martyrdom

From John Scott’s “The Cross”

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“Three tell-tale expressions in Luke’s narrative illumine what in the end Pilate did: ‘their shouts prevailed’, ‘Pilate decided to grant their demand’, and he ‘surrendered Jesus to their will’(Luke 23:23–25). Their shouts, their demand, their will: to these Pilate weakly capitulated. He was ‘wanting to release Jesus’(Luke 23:20), but he was also ‘wanting to satisfy the crowd’(Mark 15:15). The crowd won. Why? Because they said to him: ‘If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar. Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar’(John 19:12). This clinched it. The choice was between honour and ambition, between principle and expediency. He had already been in trouble with Tiberius Caesar on two or three previous occasions. he could not afford another. Sure, Jesus was innocent. Sure, justice demanded his release. But how could he champion innocence and justice if thereby he denied the will of the people, flouted the nation’s leaders, and above all provoked an uprising, thereby forfeiting the imperial favour? His conscience was drowned by the loud voices of rationalization. He compromised because he was a coward.” — John Stott (pp. 51-52)

From “The Cross” by John Stott

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“Do you know the painting by Holman Hunt, the leader of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, entitled ‘The Shadow of Death’? It depicts the inside of the carpenter’s shop in Nazareth. Stripped to the waist, Jesus stands by a wooden trestle on which he has put down his saw. He lifts his eyes towards heaven, and the look on his face is one of either pain or ecstasy or both. He also stretches, raising both arms above his head. As he does so, the evening sunlight streaming through the open door casts a dark shadow in the form of a cross on the wall behind him, where his tool-rack looks like a horizontal bar on which his hands have been crucified. The tools themselves remind us of the fateful hammer and nails. In the left foreground a woman kneels among the wood chippings, her hands resting on the chest in which the rich gifts of the Magi are kept. We cannot see her face because she has averted it. But we know that she is Mary. She looks startled (or so it seems) at her son’s cross-like shadow on the wall.” — The Cross, John Stott