So here we are. Stuck with ourselves, as usual.
Could be London 2023, but in fact it’s Palestine two thousand years ago. A quick thumbnail sketch of how we got here. This Nazarene from the Northern Wastes of Galilee, has kicked off big time in Jerusalem’s Temple. It’s one thing to preach that when the lord is at hand the spiritual and political establishments are redundant, provided you do it only to sheep-shaggers up in the hills far away. But once you bring your unwashed supporters down here and start attacking the money-changers - well, enough’s enough. He’s got to go.
The Sanhedrin want him dead. But they’re not absolutely sure they’ve the right to kill him. The Romans certainly do, however, so the Sanhedrin send him to Pilate. Pilate thinks: ‘Aha, but he’s not a Judean, so not, strictly speaking, my responsibility. What’s the point of having a puppet king up in Galilee if you can’t use him. I’ll send him to Herod.’ But, handed this hot potato, Herod has a get-out - ‘The crime was committed in Jerusalem, in Judea, so I simply don’t have jurisdiction. Sorry, Pilate, back to you.’
So here we are, back in Jerusalem: Pilate, Jesus, the a whipped-up crowd of Judeans. And we’re stuck with ourselves, as usual. I can recognise myself, and everyone else, in all three parties.
Pilate’s crucial moment is when he muses: ‘What is truth?’ What does he mean by this? Three interpretations spring to my mind. ‘What is truth?’ could be Pilate saying: ‘What is the truth about what happened? Where’s the evidence? What can my little grey cells make of it?’ It could, in other words, be the prompt of a genuine judicial enquiry. But ‘What is truth’ could also be Pilate in High Table mode, a baffled enquiry in the face of fundamentally conflicting religious and ethical, and therefore political, claims. Finally ‘What is truth’ could also simply be a military leader contemptuous of the whole game - how may legions does ‘truth’ have anyway’ that I should give a damn.
We don’t have to choose between these possibilities, and neither, crucially, does Pilate. Perhaps he means them all at the same time, with the weights he assigns them shifting literally minute to minute. He’s human, after all.
Then there are the Judeans. “Crucify, crucify, crucify!’
‘What, you’d rather have him killed than this actual convicted murderer Barrabas?’
‘Crucify, crucify!’
We’re only human, we’re stuck with ourselves, so let’s not pretend this couldn’t be us, now. On the one hand: ‘From the river to the sea’ is a horrifying response to the latest rampage of murdered Jewish women, children, partygoers and bystanders. But my instinctive response is ‘I don’t want genocidal antisemites in my country - deport them!’ It’s not so different as I could wish.
I think one way or another, we’re very unusual if we get through life without spending some time in that crowd: ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’
Finally there’s Jesus, and the nub of his response to overwhelming and murderous pressure: ‘Your words, not mine.’
The simplicity, the abandon, is extraordinary. Crucially, it throws back the challenge directly to both parties. To Pilate, it’s like saying: ‘So did you make up your mind about what is truth? In words you can say out loud?’ To the Judeans: ‘have you listened to yourselves?’
So here we are, stuck with ourselves as usual. Could be London, now.
The asymmetry in the treatment of different protesters tells us how corrupted by excessive pluralism we are as a society. I think it was Berlin that warned - in Nicomachean fashion - that pluralism itself could become tyrannical.
Thus it is we find ourselves in a cognitively dissonant society that sponsors antisemitism while maintaining a multicultural/anti-racist facade.
You can see it is antisemitic hate, simply by the fact that the protesters/jihadists never protest atrocities in the Yemen, perpetrated by other islamic states....