Loving Pontius Pilate

As Easter is approaching I thought we should take a closer look at Pontius Pilate, a man with whom Jesus is forever entwined. This episode offers a different approach to looking at those embedded in the system of unjust decision-making throughout the world and suggests that we muster up compassion in the most unexpected corners, breaking down our dualist patterns. It also includes a reading from Psalm 38.

Books mentioned in this episode:
Falling Upward by Richard Rohr

Thank you so much for listening. Please consider sharing or subscribing!
For more information about me and my work, please visit http://www.brianneturczynski.com or http://www.lovingtheimperfect.com

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to Loving the Imperfect Podcast. I’m Brianne Turczynski. Today’s psalm is 38. It’s another long psalm from David. This one’s a teeny bit shorter than last week’s because Easter’s coming up and this episode will contain information about Pontius Pilate. I think I should read the whole thing.

 Psalm 38, a Psalm of David: 

“Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger, or discipline me in your wrath.  Your arrows have pierced me.  And your hand has come down on me. Because of your wrath, there is no health in my body.  There is no soundness in my bones because of my sin.  My guilt has overwhelmed me, like a burden too heavy to bear.

My wounds fester and are loathsome. Because of my sinful folly, I am bowed down and brought very low.  All day long, I go about mourning. My back is filled with searing pain. There is no health in my body. I am feeble and utterly crushed. I groan in anguish of heart.  All my longings lie open before you, Lord.

My sighing is not hidden from you. My heart pounds, and my strength fails me. Even the light has gone from my eyes. My friends and companions avoid me because of my wounds.  My neighbors stay far away.  Those who want to kill me set their traps. Those who would harm me talk of my ruins.

All day long they scheme and lie.  I am like the deaf who cannot hear, like the mute who cannot speak.  I have become like one who does not hear, whose mouth can offer no reply.  Lord, I wait for you. You will answer, Lord my God.  For I said, do not let them gloat or exalt themselves over me when my feet slip.

For I am about to fall, and my pain is ever with me.  I confess my iniquity. I am troubled by my sin.  Many have become my enemies without cause. Those who hate me without reason are numerous. Those who repay my good with evil lodge accusations against me.  Though I seek only to do what is good. Lord do not forsake me.

Do not be far from me, my God. Come quickly to help me.  My Lord and my Savior.”

This psalm is asking for God’s mercy. I should mention that the study Bible because I went down below, just to get some ideas for, you know, what to pinpoint in here.  And it says David saw anguish as judgment from God for his sins.  sometimes God has to punish his children to bring them back to himself.  Okay, so, these are some of the additions that I don’t like in the study bible. Additions like, sometimes God has to punish his children with illness, basically, to bring them back to himself.  And I will say that this is wrong. We have bodies that are like imperfect machines, but they are perfect in many ways.

My grandma died on January 1st from, well, she had cancer, but her health was just deteriorating.  But you could see how much her body was working just to keep her alive. Even when she wasn’t eating and wasn’t drinking, her body, the body will do everything it can to keep us alive.

And it’s really miraculous the way the body works.  And in that is perfection really. But we have things that go on here and there and things that are, that go wrong.  When we’re stressed, from circumstances, maybe even from our own guilt or anxiety. Our bodies often react by making us sick.

It is much of the time connected to our lives, the lives that we’re currently living. It can be a sign for us to turn back and see things differently and see what’s most important.  Will I go as far as to say that in some cases, brief sickness can be good? I think sometimes if there is a positive outcome, and it doesn’t lead to death. But sickness is a time, a liminal space of the unknown.  We’re really at the mercy of our bodies at that moment. We have to give our will, give. our will over to the health and the healing of our own bodies.  So, we have no control at all. We have to say, Hey, I’m in pain.

Even though I have a million things to do today, all of that stuff can wait. All we can do is be gentle with ourselves by resting and eating better and drinking better and allowing others to take care of us.

Being sick can be a beautiful time of rest and gentleness. If we allow it to be. Most of us wear ourselves out by working too much and trying to impress everyone with how amazing and dedicated we are to our jobs. And sickness can be a tremendous relief from that world.

And so, for anyone to say that sickness is a kind of punishment, sure it feels that way, especially if the illness comes with pain and impending death. But it can remind us not to take our health for granted.  And to remind us to take it easy and take it slow and care a little less about winning the accomplishment medals. They will never get you to the place your heart most longs. It will never get you to that place.

I just wanted to address that. That sickness is not a punishment. It is to bring you into some sort of awareness. And when we’re sick or we are not able to do everything, maybe we’re in pain, currently, right now, my back is out. I laid in bed all day yesterday and it was amazing.

 So, I want to talk about Pontius Pilate, because, you know, a lot of that psalm was about the guilt that David felt because he had done something wrong. And I’m sure that Pontius Pilate felt very guilty for condemning Jesus to death. Okay, Easter is coming up, so maybe you’re going to be going to a Good Friday service soon where they go through the whole Passion.

