Good Friday Homily 2025
Though there are independent records of the execution of Jesus by Roman occupation forces under the prefect Pontius Pilate, we have no record of the trial itself except for the accounts in the gospels. This is not really that surprising. Judea wasn’t exactly a great assignment, and there are few records of Pilate’s ten years of service in the region. He disappears from the historic record after he is dismissed from his post and returns to Rome.
We know that Jesus had followers and friends among the Jewish elite, including Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, and the gospels tell us Peter and a second disciple made it inside, so accounts of events before the Sanhedrin may be historically accurate. Did he, as legend often suggests, also have would be followers among the Roman soldiers?
It seems unlikely that Pilate was the wishy-washy dreamer who washed his hands of the execution. Pilate had little regard for Jewish religion and custom, and a prefect was a military governor, not a civilian. His rise to that middling high office most certainly reflected a cold and calculated brutality.
If the events are dramatized, there is no question that they are characteristic of Roman rule. Though the cross has become the symbol of Christianity, the crucifixion of Jesus and the two bandits was far from a one-off. There were crosses outside of every city in the Roman colonies, containing the dead and rotting and sometimes still living and moaning bodies of runaway slaves and insurrectionists.
But tonight I want to focus on what happens before Jesus is nailed to a cross. There is, of course, the physical torture. Interrogated all night, he is then flogged, a mock crown placed on his head, a purple robe like that of a king across his bleeding back. He would eventually die under a placard naming him King of the Jews, often abbreviated INRI from the Latin.
Evil does not simply seek to execute threats to the powerful. It seeks to first humiliate its victim, to strip them of their dignity, of what makes them human. This is its own form of terrorism.
Continue reading “Good Friday and Easter Sunday 2025”