John 19:15

The Jews thought they could alarm Pilate more by the mention of Caesar, than by telling him of their law, as they had done above; We have a law, and by that law He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God. So it follows. But the Jews cried out, saying, you let this Man go, you are not Caesar’s friend; whosoever makes himself a king speaks against Caesar.

But how can you prove this? By His purple, His diadem, His chariot, His guards? Did He not wall; about with His twelve disciples only, and every thing mean about Him, food, dress, and habitation?

Pilate was before afraid not of violating their law by sparing Him, but of killing the Son of God, in killing Him. But he could not treat his master Caesar with the same contempt with which he treated the law of a foreign nation: When Pilate therefore heard that saying, he brought Jesus forth, and sat down in the judgment seat in a place that is called the Pavement, but in the Hebrew, Gabbatha.

He went out to examine into the matter: his sitting down on the judgment seat shows this.

The tribunal is the seat of the judge, as the throne is the seat of the king, and the chair the seat of the doctor.

Lithostraton, i.e. laid with stone; the word signifies pavement. It was an elevated place. And it was the preparation of the Passover.

Parasceve, i.e. preparation. This was a name for the sixth day, the day before the Sabbath, on which they prepared what was necessary for the Sabbath; as we read, On the sixth day they gathered twice as much bread. As man was made on the sixth day, and God rested on the seventh; so Christ suffered on the sixth day, and rested in the grave on the seventh. And was about the sixth hour.

Why then does Mark say, And it was the third hour, and they crucified Him? Because on the third hour our Lord was crucified by the tongues of the Jews, on the sixth by the hands of the soldiers. So that we must understand that the fifth hour was passed, and the sixth began, when Pilate sat down on the judgment seat, (about the sixth hour, John says,) and that the crucifixion, and all that took place in connection with it, filled up the rest of the hour, from which time up to the ninth hour there was darkness, according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But since the Jews tried to transfer the guilt of putting Christ to death from themselves to the Romans, i.e. to Pilate and his soldiers, Mark, omitting to mention the hour at which He was crucified by the soldiers, has expressly recorded the third hour; in order that it might be evident that not only the soldiers who crucified Jesus on the sixth hour, but the Jews who cried out for His death at the third, were His crucifiers. There is another way of solving this difficulty, viz. that the sixth hour here does not mean the sixth hour of the day; as John does not say, It was about the sixth hour of the day, but, It was the preparation of the passover, and about the sixth hour. Parasceve means in Latin, praeparatio. For Christ our passover, as says the Apostle, is sacrificed for as. The preparation for which passover, counting from the ninth hour of the night, which seems to have been the hour at which the chief priests pronounced upon our Lord’s sacrifice, saying, He is guilty of death, between it and the third hour of the day, when He was crucified, according to Mark, is an interval of six hours, three of the night and three of the day.

Some suppose it to be a fault of the transcriber, who for the letter y, three, put s, six.

Pilate, despairing of moving them, did not examine Him, as he intended, but delivered Him up. And he says to the Jews, Behold your King!

As if to say, See the kind of Man whom you suspect of aspiring to the throne, a humble person, who cannot have any such design.

A speech that should have softened their rage; but they were afraid of letting Him go, lest He might draw away the multitude again. For the love of rule is a heavy crime, and sufficient to condemn a man. They cried out, Away with Him, away with Him. And they resolved upon the most disgraceful kind of death, Crucify Him, in order to prevent all memorial of Him afterwards.

Pilate still tries to overcome their apprehensions on Caesar’s account; Pilate says to them, Shall I crucify your King? He tries to shame them into doing what he had not been able to soften them into by putting Christ to shame. The chief priests answered, We have no king but Caesar.

They voluntarily brought themselves under punishment, and God gave them up to it. With one accord they denied the kingdom of God, and God suffered them to fall into their own condemnation; for they rejected the kingdom of Christ, and called down upon their own heads that of Caesar.

