John 19:9Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

Therefore it would have been necessary to investigate carefully whether He was truly seeking power and planning to overthrow Caesar from the kingdom. But Pilate does not make such a careful inquiry.

For this reason Christ answered him nothing, since He knew that Pilate was asking about everything in vain. On the other hand, His works bore witness concerning Him. Therefore He did not wish to refute or defend Himself with words, showing thereby that He goes willingly to death.

But Jesus gave him no answer. Jesus is silent because He had already declared to Pilate, “For this I was born,” and, “My Kingdom is not from here.” Yet Pilate gained nothing from this and did not stand up for the truth, but yielded to the demand of the people.

Therefore the Lord, disregarding his questions as asked in vain, answers nothing.

Yet he receives this idea and belief not from the Holy Scriptures, but from Hellenic error. For Greek myths call many men demigods and children of gods. The Romans too, doing this with somewhat greater superstition, always gave the divine title to the most glorious of their kings.

By setting up altars and erecting shrines, they immortalized many in this way. Therefore Pilate investigates more exactly and carefully than at the beginning who Christ truly is and whence He comes. But He, it says, did not answer him a word, apparently recalling His own saying.

What had He said to him? “Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice” (Jn 18:37). But would Pilate, an idolater, heed the voice of the Savior, who called Himself Truth and the Child of Truth?

Or would one who at the beginning had shown contempt for truth and said, “What is truth?” (Jn 18:38), receive and honor the name of Truth? For he still served falsely named gods and was plunged into the darkness of falsehood.

He was not asking about the place of birth, for Pilate had already heard that the Lord was born in Galilee. He was asking what His origin was, whether He had been born from men or from gods. The Lord was required to reveal whether His origin was natural or supernatural.

If even before it had not been difficult for Jesus Christ to draw the judge to His side, now it had become still easier. Despite his skepticism, the superstitious and frightened pagan seemed ready to believe whatever wondrous thing the Prisoner might say about His origin.

But Jesus gave him no answer. Was a superstitious pagan worthy to know the holiest of mysteries? He questioned the Lord not from love of truth, but from fear, after having subjected Him, utterly against his conscience, to tormenting scourging.

Pontius was incapable of understanding the mystery of the pre-eternal origin of the Person of Jesus. By its loftiness, this mystery could not even find a place in the minds of the chief priests and scribes, who had always rested upon the law of Moses.

Everything Pilate had heard or read about sons of gods, with which the mythology of the Greeks and Romans abounds, would not have helped him grasp the mystery of the Person of Jesus. On the basis of these fables, Pilate would most likely have compared Him in his mind with some Hercules or Romulus.

Moreover, to deliver Himself from death by a narrative about His heavenly origin was wholly inconsistent with the moral dignity of Jesus Christ. We have seen that, having resolved to lay down His soul for the salvation of the world, He at the same time renounced all supernatural means for His own deliverance.

It was His will that He be judged as a man, and not as the Son of God. Still, if the Lord had come from earthly parents and not, as He Himself said, from heaven, from the Father, then perhaps love of truth itself, for witness to which He was born, would now have moved Him to bring Pilate out of error.

He would have said, “I, like all men, come from mortal parents. I am not the Son of God in the proper sense of this word, and I have called Myself such only in the sense in which every virtuous man can be called a son of God.” Pilate, perhaps, would not have been incapable of understanding what moral sonship of God consists in.

But since Jesus Christ was and is the real, natural Son of God, it was fitting for Him to answer Pilate’s question as He did, with silence.

Even writers as sober and serious as the Roman historians recorded in the pages of their chronicles the widely spread rumor that some extraordinary man would soon appear, and precisely in Judea, who would conquer the whole world.

As governor of Judea, this rumor was certainly better known to Pilate than to anyone else, since a dangerous thought for Roman dominion was connected with it. Was this incarnate deity standing before him?

Pilate thought he had struck upon the true essence of the matter. If indeed a god or demigod was standing before him, having suffered so cruelly at the hands of the Jews, then let Him only reveal it. Then the procurator, certain of support from a grateful deity, would immediately disperse this disgusting Jewish mob.

He himself would be ready to become His right hand in the conquest of the world, in hope, of course, of a fitting reward afterward. Pilate impatiently awaited the answer to his question, “but Jesus gave him no answer,” because Pilate’s thought, though true at the beginning, had finally taken a false, political ground.

Therefore there was no point in revealing this lofty teaching before him (Mt 7:6). Besides, the Lord had already told Pilate as much as he needed to know and as much as he could contain about Himself as King of a Kingdom not of this world. Yet this had only aroused in him a frivolous, skeptical question (Jn 18:36-38).

Pilate is asking about Jesus’ relation to the Divine. He wants to know what His origin is, if it is an origin from above. Where and how was He born of God?

“But Jesus gave him no answer.” What does this mean? It cannot be said that the lofty thought was left without attention. Jesus’ silence served as approval of Pilate’s lofty thought concerning the non-earthly origin of Jesus.

Yet no detailed instruction about the mystery of the divine Person was given, because Pilate, according to the dispositions of his soul, did not need it. It would not have served him to his benefit, but only to greater condemnation, if he had understood it.

The Savior saw that earthly calculations would nevertheless prevail over all Pilate’s good thoughts. Why, then, subject him to a heavier responsibility, when even as it was he would not easily answer for himself before the judgment of eternal Truth?

Pilate himself must say: “I am innocent of the blood of this Righteous Man” (Mt 27:24). Thus the best and most righteous cause is the one that is not defended, and yet remains unshaken.

The fully righteous cause is not the one supported by words, but the one supported by truth itself. Truth must not be defended in the same way that falsehood is usually defended.