Hi all, since Kay is dealing with more important things (ie RL!) and Justa is packing to go to the Balkans, I volunteered to lead this week's Bible Study on the Passion narrative in Mark's gospel. Those of you who "know" me from these threads will be aware that I'm a liberal rather than a fundamentalist where the Bible is concerned, but you'll be relieved to know that I do actually believe that the Passion happened pretty much as described so I won't be horrifying you too much I hope .
When I read through the passage, I was expecting to focus on Jesus. After all, it is about him. But I found myself thinking more about Pilate, and wondering about the nature of power.
Pilate gets a bad press, understandably. He knowingly sent an innocent man to a horrible death, for political reasons. Most of us would agree that's a bad thing. But to what extent did he have a choice?
Pilate was the Governor - he was the man Rome had put in charge, he had an army he could call on to back up his decisions, and the whole power of the Roman Empire behind him, though it was a bit far away to call on every time things got tricky. So he had power. Lots of it. And yet... Rome was canny. It knew that defeating and invading a country was the relatively easy bit. Occupying a country for the long term was much harder (our politicians could take note of this...). So Rome didn't try to make the occupied countries do everything the Roman way, they let them do things the way they had always done, keeping their religious and community leaders, living their lives pretty much as before, so long as they were peaceful and paid their taxes. Pilate had the power in theory, but he needed the cooperation of the local religious/community leaders to keep everything going smoothly. So he had to give them what they wanted to some extent.
The religious leaders had power - within limits - but did they think of themselves as powerful? The stereotype says they did, and wanted to keep it that way. But maybe they genuinely thought that another rebel would only cause problems for the people in general, not just for their own interests. So they had power, but were also scared.
Barrabas had some power - he was popular, he was a rebel leader. OK he was temporarily in an awkward position, but he still had popular support. The crowd was happy to shout for his release when they were prompted to, and that had influence if not actual power.
The crowd had power - though without leaders they didn't know what to do with it! If the people had risen up in a revolt, the Roman army would have struggled to contain it. But there were too many different factions and they didn't work together (Do watch Monty Python's Life Of Brian for a good view of what the Holy Land was like at this time - they get lots of things right!)
Then we come back to Jesus. He had power, He was God Incarnate. He could have changed things, smitten the soldiers, taken over the leadership. But He wasn't going to use his power that way, he set it aside and accepted what had to happen, in order to achieve something that power could not. Powerlessness was what achieved a permanent change in the universe, powerlessness was what gave us a link to God which had never been possible before.
"For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life"