Rector’s Reflections
Monday 25th March 2024
Why was Jesus Crucified?
As we are now in Holy Week, I thought it would be appropriate to start a fresh series of reflections on a topic particularly relevant to this special week in the Church’s year. There are so many topics to write upon. I have chosen to focus on one simple but profound question: why was Jesus crucified?
A straightforward answer to this question is that Jesus was crucified because Pontius Pilate decided that this was to be his fate.
At the time of Jesus, the Holy Land was part of the Roman Empire. The Romans sometimes ruled their Empire directly through one of their own officials – this was the case for Judea, the contemporary name for the area around Jerusalem and the surrounding district. The relevant Roman official at the time Jesus was crucified was Pontius Pilate, who was procurator of Judaea from AD 25-27 to AD 35. Incidentally, the dates of Pilate’s term of office help to fix the date of the Crucifixion itself. The area known as Galilee was administered on the Roman’s behalf by Herod Antipas.
It seems to have been the case that only the Romans had the right to order someone to be crucified. The accounts of Jesus’ trial and execution found in the New Testament seem to make this assumption. They also tell us that it was Pontius Pilate himself who gave the order for Jesus to be crucified. He was in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’ trial, and there seems to be no evidence of any desire by Pilate to postpone the decision, or delegate it to some other member of the Imperial bureaucracy.
So it was Pilate who made the decision to have Jesus crucified. He could have decided to take some other course of action. For example, he might have chosen not to be get involved in this matter at all, on the grounds that it was simply a dispute between Jews over matters relating to their religious beliefs and practices. If he felt that some sort of punishment was appropriate, he might have decided to order Jesus to be scourged, and leave it at that. Or he might have decided that Jesus was really a Galilean, and so he could be passed over to Herod Antipas, who was Tetrarch of Galilee, to be dealt with as Herod saw fit. Let Herod take the decision - and let him take the blame, should Herod’s decision prove unpopular.
But despite these other options, Pilate chose to order Jesus to be crucified. Why did he make this choice? What do the New testament writers have to say on the topic?
We will explore this further in the days ahead.