good friday

In the Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion on Good Friday, we hear Jesus responding to the accusations levelled against him. When Pilate asks him ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’, Jesus doesn’t respond defensively. He makes no attempt to prove his credentials. As he said to the high priest who questioned him on his teachings shortly before handing him over to the Roman authorities, ‘I have spoken openly to the world… I have said nothing in secret. Why do you ask me? Ask those who have heard me what I said to them; they know what I said.’

Jesus’s refusal of the judicial process tells us something about the perils of self-justification. It’s the most human thing in the world to defend oneself. It’s automatic, the first thing we leap to when accused of something—whether the accusation threatens our lives and freedom through the threat of punishment or simply reveals something about ourselves that we would rather not hear. Refusing this response when one’s life is at risk is a gift of supernatural grace. We could not accomplish it with our purely human natures. This is the gift of the martyrs, the template of all forms of sanctity. Denying the impulse to self-preservation.

Why not speak the truth, though, if one is in the right? When Jesus is asked whether he is King of the Jews, he responds ‘Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say this about me?’ When Pilate then responds that is Jesus’s own nation, the Jews, who made this accusation, Jesus responds ‘My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.’ Pilate then asks, ‘So you are a King?’ and Jesus answers with one of the most powerful self-disclosures in the Gospels: ‘You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.’

‘What is truth?’ says Pilate.

Jesus refuses the logic of the courtroom. He doesn’t defend himself against charges in the terms of the law. In so doing, he makes a mockery of our temporal pretensions towards justice and truth. Neither the Roman nor the Jewish law could fairly try Jesus; they could make no sense of who he was. Here was Truth Himself on trial. The eternal Logos who gave meaning to the world, underwriting every truth claim, every form of signification.

Aside from the fact that the salvation of the world necessitated Jesus’s conviction and execution, there is something to be learnt here about how frantic attempts to defend ourselves keep us twisted in sin. Defence usually entails counter-accusation rather than forgiveness. It might require twisting a story, leaving out our own culpability and contributions to what transpired as we flatten events into a simple victim-aggressor dynamic to make it easier to comprehend. The legal system is incapable of dealing with the sort of moral complexity that can be heard in the confessional or in prayer. It forces us to lie, whether outright or by omission. It demands a victim persona which seeks restitution. But there is no restitution in this world and the search for it is pointless, serving only to damage the person seeking it and heaping harm upon harm.

And then there is the demand to be heard—the desperate, insistent cry that others listen to us, validate us, believe us. I often think of the image in Simone Weil’s essay ‘Human Personality’ where a vagrant stands in front of a magistrate and, weighed down by a lifetime of incommunicable suffering and choices proceeding from that suffering, is unable to articulate his own defence. She writes:

There is a natural alliance between truth and affliction, because both of them are mute suppliants, eternally condemned to stand speechless in our presence. Just as a vagrant accused of stealing a carrot from a field stands before a comfortably seated judge who keeps up an elegant flow of queries, comments and witticisms while the accused is unable to stammer a word, so truth stands before an intelligence which is concerned with the elegant manipulation of opinions.

I read Pilate’s ‘What is truth?’ as exposing the arbitrary quality of our human claims to truth and, as enshrined in law, justice. He knows that the law is inadequate to try the man before him; he knows that all our little systems for getting at the truth has little to do with truth as a transcendent reality (who stood before him that day.) Attempts to get closer to truth through natural reason are laudable but will never be sufficient. The Christian tradition relies on revelation as well as reason because reason was capable of trying and executing revelation itself.

Jesus was the ultimate victim because he did not victimise himself. A normal human being, trapped in sin, would invariably respond to unjust arrest, detention and trial, much less execution, with anger, defensiveness; he would lash out, scream, cry, throw things. Not go willingly to the slaughter knowing himself innocent. This is a difficult teaching, perhaps the most difficult. If we try to imitate it, not being perfect as Jesus was, it can easily lead us into the opposite sin of self-destruction. It is necessary to hold onto dignity. But it does tell us something real about the dangers of self-defence. The posture you must adopt to defend yourself is not the posture of Christian piety, which is supplication.