Ecce Homo...

...'Behold the Man' as Pilate truly, if not understanding fully by a long shot, spoke. Was he to know who Christ was - the scorned, spurned, beaten yet majestic and awesome figure standing before him - that fateful night and dawning day?

The Gospel accounts seem to intimate that indeed Pilate had some inner awareness of soul the true being and nature of Jesus, though if so his ultimate decision to permit the Crucifixion was the more damning of him.

Setting though aside such largely unnecessary speculation the words - a challenge, an admonition who can tell? - 'Ecce Homo' have echoed down the centuries as an insistent call to all to gaze on that bruised and bleeding face, a head crowned with mocking thorns and a body cloaked in false imperial purple, and to require of all of us to answer truthfully as to what we see there: a broken man about to die, or the Redeemer of the world?

That He was both - the moribund man and the risen Lord - is indeed the great 'scandal' as Saint Paul called it of the Christian faith. Not for us a triumphant warrior king, sweeping all earthly enemies aside in a rush to victory, but a 'was crucified, dead and was buried' man and Son of God both.

This 'scandal' is too much for many and not just those who reject the Christian faith. There are many who say that they are Christian and yet have not the heart or the stomach to face the true, cruel and monstrous reality of the Cross and the dying Jesus hanging there in mortal agony.

Why this thought tonight when one avers that this place is not the place for sermonising?

It is because I have been reading a biography of William Wilberforce of late and have come across this telling tale.

Wilberforce was on the stump, travelling the length and the breadth of the land in order to drum up odium for slave trading and support for its abolition. There were many who instantly accepted his message, whilst there were not a few who opposed it most vigorously.

There was though one whose concern was not for the debate itself but for the very unseemliness, as he perceived it, of a wealthy Evangelical Christian - and Wilberforce was all of these - putting himself at so much risk of political and social opprobrium by supporting black slaves against white masters.

This man, a Bishop in the Church of England, remonstrated with Wilberforce when they met pointing to a painting on his study wall and crying out "If you're not careful, you'll end up like him!" The subject of the painting to which the hapless Bishop was pointing and declaring a thing most not to be like, was of course Christ Crucified.

'Ecce Homo' was saying, once more, the poor uncomprehending Bishop Pilate, who could not see or accept that 'death, even unto death on a cross' is the true calling of all Christians if it be God's will.