We all love a showdown scene. We want to see the good guy stare down the bad guy and see who flinches first. In this case, in Jerusalem with Pilate and Jesus, we all know who is who, but what each person represents goes all the way to the top, meaning beyond this world and into the heavens. Jesus facing Pilate is the flesh version of the true God versus Zeus, and we can see the stark difference between these worldviews in this brief interaction. This is like a face-off of the two opposing forces coming to a climax, as Abraham started the path toward this showdown long ago. One of them will be revealed as a fraud. The backstory of this showdown starts way back with Abraham. So we need to backtrack a long ways and talk about him.

The reason Israel is so strange, and so hated, is because they believe that the one true God was never defeated. That is the reason they do not fit in with others. Let me qualify this, however, because the nation of Israel is constantly falling into worship of the many gods. The draw of the world around them is strong, so it’s incorrect to suggest that there was this group of people walking in lock-step, arm-in-arm, from Abraham onward. Within the people of Israel, there was a subset of people that kept the faith. From Abraham to Mary, there always remained some percentage, some handful of devout people, who kept faith in the one God even when the chips were way, way down. Within that special line, even many of them faltered. They strayed, some further than others. This is the true underdog story, because this journey took nearly 2,000 years in order to get to Jesus and it’s full of twists and turns and progress and backtracking.

This leads me up to the idea of a “chosen people,” which always seemed so odd, if not arrogant. To think that God had selected a group of people as “chosen” rankled me because, like everyone outside of a group, it’s irritating to be among the un-chosen. Being un-chosen seems to imply that you are the damned. This upsets people. Being told you are going to burn in hell because of who you are is like hitting someone with a pie in the face. Not a fresh apple pie, but like a fresh cow pie, right in the face.

If you hear a message that makes you feel lesser or damned, anger is the only response. This can be enraging. No one wants to hear about their inability to be saved because of the family he belongs to, or what nation he lives in, or what language he speaks, or what skin color he is, or who he is married to, or that he’s done something in the past that cannot be forgiven. If someone is telling you that they are chosen, but you are not chosen, that puts up a wall. And if you are not chosen, then you are not equal, not worthy, not good enough. Maybe you even feel that you are somehow bad without any possibility of fixing or altering the situation. (This is getting dangerously close to the correct answer of why we need a savior, but for now let’s just stick with the problem of being un-chosen.)

The unchosen feel attacked, and the best way to stop an attack, is to counter-attack. Newton’s third law of motion applies well to the ego in terms of equal and opposite reactions when you start claiming chosen status. So on the outside looking in, the idea of being self-declared as the “chosen people” seems like a move that Jack might make on the island in Lord of the Flies, but you have to look closer.

Our pride rises up against the idea of being left out. Today we might call this FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out. Anyone that claims a special status will have outsiders react in several ways: they may want to join them, they many want to reject them, or they may want to destroy them. Everyone feels this sense of rejection in some area, and attempting to make peace in our heart, we must find a group or ideology that includes us. Atheists and non-believers feel rejected because they are told they are not “saved,” which sounds like another way of saying “chosen.” Surely we have all seen believers use this idea of being “saved” like a trophy and it often chases more people away from the tent rather than bringing them in. But Abraham and his people had a reason for being called chosen that is different from what we think of today as “saved.”

Abraham is said to have been called to leave his home by God. He becomes a nomad in old age, leaving his home. Why does he leave? Because he doesn’t fit in. Everyone at the party is drinking from the cup of the moon god and he cannot take a drink without betraying his conviction that there is only one God. There is a parallel here to being called out into the wilderness like other great figures, like Jesus, John the Baptist, Moses, St. Benedict, or St. Anthony of the Desert. Genesis just mentions this casually, but Abraham is called away from the place he lives because his people do not worship the one God. His hometown worships an idol. Due to his belief, he separates and excludes himself from the mainstream. He does this not because he wanted to be left out, not to be alone, not because he wanted to be a nomad, but because the worldview he held required that he evacuate the city or be swallowed up. He has chosen to worship the one God. Because of this, he can’t live among the people. I’ll do my best to explain what I mean by that.

I think the hard question is this: How could any group think they were special? Were they not humans like the rest of us?

The answer of course is: yes, they were just ordinary people. Abraham was an ordinary man who ate and slept and committed sins like any other person. But he made a choice to believe something that no other people believed.

If you believe in the creation and rebellion stories of Genesis, in the one God who defeated all contenders for the title belt, then you must reject the wider world of idols. This is the situation the Old Testament covers in detail.

