas. I think I know now what a paradox is. If this Christ is God, is Creator, is one who realizes His own ideas, then the statement, “I shall give my honor to no other” is now literally translated into the sense: “I shall give my shame to no other, nor my cross to Claudia’s graven images.” I think I can understand now why He is so determined: I have seen the Will in action. In the beginning this Will created heaven and earth. The day is void and without form, but something will appear presently. The story has not yet ended.