Pontius Pilate appears to have been genuinely confused by how much the High Priests and the crowd hated Christ.
At first, Pilate did not want to judge Christ at all. Then Pilate tried to appease the people by having Jesus scourged, instead of crucified. But only death would satisfy the angry mob.
Then Pilate asked them a question, full of contemptuous irony: “Shall I crucify your king?”
He received the answer: “We have no king but Caesar!”
We have no king but Caesar.
Indeed, the Son of God was revealed to destroy the works of the devil. (I John 3:8)
Will it sound too grim if I wish you all well–during another year of strife? Will it sound even grimmer if I remind you that not all of us will be on earth on New Year’s Day, 2013?
I do not wish you unnecessary struggles. After all, at every Mass, the priest prays on everyone’s behalf that the good Lord would deliver us from all distress. The priest prays that He Who promised peace to His Apostles would fulfill his will in us and grant us peace.
But why did St. John have to write his letters? Why, after all, did all the human authors of the New Testament documents feel the need to write?
In this world, we will have troubles, says the Lord. “But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
God took our human nature to Himself, became man, set His feet on the earth, showed signs of His divinity with miraculous wonders—and we proceeded to crucify Him.
The Apostles wrote because the beautiful and simple Word of Truth had been, in certain quarters, distorted and maliciously misunderstood. They wrote because a battle ceaselessly rages between the pure love of God the Father and the agonizingly confusing destructiveness of the Evil One.
This is what St. John the Baptist said to the priests and Levites about Christ (John 1:26). The Son of God is here, but you are so obtuse, you don’t see it.
Even St. John himself had his moments of doubt about his cousin. When Herod imprisoned John, the Baptist sent his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the One who is to come, or should we look for another?”
The other St. John—the Evangelist—also pointed out that people did not recognize Christ. At the beginning of his gospel, St. John wrote: “Christ came to what was His own, but His own people did not accept Him.”
Father Mark White Blog 