LECTURE VI. THE WARNING OF PILATE. MARK XV. 15. "And so Pilate, willing to content the people, released Barabbas unto them, and delivered Jesus, when he had scourged him, to be crucified." THE image of Good Friday is impressed upon the whole of Passion week. There is no need to recapitulate the events that happened upon it. Day by day they have. been read in our Church Service, and they are, or ought to be, familiar to us all. Even if it were otherwise, they are of too awful a character to be dwelt upon in a few words; and the train of thought connected with them is deeper, and more full of mystery than that which we have hitherto been following. For the subject of the present Lectures has been, not the cross of Christ itself, but the group by whose hands it was raised; not the one unchanging source of comfort which this week opens to the penitent, but the daily warning which it affords to the sinner. For this reason I shall not now dwell on the narrative of the Crucifixion, but confine myself to the circumstance that, on the external view which I have been taking, gives a peculiar feature to the events of the Friday. Hitherto the contest between good and evil, whether secret or open, had been going on within the borders of the Jewish Church; but on the morning of this day it broke forth and was brought into contact with the world. As yet we have spoken of Jews alone, whether in the wavering multitude, the traffickers in the temple, the emblem of the fig tree, or the false Apostle; but this morning the scene was suddenly changed. A heathen ruler found himself obliged to take part in it, and a part of so fearful a prominence that his name became, from that hour, inseparably connected with the sufferings of our Lord. While Judas Iscariot, and Annas, and Caiaphas have been passed over in silence; one who was an alien from the house of Israel, and a stranger from the covenants of promise, has been selected from among all those who this day "took counsel together against the Lord and against His anointed 1" to be handed down to a lasting infamy in the Creed of the Christian. It is to his trials and struggles, affording in many respects a marked contrast to those of Judas, and to the warnings to be gathered from them, that I now propose, by God's grace, to direct your attention. Pontius Pilate then was the Roman governor of Judæa, during the period of our Lord's ministry. We cannot doubt that, as such, he must have heard very frequently of His miracles and doctrine. For the minds of all his subjects were agitated by the question, whether Jesus were the expected Messiah or not; and even had it been otherwise, it is quite inconceivable that the blind should receive their sight, the lame walk, the deaf hear, and the dead be raised to life, in a small district like Judæa, without some rumour having reached the ears of the governor. We shall do well to remember this, as it throws light on that page of his history which this day brings before us. Pilate had, doubtless, heard long before of the signs and wonders wrought by our Lord, and they could not have failed to cause him some kind of disquietude and alarm; for he was, as we shall see, a man of an anxious, and, if we may so speak, a superstitious mind. But he probably, for that very reason, endeavoured to shut his eyes to them, and dismiss them from his thoughts. He seems to have considered it most pru |