Pilate’s doubt

According to the canonical gospels, after his arrest Jesus was successively led from one instance to another to be judged: from Annas to Caiaphas and from Herod to Pilate. In this last trial to which Jesus was subjected in the praetorium, Pilate asked him: “What is the truth?” The Roman governor’s question remained unanswered, but it crossed not only the mind of Christ, but also the centuries of history until it was deposited intact in our consciences, filling them with disquiet and shock.

In the same story, Pilate’s wife, called Claudia Procula according to tradition, intervened. This woman has not gone unnoticed in the memory of the Church. Her instantaneous appearance in the Gospels has given rise to a glimmer of light in her brief intrusion. A French writer studies her in depth in the novel The Gospel according to Pilate. And he presents her there as a woman who becomes involved with Jesus to the point of exposing the rottenness that corroded her husband’s logic and led Jesus to the cross. In the conversation recreated by our writer, Claudia addresses her husband with this emphatic phrase: “Doubting and believing are the same thing, Pilate. Only indifference is atheistic“.

The bold sentence serves as a meditation in this Lenten season, now approaching Holy Week. Indeed, this woman manages to shatter Pilate’s granite rationality, to fill him with doubts. These are the doubts that dominate within him, even though he tries to wash his hands and his conscience with a gesture of false neutrality. Claudia formulates an equation which, although debatable, undoubtedly contains a fund of truth. “Doubting and believing are the same thing“. What is this basis of truth?

– On the one hand, it leads us to identify a type of stubborn doubt that never tires of demanding proofs and demonstrations. It ends in scepticism. It is mental laziness, because it does not make an effort to search and ends up in passivity. It is perplexity, which, with the appearance of reflection, is limited to merely handling suspicions. With this kind of doubt, indecision is incurable.

– But there is another kind of doubt that enters by its own right into the territory of faith. Precisely because faith is not the fruit of a demonstrable mathematical theorem, but a wager of love or a daring gesture of trust, this other doubt brings belief to the surface and turns it into a path of encounter, a true path, albeit a risky one.

When an educated person gradually and insensitively rejects his beliefs, until he confines them in a corner of his brain…, faith becomes something abstract that no longer resembles faith at all. It is better to be agitated in doubt than to rest in error. So let us avoid two pitfalls: doubt nothing and doubt everything. Pontius Pilate’s wife could not get her husband to avoid them.

 

Juan Carlos cmf

(PHOTO: Yael Portabales)

 

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