But Pilate is at last overcome by fear: Then delivered he Him therefore to them to be crucified. For it would be taking part openly against Caesar, if when the Jews declared that they had no king but Caesar, he wished to put another king over them, as he would appear to do if he let go unpunished a Man whom they had delivered to him for punishment on this very ground. It is not however, delivered Him to them to crucify Him, but, to be crucified, i.e. by the sentence and authority of the governor. The Evangelist says, delivered to them, to show that they were implicated in the guilt from which they tried to escape. For Pilate would not have done this except to please them. 16b. And they took Jesus, and led him away.

3. If any one, again, will look into Jacob’s actions, he shall find them not destitute of meaning, but full of import with regard to the dispensations. Thus, in the first place, at his birth, since he laid hold on his brother’s heel, he was called Jacob, that is, the supplanter, one who holds, but is not held; binding the feet, but not being bound; striving and conquering; grasping in his hand his adversary’s heel, that is, victory. For to this end was the Lord born, the type of whose birth he set forth beforehand, of whom also John says in the Apocalypse: “He went forth conquering, that He should conquer.” In the next place, [Jacob] received the rights of the first-born, when his brother looked on them with contempt; even as also the younger nation received Him, Christ, the first-begotten, when the elder nation rejected Him, saying, “We have no king but Cæsar.” But in Christ every bless …

XIX . Wherefore we exhort you to fast on those days, as we also fasted till the evening, when He was taken away from us; but on the rest of the days, before the day of the preparation, let every one eat at the ninth hour, or at the evening, or as every one is able. But from the even of the fifth day till cock-crowing break your fast when it is daybreak of the first day of the week, which is the Lord’s day. From the even till cock-crowing keep awake, and assemble together in the church, watch and pray, and entreat God; reading, when you sit up all night, the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms, until cock-crowing, and baptizing your catechumens, and reading the Gospel with fear and trembling, and speaking to the people such things as tend to their salvation: put an end to your sorrow, and beseech God that Israel may be converted, and that He will allow them place of repentance, and the remi …

XXV . Because, indeed, they drew servitude upon themselves voluntarily, when they said, “We have no king but Cæsar;” and, “If we do not slay Christ, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and will take away both our place and nation.” And so they prophesied unwittingly. For accordingly the nations believed on Him, and they themselves were deprived by the Romans of their power, and of their legal worship; and they have been forbidden to slay whom they please, and to sacrifice when they will. Wherefore they are accursed, as not able to perform the things they are commanded to do. For says He: “Cursed be he that does not continue in all things that are written in the book of the law to do them.” Now it is impossible in their dispersion, while they are among the heathen, for them to perform all things in their law. …

It ought not to be forgotten that in such a Gospel as this there is embraced every good deed which was done to Jesus; as, for example, the story of the woman who had been a sinner and had repented, and who, having experienced a genuine recovery from her evil state, had grace to pour her ointment over Jesus so that every one in the house smelt the sweet savour. Hence, too, the words, “Wherever this Gospel shall be preached among all the nations, there also this that she has done shall be spoken of, for a memorial of her.” And it is clear that whatever is done to the disciples of Jesus is done to Him. …

But since the Apostle understands the words, “ And they twain shall be one flesh, ” of Christ and the church, we must say that Christ keeping the saying, “What God hath joined together let not man put asunder,” did not put away His former wife, so to speak, that is, the former synagogue, for any other cause than that that wife committed fornication, being made an adulteress by the evil one, and along with him plotted against her husband and slew Him, saying, “Away with such a fellow from the earth, crucify Him, crucify Him.” It was she therefore who herself revolted, rather than her husband who put her away and dismissed her; wherefore, reproaching her for falling away from him, it says in Isaiah, “Of what kind is the bill of your mother’s divorcement, with which I sent her away?” And He who at the beginning created Him “who is in the form of God” after the image, made Him male, and the …

Now, keeping in mind what we said above in regard to the passage from Isaiah about the bill of divorcement, we will say that the mother of the people separated herself from Christ, her husband, without having received the bill of divorcement, but afterwards when there was found in her an unseemly thing, and she did not find favour in his sight, the bill of divorcement was written out for her; for when the new covenant called those of the Gentiles to the house of Him who had cast away his former wife, it virtually gave the bill of divorcement to her who formerly separated from her husband, the law, and the Word. Therefore he, also, having separated from her, married, so to speak, another, having given into the hands of the former the bill of divorcement; wherefore they can no longer do the things enjoined on them by the law, because of the bill of divorcement. …

