And he turned Christ’s shoulders towards that expanse of yelling muzzles that they might see the welts left by the rods, red with oozing blood. It was as if he said: Look at Him, your King, the only King that you deserve, in His true majesty, tricked out as befits such a King. His crown is of sharp thorns; His purple cloak is the chlamys of a mercenary; His scepter is a dry reed. These are the ornaments merited by your degraded King, unjustly rejected by a degraded people like yourselves. Was it His blood you desired? Here is His blood; see how it drops from the thorns of His crown. There is not much of it, but it ought to be enough for you, since it is innocent blood. It is shed as a great favor to you—to satisfy you. And now be off from here, for you have troubled me long enough! But the Jews were quieted neither by these words nor by that spectacle. They demanded something quite other than a flogging and a masquerade before they would go their ways. Pilate thought that he could make mock of them, but he would realize that this was no time for feeble jokes. They had had the best of him twice already and they would again. A few bruises and a practical joke played by the soldiery were not enough to punish this enemy of God as He deserved; there were trees in Judea and nails to nail Him to them. And their hoarse voices shouted all together, “Let him be crucified! Let him be crucified!” Too late Pilate realized that they had driven him into a tangle from which he could not disengage himself. All his decisions were combated with a pertinacity he had not foreseen. By a flash of inspiration he had pronounced the great words, “Behold the man!” But he himself did not understand that proclamation which transcended his base soul. He did not realize that he had found the truth he was seeking: a half-truth, but deeper than all the teachings of the philosophers of Rome and Greece. He did not understand how Jesus was really Man, the symbol of all humanity, sorrowing and humiliated, betrayed by its rulers, deceived by its masters, crucified every day by the Kings who oppress their subjects, by the rich who cause the poor to weep, by priests who think of their bellies rather than of God. Jesus is the Man of Sorrows announced by Isaiah, the man without form or comeliness, despised and rejected of men, who was to be killed for all men; He is God’s only son who had taken on man’s flesh, and who would ascend in the glory of power and of the new sun, in the midst of the blaring of the trumpets calling the dead to life. But now to the eyes of Pilate, to the eyes of Pilate’s enemies, He was only a wretched, insignificant man, flesh for rods and for nails, a man and not Man, a mortal and not a God. Why did Pilate lose time with those sibylline remarks before delivering Him to the executioner?