Column

Creed

Easter

28 March 2024

4 min read

Pilate: a lord of misrule

Agents of chaos still inhabit our world today.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A balcony scene viewed behind shows a Roman ruler leaning over a balcony to the crowd while gesturing to a semi-naked Christ.

Ecce homo – behold the man.

Antonio Ciseri, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve had a lot of Pontius Pilate in my life lately. And this week he’s set to play arguably the second-biggest role in human history, as the Passion of the Christ reaches its climax on Good Friday.

The reason I’ve been spending a lot of time with Pilate is that I’ve done a podcast about him for Things Unseen, which sounds like a sister operation for this platform, but isn’t. Its title was Pontius Pilate: A man like us and addressed the question “Was the man who sent Jesus to the cross evil or merely weak?”

I’m accustomed to Pilate being a paradigm for flawed human leadership – vain, indecisive, distracted, cowardly. A former archdeacon of London, the Ven. Lyle Dennen, had a very good stock sermon entitled “Pontius Pilate’s Brother”, in which he recalled that his elder sibling had played Pilate in a school play.

Consequently, the headmaster had made a habit of greeting little Lyle in the corridor with the words: “Ah, if it isn’t Pontius Pilate’s brother.” It was an engaging way to develop the thought that we’re all Pilate’s brothers and sisters, collectively executing the Christ on a daily basis.

My fellow podcast panellist, the novelist and musician Chibundu Onuzo, was having none of this “Pilate inside us” stuff, making the case for his particular circumstantial weakness. It’s a good listen. But it’s set me thinking, since we recorded it a fortnight ago, a whole lot more about the local Roman procurator, the man who has history’s worst morning at the office.

I’ve come to consider that there is a third way, a via media, between this being a verbatim transcript and a metaphor for his judgment by worldly authorities.

The veracity of Pilate’s gospel role is hotly disputed. He’s undoubtedly a real historical figure, as is Jesus of Nazareth, and his jurisdiction presided over the crucifixion of the latter. Beyond that, the interpretation of his scriptural role varies.

Perhaps it was written back, particularly in John’s gospel, as a means of exculpating the repressive Romans of Jesus’s death and putting the blame firmly on the Jews (with very terrible historical consequences).

If that is even partly so, we’re invited to view Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus in his palace allegorically; especially around Pilate’s rhetorical question of Jesus, “What is truth?”, when the answer is literally standing right in front of him and from which he doesn’t even bother to await an answer.

So if this gospel section contains the kind of truth that the Nazarene’s parables held, what is it meant to tell us? I’ve come to consider that there is a third way, a via media, between this being a verbatim transcript and a metaphor for his judgment by worldly authorities.

Pilate, as he faces the mob bent of insurrection and baying for blood outside the praetorium, is an agent of worldly chaos too, a lord of misrule

Before I left for a holiday in the Balkans early this month, I decided on a book to take with me. Should I re-read Ann Wroe’s excellent Pilate: The biography of an invented man, in preparation for the podcast? No, I thought, there’s plenty of time for that. So I took a novel I’ve been meaning to read for decades, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

Alarmingly, it turns out that Bulgakov’s novel has a recurrent deconstructive sub-plot of the fate of Pilate running throughout it. This was the sort of coincidence of which we’re taught to be suspicious at theological college. So I paid attention.

The book’s main narrative is a satire of Stalin’s post-revolutionary Russia. Satan, in the character of Woland, visits Moscow to see how things are going. Death and destruction ensue, as Woland and his weird retinue cause havoc. Yet, along the way (spoiler alert), he reconciles a crazed and failed author (the Master) to the love of his life (Margarita), which is not a bad thing to do.

A lot of it is in the rather annoying style of magic realism. But annoyance is a point. The work of a devil in human affairs is annoying, but it doesn’t have the last word, just as Pilate doesn’t.

What I took from this novel was the darkness of chaos before the divine order that is brought in the act of creation, from which humanity constantly falls back into chaos.

Woland isn’t really evil (he’s quite kind to Margarita and may even be in love with her), he’s just the agent of chaos, like Pilate. A lord of misrule, if you will.

We have many such agents of chaos in the world, from US and European politics, to Russia (again) and Ukraine, from Israel and Gaza to the famine of Sudan and the global technological interference of China.

Pilate, as he faces the mob bent of insurrection and baying for blood outside the praetorium, is an agent of worldly chaos too, a lord of misrule. But as Bulgakov’s novel tells us, he can be redeemed.

The difference between him and us is that we have the benefit of hindsight. When we ask despairingly, like him, on all the Good Fridays that afflict the world, “What is truth?”, we may not (also like him) recognise it.

But, unlike him, we have the chance finally to recognise that truth, as it stands right in front of us on Easter morning.

The Wild God we can't coerce

Weird and increasingly encountered beyond the wilderness.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

A pianist raises his arms while sitting at a grand piano amid recording equipment.

Nick Cave recording Wild God.

nickcave.com

Christianity is a wild thing.

I say this, even while only half-understanding what I’m saying. It’s something that I’m learning. Or perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that it’s something that I’m unlearning. Because, admittedly, I’m far more familiar with a somewhat domesticated view of my own faith tradition. The kind that allows me to fashion fences out of my expectations; to put parameters around God’s presence and boundaries upon his behaviour. Both of which are a farce, of course - but a comforting farce, none the less.