When I was a little girl, or even in my 20s probably—might sound stupid—but I’m just going to tell you anyway. We would recite the Nicene Creed in church. I go to a Protestant church, I’ve mentioned it before, I’m Episcopal. I’ve been going there since I was baptized. And we would get to the part when we were talking about Jesus, we would say he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. And every time we said this, a little flame of anger would rise up in me toward Pontius Pilate, and, you know, being, you go to a church so you’re loyal to the person that you’re following, which is Jesus. And so, you have this loyalty in anything, you know, you, you hate that he had to go through all that. And especially if you go to a Good Friday service, oh my gosh, and they act out the whole thing, or, at least recite it all.

That can be a moving experience.  And we must go through it every year. And it can be painful because most of us don’t want to hear about that happening to anyone, the torture and the, the mocking and just the injustice of it and the violations.  We don’t want to hear about that. So it’s upsetting.

So, to hear that, oh, we can blame one man for this. And it’s Pontius Pilate. He listened to the crowd. How dare he?  But I’ll tell you, In the words of my college professor, nothing is more dangerous than a mob. And they knew this 2000 years ago, they knew this. And so, you want to appease the mob to get them to go away.

So a few years ago when I was going through some pretty terrible mental tortures, I would say, basically nightly I would get these like agoraphobic panic attacks and it lasted seven years like almost every single night they would come for seven years. So, naturally, I ventured deeper into spiritual study as a way to bring myself closer to God, the only source I felt that could save me from this mysterious affliction that just, seemed to come out of nowhere.

And it felt very dark. And so, I was trying to get to the light. I was trying to see more light and stay with the light.  I wanted my peace back and I felt that I could, that could be found in reading about Jesus who, you know, we call the Prince of Peace. He is the one who brings peace. He is the one who guides you through the wilderness, this is what we’ve been taught. So naturally that’s just what I gravitated to, to help heal me. Richard Rohr teaches us in his book Falling Upward that to have an authentic, transformative experience, we must leave our places of comfort.  And if the mythological stories have told us anything, they have said that we must also descend into the depths of hell. So, I believe, that because I have never really left home physically, inside my mind, the comfort of my peace left me all that time, and I descended into what seemed very much like hell. And I did meet angels and demons and I met saints and others who have passed over in books and in teachings and sometimes in dreams, and they all guided me either to or away from the next trail I was to take to find myself out of the wilderness.

History teaches us that when you are sort of stuck in one place, and you have nowhere to go, you end up going deeper within yourself because you have nowhere to go on the outside. We see this transformative experience happening to people who are in prison, and we’ve seen it in countries that have isolated themselves, and we’ve seen it in countries that were blockaded by their enemies.  There’s always some sort of, transformative experience. They get better from the inside.

And so, when I say that the only thing I was grasping was spiritual, spiritual teachings that really did transform me over time.  So, one night, I took my Bible to bed, and I was reading about the Passion of Christ. I think it must have been Easter, around Easter or something. But I read the part of Pontius Pilate, and that moment when Pilate is asking Jesus a lot of questions, and Pilate says, You are a king, then.  And Jesus says, you say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.

And so I just started to cry, because Pontius Pilate was caught in the web of the system, the bureaucracy, like so many of us are. And so many of us don’t have a choice, or at least we think we don’t have a choice, because we’re trying to protect our families, our children, our lifestyle. We’re trying to protect something, and so we go along with these systems.

 While inside we know what we’re doing is wrong, most of the time.  We know something inside us doesn’t feel right about it.  For some of the systems that are corrupt, not all systems are corrupt.  But for those of us who are involved and intertwined and embedded in systems that are corrupt, there’s a part of us that knows that, and our spirit is constantly fighting against our conscience.

And so that can develop stress and guilt within us that can create illness in our bodies. There is pressure from the outside or from our boss. And so, we go against our own conscience. I believe that Pilate did this and he was compelled by the force of the system to make the decision that he did.

And he went with the people, the mob. Most of the world population is caught up in this spinning wheel, and yet we condemn him in our liturgy every Sunday.  If by saying he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, we are really saying he was crucified under the system which holds most of the world captive in unjust decision-making.

Then, that is fine.  I’m just suggesting that We rework our mindset. And give some mercy to this one man we keep blaming every Sunday.  Because we all are at fault. Anyone who has ever fallen in line with an unjust system, the powers and the principalities that run our world, we are a Pontius Pilate.

And we do this innocently enough.  Remember that Jesus said, “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.” Some people understand that the Nicene Creed is just stating the facts. They’re stating the facts that Pontius Pilate was the ruling factor in the crucifixion.  And that’s just a fact for them. And, and that’s okay. But what does this do to the children? When they hear that Sunday after Sunday, he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. We’re sort of insinuating that he was killed because of this man, Pontius Pilate. So, to me, it reinforces that dualistic Us versus them mentality and the blame game I just think that we should be aware of that, maybe.  Or at least make sure the children know that it’s different than that.