The reason the wagons are circled in the entire Old Testament is not because the Israelites enjoy or seek conflict. The conflict seeks them. The wagons are circled because they are the only culture hanging on to the idea of a single God. They are the sole believers that the one true God existed before everything else. They alone believe that the first Being was never defeated. Every other people around them has granted assent to the death of the primordial god or gods and now have lesser gods for everything.

Creating a club may cause an angry reaction among those uninvited, but a guaranteed way to animate hatred is to tell someone that their god is fake. Telling your neighbor that their way of life is false makes for fightin’ words. Like Merle Haggard said, “They're walking on the fightin’ side of me.” That is how you get punched in the eye.

But as anyone knows who holds a dear belief or conviction, there is no way to preserve that belief or way of life unless you are willing to proclaim that belief and then live out that way of life. Otherwise you are just a fan or hobbyist. It’s easy to click the Like button and call yourself a believer. It’s much harder to put down the phone and take action. If you declare a belief but don’t take action, then you probably don’t really believe it. You are a tourist or maybe just opinionated. If you truly have a conviction in the belief, then you cannot just “fit in” with everyone else. The only way for the Hebrews to “fit in” with a pagan world was to abandon your belief in the one God, which instantly discredits and devalues the one God. In terms of faith in the one true God, everyone else on planet earth has already done that.

This kind of situation is not foreign to our own experiences. We have all felt peer pressure. Anyone who has been to high school or college parties may have been in this dilemma. Or maybe a boyfriend or girlfriend put you into a dilemma where you had to make a choice that tested your beliefs. For example, no child has ever said that they would someday like to be addicted to drugs. Children know it’s a bad idea. But someday that child will grow up and be in a room at a party where everyone is partaking in something they have sworn to never do, and only then will they find out if what they declared is true or false. The same can be said for drinking, where a child will declare, “I will never get drunk,” but someday at a party there will be a chance to find out if what they declared was true. As the plastic Solo cup is nudged at them, they will be urged to take a drink: “Everyone does it, it’s no big deal.” “Don’t be such a stick in the mud.” “Trust me, you’ll enjoy it. It’s so freeing.” The argument is made to join the ways of the others. The prosecution makes it’s case, through temptation to fit in and have fun, the defense sits at rest with it’s past declaration of belief. In the end, the person will make his decision and either drink or not drink. If the person decides to reject the offer, they choose a harder path, because it often means being alone for the night. By rejecting the offer, he is himself rejected. But that is the price of having convictions. The reject must leave the party, because he doesn’t fit in. He has to find new friends. To fit in can mean giving in and accepting something that you cannot do without betraying your beliefs.

Abraham is where the tide begins to turn back against the grain, against the world. Tupac had a song “Me Against the World.” He should have featured Abraham in the video, but unfortunately these two lived 4,000 years apart. But Abraham really could have said, “It’s just me against the world.” I don’t know that we’ll be talking about Tupac in 4,000 years, but we will likely still be talking about Abraham.

When people wonder why the common denominator in Biblical wars and squabbles seems to be Israel, it’s because of this belief. They do not bend or conform to the gods and the idols around them. The moment that they do, then they have abandoned the one God. Whether its the gods of Sumerian, Egyptian, or Greco-Roman culture, they must reject them all. They don’t give up their belief for anyone or anything, right up until today, whether it’s modern paganism or Christianity or Islam or atheism. This hatred remains today against the Jews and Israel, because they still won’t bend in their faith and conform. There is a same loathing for Christians, for the same reason, as they refuse to “just fit in” with the culture, because the moment you change your beliefs to fit the culture, then you have no beliefs; you are just like everyone else. This is what drives non-believers crazy, because they think: why can’t these people just get with the program? What can’t they just fit into the culture? The answer is very simple: they reject the program because the program rejects the one true God, and that is the one thing that the believers cannot reject. Believers argue it the other way, wondering why the culture, the program, can’t just believe in the one true God. So you see the problem.

There is a bizarre scenario in here that I have to go into briefly. Some Christians hate the Jews and we have ample historical evidence of that. This should baffle anyone with even a modest understanding of salvation history, because without the people of Abraham, the savior would never have arrived. Jesus could not have come from any other group of people, for the exact reason that all other peoples had rejected the idea of one God.

Even within the nation itself, the savior had to come through a very specific line of people because they, for the most part, stuck with faith in the one true God. Through one set of people alone could Jesus have come into the world, as they were “chosen” because they chose God. They kept the faith. This is why Christians who hate Jews make no sense at all, as without the Old Covenant and line from Abraham to David to Jesus, there is no salvation. As Paul says, we would still be in our sins.