You see, there is nothing ‘comfortable’ about a God who cannot be wholly predicted or comprehended, let alone controlled or contained. A wild God is always going to be a challenge to a culture that has enthroned comfort. We’re too easily spooked and too unused to the sensation of being cosmically baffled.

But, affronting as it may be, I am trying my best to sit in the knowledge that the God I believe in is a wild God. And I’m finding this wildness increasingly hard to ignore. Perhaps it’s all the Rowan Williams I’ve been reading, or my newfound interest in the Romantics (as in, the eighteenth and nineteenth century poets, not the 1970’s American rock band). Or maybe it has more to do with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ new album, which I have been listening to relentlessly over the last week.

In this musical offering, Nick Cave introduces us to his ‘Wild God’, who I think is my God too. It’s just that ‘wild’ has never been the first adjective I reach for when describing him.

Until now, I suppose.

Let me clarify what I mean by wild, because what I’m not saying is that God is inherently chaotic, unruly, reckless or irrational. Wild Gods, as we know them from the myths and legends, act on tempestuous whims, and are more than a little havoc prone. They are perilous, largely because one can never truly know where they stand with them. That couldn’t be further from what I mean. The entire Old Testament - as complex, nuanced and masterful as it is - can be understood as a collection of ways in which the God at its centre is saying – this is who I am, this is what I desire, this is what I’m going to do, this is where you stand with me. If you were to read the Bible, it would become pretty clear pretty quickly: God is insistent that those who seek to know him will never have to second guess him. God’s wildness does not mean that we cannot know the essence of who he is or how he feels towards us. I like to think that we can endeavour to know him accurately, but never exhaustively.

Rather, what I’m trying to get my head and heart around is the knowledge that God, and therefore Christianity, cannot be wholly domesticated. Despite my best efforts, it cannot be made into an entirely comfortable and cozy thing. To make it so, one would have to dilute it, shrink it, bleed any truth out of it. In his poem - Sometimes a Wild God -Tom Hirons writes,

Oh, limitless space.
Oh, eternal mystery.
Oh, endless cycles of death and birth.
Oh, miracle of life.
Oh, the wondrous dance of it all’.

There’s an innate weirdness to the Christian worldview, a pure wildness at the heart of it. It’s brimming with mystery and mysticism. As Hirons hints, it’s bigger and more consequential than our comfort-zones would like it to be. And, what’s more, much of it is communicated through the natural world. Biblical narratives and poetry are endlessly pointing us toward the places and spaces that are outside human cultivation – the stars, the mountains, the oceans – the things that pre-date and will outlive us.

Christianity is wild in that there’s an alluring organic-ness about it. Its truth sits beyond human manipulation and coercion.

For millennia, whole lives have been given over to this truly wild and, I believe, wildly true story. Can I give you just two recent examples? Two people who have (utterly unexpectedly) adventured their way into this wild and wonderful way of seeing the world? Two people I’ve had the joy of learning from over the past year?

First up is Paul Kingsnorth.

Paul is an award-winning poet and a best-selling author of both fiction (including the Buckmaster Trilogy: Wake, Beast and Alexandria) and non-fiction (including Real England, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and his ongoing Sub-Stack series: Abbey of Misrule). He is, and always has been, an advocate for treating the natural world as if it were far more than a machine to be used or a resource to be obtained. Such behaviour is, according to Paul, nothing short of sacrilegious. As well as an enchantment with what he can see and sense in the natural world, he also has a long-standing fascination with all things mystical.

Buddhism, Witchcraft – you name it, he’s tried it.

He told Justin Brierley and I the story of how he his adventures have led him to arrive at the wildest possible destination: Christianity.  

And then there’s the renowned mythologist, Dr Martin Shaw, who decided to do a 101-day wild vigil in Dartmoor. Despite not being a Christian, on the very last night, he prayed. While praying, he looked up and saw something utterly unexplainable, something ‘properly Old Testament’. And that was it – after a night of dancing, several other ‘odd’ experiences, and eighteen months of deep pondering – he was able to say, ‘I went into the forest expected to be wedded to the wild and I came out wedded to Christ’.

Thinking about it, it’s probably no accident that ‘Christianity’ began on the margins, and from there, worked its way into the cities. There was a time where the prediction of Jesus’ arrival was being yelled out into the countryside, so loudly that people were emptying the surrounding towns to come and hear more. A time when rumours of redemption were being whispered in the rural hills. A time when its chief messenger was an inexplicably weird man named John the Baptist; who shunned his prestigious priestly heritage to live in the wilds, to dress in camel skins, to eat honey and insects and insist upon the imminent coming of the long-awaited Messiah. This Messiah, by the way, who would be born where animals are kept, sleep on mountains, retreat into deserts, walk on water, speak to storms, and break people (including himself) out of stone graves.

You see what I mean, Christianity is a wild story to believe and live in accordance with.

It’s the story that drove the ‘Desert Mothers and Fathers’ of the Third Century AD to reject civilisation and all its comforts, in order to seek God in the silence and solitude of the desert. It’s the story that is still inspiring people to live in caves on Mount Athos, secluded islands just off the coast of Wales and forests in the heart of Ireland. An uncontainable message has, since its inception, been lived out in uncontainable places.

Honestly, you want weird? Christianity can darn-well give you weird.

Don’t be fooled by over-familiarity or be swayed by that pesky left-side of your brain, the part that wants to convince you that you know all that there is to know. Christianity is a story that I, myself, had forgotten was quite this wild.