Certain questions just have a way of getting your attention.
My beloved had asked me to swing by the bookstore and see if they sold a particular children’s book she needed for her classroom. Since this is not unlike asking President Biden if he’d mind dropping by Baskin Robbins, I responded to her request with more than my usual alacrity.
But children’s book sections (if you haven’t been in one lately) are now organized with roughly the same intricacy as corporate tax forms, and my diligent search turned up nothing. Couldn’t even find Waldo. A man with the air of much-put-upon literary authority was at hand, but walking around in no particular direction, staring hard at nothing, talking in an annoyed voice to no discernible party. (These used to be signs of a crazy person, but now we know it's just a guy with an ear bud.)
I bided my time, looking over the 32 different children’s editions of Barak Obama’s biography, trying not to eavesdrop on the clerk while listening enough to know when his ear hung up. After a moment, I was beyond stunned to hear him say – angrily, urgently – “I need to know. Is Chris Potts supposed to die?”
Yes, I know how spectacular the odds are of that being anything remotely like what he actually said. On the other hand, I’ve had several days now to rack my head for sentences that could somehow sound, however oddly, like “Is Chris Potts supposed to die?” Try it for yourself:
“Is this clod a go-to guy?”
“His brisket and tots are too cold to fry?”
“Is the Mrs. too hot for her hose to dry?”
None of those seem any more or less reasonable than what I thought I heard.
The fellow saw me start and stare at him. He rolled his eyes in irritation and stormed off to another part of the store. Which probably means a) he didn’t know I was Chris Potts, b) he no longer felt comfortable discussing my doom in front of me, or c) he didn’t see how the certainty of my death was any business of mine, anyway.
At any rate, I didn’t track him down for clarification. How, after all, would one go about posing the question, under those circumstances?
Beside which, of course, I already knew the answer.
Yes. Chris Potts is supposed to die.
Sad to say, it’s a question all of us have to wrestle with, at one point or another. And not a few of us – doctors, police officers, families watching the beeping hospital monitors – have to wrestle with it for others.
I have found myself especially intrigued of late with a Bible character who – very much against his will – had to decide if someone else was supposed to die. Intrigued, because he’s not someone in whom I would have expected to see so much of myself.
As portrayed in the Gospels, he seems to take his wife seriously, and looks to her for advice. He cultivates a sense of wonder; twice he’s referred to as “marveling” at the situation unfolding before him. Trapped in perhaps the all-time rock-and-a-hard-place situation, he navigates as best he can, showing a streak of defiance and more than a measure of compassion.
And he keeps asking questions. At least 15, by my tally, not counting repetitions in one account or another. More, I’d guess, than any other one person in the Bible. And almost none of them answered to his satisfaction.
His name is given as Pontius Pilate, the governor of the troublesome province of Judea at the time its leaders determined to kill Jesus. Almost nothing is known about him, apart from the Gospel records. He’s remembered as the man who sentenced the Savior of the world to death. The date we remember as “Good Friday” was an especially bad day for him.
Some of the questions he asked that terrible morning are haunting, in the way they’ve been asked, over and over again, by so many, many others across the centuries.
To Jesus: “Are You a king?”
To the crowds: “What then do you want me to do with Him?”
To no one, perhaps, but himself: “What is truth?”
Difficult questions, to which each of us must find our own answers. But one thing human history, God’s Word, and our own souls make clear: “The wages of sin is death.” In the end, we’re all “supposed to die.” No help for that – and only one hope.
“As it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment,” the writer of Hebrews tells us, “so Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many.”
Or, as the Apostle Paul puts it: “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Paul wrote that to believers in Rome, and we might fondly hope that, as a Roman, Pilate himself – retired there, perhaps, after his tenure in Judea ended – somehow got the message. Some strong traditions contend that he and his wife eventually became believers ... maybe even died as martyrs in those early persecutions.
This we know: that Pilate, in condemning the Son of God to die, did no more than each of the rest of us have done, in choosing the way of sin, time and again and again. Each of us, for those choices, is supposed to die. And Jesus, to save us, was supposed to die.
Easter is coming. He is risen, indeed.
So, long live Chris Potts. And maybe, mercifully, Pontius Pilate.
And you, too … if you know what to do with Him.
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