I need to stay on track here though, because this is the big moment.

The whole point of the Bible is the story of bringing back worship to the one all-powerful creator God in order to rescue us from the world of the many gods. After the Tower of Babel, the world was pagan and polytheistic. The rest of the Bible is the “return of the king,” the return of the one God. That is the overarching story of the Old and New Testaments. Whenever you go get stuck in a single line of Old Testament violence, recalling this big picture idea is a good idea, because you can easily miss the forest for the trees.

In the Old Testament, starting with Abraham, the one true God is worshiped and defended. In the New Testament, the one true God returns to glory, bringing an end to the world of false gods, all for the sake of rescuing us. This happens through a very specific process of selection, from Abraham all the way to Mary. It’s important to remember how focused and targeted this selection of people really is. The story narrows and narrows toward one woman. Clearly the whole nation of Israel did not gather in Mary’s room during the Annunciation and consent to Gabriel. No, only she said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” She was chosen by God from the chosen people, but this selection, this precision laser-targeting, had to come through the only people on earth who believed in the one God. Could it have happened otherwise? Of course. God can do whatever he wants. But he didn’t. This is one of the mysteries of God’s ways, and while the rational brain wants to rebel at this idea, it is fitting that God chose to rescue us in the way that he did.

Were there other people in the world who believed in the one true God? Possibly, but we don’t know. There are no known groups of one God peoples, so just as Abraham has chosen God, it seems that God really has also chosen Abraham. There is at least one man who worships the one God, as we see in a cameo appearance from Melchizedek, which I’ll talk about later. He just shows up to bless Abraham, but aside from Melchizedek, the world seems completely empty of people that worship one God. There is a sense that “God is Dead” by the time you reach the end of chapter 11 of Genesis. The whole Bible after that chapter is about the restoration of God through this unique line of believers, which is why Abraham is so important to the all three of the major religions of the world today, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

The path to salvation returns via Abraham and his dedication to the one God. For Christians, this beginning by Abraham is fulfilled in Mary, mother of Jesus, mother of God. Jesus of course is literally the God-man, Son of God, Son of Man, the incarnation, fully-human and fully-divine. Jesus is the one true God in human form.

Of course, the irony is that after all the wars, setbacks, journeys in the desert, time in captivity, and staggering hardships, only some of the Jews convert and join the apostles. Many of the chosen people do not choose to believe in Jesus as the Messiah. But in reading the Old Testament, this is hardly anything new or even surprising. The chosen people stray from the one God in nearly every book of the Old Testament. Being a member of the Israelites, or even being of the line of Judah, or David, or even being a cousin of Mary, doesn’t necessarily mean you have chosen to believe in the one true God, and so it also will not mean that everyone will convert to Christianity. Having a social security card doesn’t mean you love America, it just means you are in the tax system. Where you live doesn’t dictate your faith, even though many nations have tried that and still try to force-feed faith today (all countries do this, not just Saudi Arabia, Iran, Cuba, and China. Every nation demands a kind of faith or it could not stand, some just force the narrative harder).

Every Hebrew had free will, just as we have free will today. None of that changed. Peoples of ancient times were not homogenous in their beliefs. They were not one giant blob of uniform ideas, but we tend to think of them like that. The same goes for Romans or pagans. Clearly there were “virtuous pagans,” as Dante calls them in his journey through hell. You can find loads of writing on virtue from Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Cicero, Virgil, Plato, Socrates, and many others. So it’s absurd to pretend that all Israelites lay prostrate daily before the one God, while all Romans or Sumerians ate their children like Saturn.

They were just like us, with some being more devout, and others being less devout, and still others not believing at all. For a specific example in our world, you can go from one end of a city and find a strict Catholic church that the Pharisees might even find homey, and then go to the other end and find a church that appears to be unaware of all doctrine. Yet both consider their parish to be fully Catholic, part of the Mother Church. There is gray area between churches, but specific statements of faith are non-negotiable, such as that there is only one God (plus everything else in the Nicene Creed).

What I’m getting at is that faith cannot be forced among the chosen or the un-chosen people, and even among the devout believers there can be significant differences in what “devout” actually means.

To break this out of religious terms, consider the rewards card at your local gas station or grocery store. Having a rewards card doesn’t mean you love the gasoline or groceries from that store. You may get gas and groceries daily from the store, but you have no real loyalty to it. You may only have signed up for the rewards card because of a discount or because it’s close to your house, but whatever the reason you are now a member. The moment a better deal arrives, you may dump that rewards card.