84. In Tamar, then, the daughter-in-law of Judah, we see the people of the kingdom of Judah, whose kings, answering to Tamar’s husbands, were taken from this tribe. Tamar means bitterness; and the meaning is suitable, for this people gave the cup of gall to the Lord. The two sons of Judah represent two classes of kings who governed ill, those who did harm and those who did no good. One of these sons was evil or cruel before the Lord; the other spilled the seed on the ground that Tamar might not become a mother. There are only those two kinds of useless people in the world, the injurious and those who will not give the good they have but lose it or spill it on the ground. And as injury is worse than not doing good, the evil-doer is called the elder and the other the younger. …

35. Let us next take the account of these same incidents, that is to say, those in which Pilate was engaged, as it is presented by John. He proceeds thus: “And they themselves went not into the judgment-hall, lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the passover. Pilate then went out unto them, and said, What accusation bring ye against this man? They answered and said unto him, If he were not a malefactor, we would not have delivered him up unto thee.” We must look into this passage in order to show that it contains nothing inconsistent with Luke’s version, which states that certain charges were brought against Him, and also specifies their terms. …

40. Matthew continues thus: “And they set up over His head His accusation written, ‘This is Jesus the King of the Jews.’” Mark, on the other hand, before making any such statement, inserts these words: “And it was the third hour, and they crucified Him.” For he subjoins these terms immediately after he has told us about the parting of the garments. This, then, is a matter which we must consider with special care, lest any serious error emerge. For there are some who entertain the idea that the Lord was certainly crucified at the third hour; and that thereafter, from the sixth hour on to the ninth, the darkness covered the land. According to this theory, we should have to understand three hours to have passed between the time when He was crucified and the time when the darkness occurred. …

46. Interrogate John in like manner, and see how strong this hesitancy was on Pilate’s part, and how he shrank from so shameful a service. For this evangelist records these incidents much more fully, although even he certainly does not mention all the occurrences which took up these two hours and part of the sixth hour. After telling us how Pilate scourged Jesus, and allowed the robe to be put on Him in derision by the soldiers, and suffered Him to be subjected to ill-treatment and many acts of mockery (all of which was permitted by Pilate, as I believe, really with the view of mitigating their fury and keeping them from persevering in their maddened desire for His death), John continues his account in the following manner: “Pilate went forth again, and saith unto them, Behold, I bring him forth to you, that ye may know that I find no fault in him. …

15. “They shall be delivered unto the hands of the sword” ( ver. 10 ). In truth, thus it hath visibly befallen them, they have been taken by storm by enemies breaking in. “Portions of foxes they shall be.” Foxes he calleth the kings of the world, that then were when Judæa was conquered. Hear in order that ye may know and perceive, that those he calleth foxes. Herod the king the Lord Himself hath called a fox. “Go ye,” He saith, “and tell that fox.” See and observe, my brethren: Christ as King they would not have, and portions of foxes they have been made. For when Pilate the deputy governor in Judæa slew Christ at the voices of the Jews, he said to the same Jews, “Your King shall I crucify?” Because He was called King of the Jews, and He was the true King. …

7. “They have confirmed to themselves malignant discourse” ( ver. 5 ). There were done so great miracles, they were not moved, they persisted in the design of the evil discourse. He was given up to the judge: the judge trembleth, and they tremble not that have given Him up to the judge: trembleth power, and ferocity trembleth not: he would wash his hands, and they stain their tongues. But wherefore this? “They have confirmed to themselves malignant discourse.” How many things did Pilate, how many things that they might be restrained! What said he? what did he? But “they have confirmed to themselves malignant discourse: Crucify, crucify.” The repetition is the confirmation of the “malignant discourse.” Let us see in what manner “they have confirmed to themselves malignant discourse.” “Your King shall I crucify?” They said, “We have no king but Cæsar alone.” He was offering for King the So …