There's an Executioner in the Apostles' Creed.
Jesus, Mary, and Pilate?
Last Sunday, we recited the Apostles’ Creed, like we do every week. I’ve said it hundreds of times:
“Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.”
Only this time, it struck me: what is Pilate doing in there? Not a follower of Christ, not an apostle, not a saint, and yet memorialized and repeated by billions of Christians each Sunday.
This confession wasn’t thrown together in a half-hour meeting. Every word was selected, weighed, carefully preserved, and passed down for 2,000 years. If you count the names, there are only three: Jesus, his mother, and the man that presided over his execution. And look at how the creed positions those two names: born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate. The whole earthly life of Christ is bracketed by a peasant girl and a governor.
Life enters through one; death is administered by the other.
On one hand, the reference to Pilate is a time stamp. Naming the governor pins the crucifixion to a specific date and time, but that’s not the only reason his inclusion is worth considering. A re-examination of the trial can shed a little more light on how this man became so infamous.
What is truth?
Brought before Pilate, isolated from his Jewish persecutors because of their unwillingness to be made unclean by entering the palace, Jesus shares with Pilate why he was born: “to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” It is then that Pilate answers with maybe the most famous question in the history of jurisprudence: “What is truth?”
Here’s what makes that question strange: Pilate wasn’t confused. He knew the truth of the case and said so pretty plainly: “I find no guilt in this man.” He says it before he ships Jesus off to Herod. He says it after the whipping. He says it even while the crowd demands the cross. Luke counts three separate declarations, the last one nearly exasperated: “Why? What evil has he done? I have found in him no guilt deserving death.” You read that trial, and you’ll not find a single lie about Jesus coming from Pilate. It’s kind of jarring.
Through the trial you watch him wrestle across all four accounts. His first instinct is to hand the issue back: “Take him yourselves and judge him by your own law.” When that fails, he ships Jesus across town. Herod ships him back. So he tries the crowd, invoking the Passover custom, hoping they’ll choose Jesus and the decision can be theirs instead of his. They choose Barabbas, a murderer. He floats a compromise, twice: I’ll punish him and release him. Even his wife sends word mid-trial: “Have nothing to do with that righteous man.” John sums up the whole scramble in a single line: “From then on Pilate sought to release him.”
He was looking for an exit. Here was the one man in the province with the authority to settle it, hunting through every jurisdiction, custom, and compromise for someone else to hold that authority, because he understood exactly what holding it would cost. And the crowd made sure the math stayed clear. Sensing that he might relent, their anger stoked by his clarity of innocence, they yell at him, “If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend.” In that moment, they stopped arguing about Jesus’ guilt. Instead they focused on pressuring Pilate, reminding him that they may riot and he may end up losing his head (literally). Was that really worth it? Defending this man will ruin your position and your standing. It might even take your life.
Now that phrase, “What is truth?”, begins to take on new meaning. For a man facing death but understanding guilt and innocence, his sarcastic retort looks a lot more like cowardly nuance, trying to convince himself that there may not really be a wrong answer.
If the truth is murky enough, maybe I can make it someone else’s problem.
The basin
This brings us to the final act. Matthew tells us that “So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves.” Even his closing words are an attempt to delegate an level of authority only he possessed.
It is a picture of a man declaring his own innocence over the fate of a prisoner he has pronounced guiltless. A total abdication of everything his position required. He enlists the basin of water to try to make those two warring identities and ideas feel coherent. They weren’t.
Two thousand years later, “I wash my hands of it” still survives in our language. It actually means the opposite of what Pilate intended. He performed it to declare his innocence. We use it when someone’s ducking their responsibilities. You don’t wash your hands of something that no one expects you to get involved in. You wash your hands of something you want nothing more to do with, something you often could have had an influence on. What was intended as a statement of innocence has actually become the world’s shorthand for those who abandon their responsibilities.
Not a liar, not a hero
That’s the man this creed has preserved, not a monster. Pilate isn’t Herod hunting infants or Judas scrounging up silver coins after betraying his best friend. No, he occupies a space in between the liar and the hero.
The man who won’t say the FALSE thing but also isn’t prepared to do the TRUE thing.
He is guilty not because of the bad things he did do but because of the good things he left undone. There sat the man, the only man with authority in the province to stop the proceeding, and he spent the power he had accumulated on his own safety. Mark names the motive in five words: he was “wishing to satisfy the crowd.” Not convinced of the charges. Not even coerced, exactly. Just wishing to satisfy… hoping to avoid the disturbance.
The mirror
But isn’t that kind of the truth for most of us? Well, I didn’t lie. I didn’t do the wrong thing. True, maybe, but did you do far less than you were capable of doing? Far less than your God-given position or platform enabled you to do. It’s just like us to build a whole defense around sins we didn’t commit. I didn’t cheat. I didn’t slander. I didn’t participate actively in the evil. It’s maybe true, but boy, you did a lot less than you were capable of.
As for me, I know there have been rooms where someone was being unfairly characterized, and I had the standing to say something. Moments where truth needed a voice and I had one and the platform to make it mean something, but just too much to lose. Like Pilate, I can look around, count the cost. That ledger usually ends the conversation. I didn’t lie. I probably didn’t participate. I just asked my own version of his question: “Is this really my fight? Is it really that clear? Who’s to say? What really is Truth?” Just enough nuance to fill the basin so I could wash my hands and feel innocent for a while.
I can’t help but imagine James, the brother of Jesus, thinking of Pilate’s hand-wringing when he wrote: “Whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” Knowing the right thing to do but taking no action at all… that is the grievous sin of the clean-handed and Pilate is their patron saint.
Every Sunday, billions of Christians say his name. The creed preserves the verdict he spent an entire Good Friday trying to avoid. Nuancing, deferring, washing, he did everything a man can do to scrub his name from a decision. Yet it was those early church fathers who etched his name into their confession permanently. Tied forever to the death he called unjust, yet presided idly over. In the end, the man who most wanted off the record is the only one put on it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.
I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.
I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.
My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.
Not one, but two. Pilate and “I”.