Membership is not a good indicator of belief. It can be a mere matter of convenience, or mutual benefit, or tradition, or dumb-luck. (I will say, however, that I have met some very devout Costco members, making it seem like a religion for some.) Membership does not equate to conviction. Likewise, the chosen people have many members that wander into other religions of the surrounding culture. They may keep their rewards card for when it helps them, but the stories of the Old Testament has many, many instances where Israelites get caught shopping with pagan reward cards at Baal’s Golden Mini-Mart.

St. Paul had rewards cards (membership and citizenship) in both the Jewish and Roman worlds. This helped him to get his trial moved to Rome, but it didn’t spring him from jail. No, the verdict was death for him because he had joined a third club. The new club essentially offered joy in this life and eternal joy in the afterlife. It’s a very different kind of club, one that ultimately got him beheaded. This rewards club can bring a lot of anger upon its members.

Many Jewish people did not join the new faith, since they did not believe that the messiah had come. This has led to so much confusion and anger over the past two millennia, which is uncharitable, to say the least, and led to downright horrific cruelty. Many Christians seem to forget: the story is not over. We are in the messianic age now, the final age. In this age we are to love God, love one another, and do God’s will by keeping his Commandments. We do not know the time when the end will come, and we can ignore the claims of “end-times” authors and apocalyptic highway billboards who proclaim that they have “cracked the code.” All we can do is prepare without knowing, because the day will come when God decides the day has come, not when any person has predicted. This is very plain to see in the Gospel, when it says, “For just as lightning comes from the east and is seen as far as the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be.” (Mt 24:27) In other words, it will happen in an instant, and we will not be able to repent when that day arrives. This is why I feel that the “Doomsday Preppers” may want to stop hoarding canned goods and stockpiling bullets, and instead, they would be more wise to pray and give to the poor (the canned goods, I mean, since no one can get nourishment from bullets).

Each person’s salvation is for that individual to work out with fear and trembling, just as my own is. The saying among addicts is to “Worry about keeping my own side of the street clean.” That is good advice for a store owner and a spiritual person. If I judge anyone, I have immediately lost a sense of humility. Pride is a very difficult animal to cage. So there are two important factors here: first, the story is not over, and second, it’s not for me to hand out judgement as I am sorely in need of mercy. As for the chosen people, it is enough for me to know that the Old Covenant was not revoked by the New Covenant and that God’s will for them will be done, just as it is for the rest of us (CCC 121).

By the time you get through the thousand pages from Genesis to the Gospels, you might think that’s the end. It’s not. We are just in the third act now waiting for the finale, the climax to happen, around which there is much disagreement and speculation. (If interested in more about Israel, the Church, and the end of Act III see this article from Jimmy Akin that dives into it.)

As I mentioned earlier, the heroic tales of ancient Greece read like persuasive arguments for justifying the way of life chosen by the empires of the age. You might say, the stories tell the journey of the people of Zeus, the people who chose Zeus. When you look at the opposing stories in this way, the idea of the chosen people of Israel makes more sense, because the only reason God “chooses” Abraham is because he has “chosen” God. Every city-state around where Abraham lives has chosen some other god.

This is kind of a big deal, because again, it’s the big picture of the entire Bible.

God did not lose any actual power when the nations turned away from him. The story of salvation in the Bible is a big wide turn back to the one true God, to true power and not the power of objects. He was never defeated, but was only defeated in our minds and hearts. The rebellion against God failed in heaven, but we simple humans turned away. Failing to overthrow God, the fallen spirits instead attack his creatures, which is us. These spirits are watching us watch Netflix and sports, as we have once again become distracted from the one God. Now the spirit only has to suggest, “Play next episode?” and we choose to click a button in the affirmative, allowing us to space out and pay homage to the TV god for another hour.

Back to Abraham, Israel, and the gang. All nations and peoples have turned away, except for Israel. And even the chosen people struggle to keep this single truth alive of the one God, the all-powerful God, as they suffer repeated, constant temptation and do battle with the worldly influences around them. Not only do they have to fight this battle spiritually, but they literally fight to the death for this belief, which is why there is so much bloodshed in the Old Testament. People consider the Israelites as the warmongers without considering that they are under constant duress for this polar opposite worldview to every people and nation that surrounds them, and survival in that environment requires battle.

The alternative is surrender. But for them the only surrender that can happen is to the one God, not to other cultures who believe in false gods. The world tried to squash this one, last, final remaining culture that believed in the one God. They refused defeat and went to war and they slaughtered and they were slaughtered because this idea was worth keeping alive.