But I will tell you Pontius Pilate’s clever move, and this is what made me weep.  He knew he was caught in the system too deep, and though he may have looked the part of real power, he was imprisoned himself by this system like everyone else.  But he did something miraculous, after speaking with Jesus.

I imagine when Pontius Pilate was questioning him, he and Jesus shared a moment,  and Pilate looked at Jesus in the face, and Pilate saw that he was who he was. And I imagine Pilate saw that Jesus was the truth.  That the world he was living in and the world that Jesus was living in Pilate had this schism occur in his brain. And he saw that he was in fact living a lie.  And so, when the time came to write the charge on the plaque for the cross, Pilate wrote it very carefully.  He wrote.

Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews, cleverly telling everyone for all time, defying the system in the only way that he could,  because he wasn’t strong enough against his own cowardice,

but he wrote what he wrote, right?  He could have written it differently. He could have said that Jesus claimed to be the king of the Jews, but he didn’t. And when everybody questioned him about this, he said, “I wrote what I wrote.”

 He wrote simply, King of the Jews, I N R I the Latin initialization of Jesus of Nazarene. King of the Jews and Pilate finally reinstated some power within the system.  He did all he could at that moment to make it right. And these are his last words about Jesus.  And those words have stood the test of time.

A constant reminder to me of how the system has a hold on all of us. I’m suggesting that we do what we can within those systems. Do all the good we can within the system to eventually right the twisted gears. The Blessed Mother herself taught us how to do this when she took the baby Jesus in to be consecrated in the temple.

She walked into the temple into the old traditions, into the laws, into that place where those laws and those rules were built and upheld, but she took something new with her she brought something new, and Jesus would show them in time. At my job a while back I spoke out against the system a while back because I  respectfully and innocently thought I was trying to help. By helping them to realize some of their folly in the system.  And the system hated me because I refused to jive with it.  So, they didn’t renew my contract. The system will tell you not to tell your story. The system will tell you not to be vulnerable. And so, even me telling this story, about a, shameful moment in my life, is me fighting that system. Fighting the system that wants to silence us from telling these stories because we might sound pathetic. And since when do we have to pretend that we are stronger than we really are?

It’s my attempt to fight that system that tells us not to show weakness.  So be prepared to make enemies when you beat against injustice in the world, or at your place of work.  For a long time after that, I felt I had done something wrong which is exactly what people who mistreat you and abuse you want you to think. They want you to think it’s your fault, so they don’t have to feel guilty at all for what they did to you.  So they can have a clean break. And they don’t have to live with the guilt hanging over them.  That’s part of the machine. And they want you to feel ashamed. So ashamed, in fact, that you never talk about it. Meanwhile, they keep the system going this way. My priest and my spiritual director helped me understand that I shouldn’t be ashamed of the fact that I was let go at the end of the year, that it was a tremendous compliment to the work I was doing there, that I was unraveling them, I was a nuisance.

For me, it was much like last week’s crucifixion. Psalm 31.  “For I hear many whispering terror on every side. They conspire against me and plot to take my life.”  And God knows how long they plotted to get rid of me while they smiled at me in the hallways and the thresholds of copy rooms and lunchrooms. And I never saw it coming except for one early morning before I left for work. I let my dog out and I heard the birds singing and talking and they seemed to be warning me of a coming disaster.  And for some reason, I thought about Jesus in the garden and his prayer to God right before he was crucified.

And I wondered if the birds sounded the same to him.  If he, if there was any part of him at all that found peace in their innocent song.  If they sang to him, peace, brother, peace, all shall be well.  If they gave him any comfort at all, or if he found the sound to be menacing,  a looming warning of oncoming torture and pain and death,

 And so, if you do decide to take small steps toward justice, realize that depending on who you’re dealing with, you might make some enemies. You might even get fired.  But if you believe in it enough, then maybe it’s worth it. Maybe you need not be there anymore. Maybe it’s a toxic environment.

So, speaking of Pontius Pilate, I do think it’s good to remember what he did. And that sign that he wrote is in many churches. It’s a sign that we’re all part of the system.  And it’s one signal, it’s one sign that one man made to fight against that in the tiniest way that he could. Even he, who was a puppet, basically. He was a puppet of the greater system. And so many of us are. he showed us a teeny, little window out of the system. Of course, Jesus taught us the ultimate lesson by giving his whole self. We’re asked to do our small part I think, to fight against injustice it takes a lot of courage and will do a tremendous amount of good. Thank you for joining me on Loving the Imperfect. Have a great Easter Celebration. Next week, we’ll be covering Psalm 45.

Ah, and it’s written by the Sons of Korah. So, it will be a little bit different next time. Thank you so much for joining me.  I’ll see you next week.