I think that’s what I failed to understand for a long time, that what the people of Abraham are fighting for is the very existence of the one true God in the hearts and minds of men and women. I so often mention that surrender is the key, but there is surrendering to the way of the world, and there is surrendering to God. The surrender must not be to the world, but to God. The good news for those who love competition (I’m looking directly at Americans) is that when you surrender to God, you stop fighting your fellow men and women, so this may sound like rolling over and giving up, but there is a never ending spiritual combat happening and all hands are needed on deck. And this combat is more intense and powerful than playoff football or the free market or presidential politics.

The whole point of God “choosing” a people to restore faith in him is to point everyone back to the one God. It’s like an English Pointer freezing stiff as a statue and lifting a paw to point to where the hunters needs to go. And we’re all seekers, we’re all hunters for the truth, but we’re easily distracted and confused. We ignore the pointing, thinking we’ll get better directions from our phone or by instinct. That is how the fall happened and how we became “scattered” into many nations. The story of how we came to ignore the one God is fully covered in the falls of mankind that occurs in Genesis, in chapters 1-11, and everything that comes after is the return of God to his rightful place. The dramatic ending comes in the interactions between Caiaphas, Pilate, and Jesus in his trial.

The conspirators take steps to separate themselves from the deed. As for Pilate, he washes his hands with water, literally, in front of the mob and tells the people, “I am innocent of this man’s blood. Look to it yourselves.” But he can’t wash it off. He can’t extract his role in the death of Jesus any more than Caiaphas can, because they are both stuck fighting in the pit. Jesus even tells Pilate that Caiaphas is more guilty, since Caiaphas handed him over, but Pilate’s attempt to wash his hands of the verdict cannot help him. Pilate is still guilty, if only slightly less than Caiaphas who led the campaign to have Jesus killed. The blood on Pilate’s hands sinks in like a tattoo. It’s never coming out.

Choices made long ago set Pilate’s life in motion to lead him to the exact spot where he is presiding over the trial of Jesus. Once you have taken the wrong turn, you often can’t quit the trail. You must go to the end, or so it seems. The woods is thick. To get on a different trail requires going back to the trailhead, and choosing the right path, but for those far along on the wrong trail, starting over seems impossible. The pressures of the life you choose boxes you in. Sometimes there appears to be no way out, but…there is a way.

You must be reborn. You must become like a child again. You must take up your cross. Pilate doesn’t have time for repentance during the trial, because his entire life has painted him into a corner. Caiaphas has no interest in being reborn, whereas you can sense this odd tension in Pilate, kind of like Nicodemus. They both seem to want to ask Jesus for help, but they don’t. They could all be reborn and change their ways, but they won’t. For Pilate, being reborn in the spirit would probably mean he’d be killed by the Romans. To be faithful to the one God requires rejection of the false gods. Pilate, Nicodemus, and Caiaphas all love their own lives too much. They can’t change because they don’t want to. Giving up their path seems too hard, so it’s easier just to keep going. This is exactly how habitual sin works.

You can’t just easily wash it off. You can’t wish it away. You can’t stop doing it. You can’t quit it. It requires a hard turn against the current, like Abraham did, in order to escape the false gods. Eventually the sin you love the most will paint you into that corner where there is no help, and that is where you will get the chance to make the turn. It’s painful and scary, but so liberating. There is only one person who can extract you from the situation you walked yourself into. All three of these people, Pilate, Nicodemus, and Caiaphas, reject the hand that offers help when they need it most, because their position on a tiny pedestal of power seems like too far to fall for their ego to survive. They don’t realize that it’s exactly the ego that needs to fall and be shattered.

So Pilate’s attempt to “wash his hands” and remove his involvement of overseeing this kangaroo court in Jerusalem fails miserably. To this day, a billion people utter his name every week when they recite the Nicene Creed, right after the Sunday homily. Caiaphas actually got off pretty easy, in that sense, as we don’t recite his name.

Pilate is a representative of a world that has chosen many gods over the one God. It’s probably safe to say that Pilate, at the time of the trial, would have found the idea of one God ridiculous. Every culture in Pilate’s time had bought into the belief that one true God didn’t really exist. But Pilate and Rome is not unique in this sense. What happened to Pilate after the trial is unclear, as he may have been executed, or committed suicide, or may have even converted to be a follower of Jesus. His wife may have converted, and is honored in the Eastern Orthodox church as a saint. As for Pilate, it’s not really clear. But whatever his end, he played the role as the standin for the existing worldview which ruled from the time of the Tower of Babel until the resurrection of Christ. The nations had created and bowed to fictitious gods for a long time, but this interaction with Pilate is where the tide turned against the false gods for good.

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