Of all the Lenten bad guys, Pilate’s the one I feel sorriest for and would most like to excuse. This probably accuses me, too, since Pilate is the closest to those of us who are privileged North Americans—the paragon of the powerful coward.

Although Pilate is portrayed as violent and insensitive in the works of Philo and Josephus, Jewish commentators of the first century A.D., in all four gospels he’s more of a tool and kind of a weakling. He has nothing against Jesus and is not overly impressed with the Jewish authorities. In fact, he has enough psychological acuity to realize that jealousy drives the accusations as much as anything. He tries all kinds of delay tactics: a personal interview or two with Jesus in private; fobbing the accused off onto Herod, hoping he could take care of the Jewish problem for the Jews; offering a thorough scourging, enough to discourage rabble-rousing in the future, in place of a crucifixion; choosing the most outrageously offensive of Jewish criminals, i.e. Barrabbas, and making the crowd choose between him and Jesus. Unfortunately, religious conspiracy and mob rule have the upper hand. All of Pilate’s strategies fail and the choice finally lies with him. What’ll it be, Pilate? Does the King of the Jews die or not?

We all know how this one turns out. Pilate’s cowardice in the face of the crowd and lily-liveredness in the face of justice sends an innocent man to his death. His agency is as essential in this story as Judas’s. And yet, like with Judas, the gospels themselves introduce a note of ambiguity in the easy condemnation we might issue against Pilate. Of the former, Jesus says: “The Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born” (Matthew 26:24); to the latter, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin” (John 19:11). A divine necessity mysteriously coexists with the human sin, not quite a “felix culpa” as the church fathers said of Adam and Eve’s first betrayal of their Lord, yet without this death sentence on Jesus there would be no repeal of our own.

We are often tempted to justify a sin by the good God brings out of it, and that will not do here or anywhere else. We are also tempted to believe that only really wicked, deliberate, malicious, and violent sins truly qualify as sins. This is a dangerous impoverishment of our moral imaginations. Cowardice is also a sin. So is ignorance. So is short-sightedness. So is idolatry, which more often than not hurts no one at all. So are many other things about which, we’d like to protest, we had no way of knowing and could’ve done no better. Pilate the government official doing his job according to the legitimate laws of his day, Pilate the coward, Pilate who knew better, Pilate who inadvertantly echoes the serpent’s “Did God really say…?” with his own “What is truth?”—this Pilate stands as a warning against any justification of sin, even the pathetic and undramatic ones.

One of the last glimpses we get of Pilate in John’s gospel is the objection of bystanders that the governor authorized an inscription saying “The King of the Jews” over Jesus’ head. He said he was the king of the Jews, they complain, but he isn’t really. Here, for one single instance, Pilate sticks to his guns. “What I have written, I have written.” And what did that inscription mean to the governor? Perhaps it was nothing more than an ironic statement on the fate of the Jews as a whole: this Jesus dies now as a synecdoche and symbol of the inevitable fate of the whole nation. Or maybe it was one of those sad and inadvertant confessions from one who’d had a chance to do better and failed. Maybe behind that inscription was Pilate’s private, muted, and despondent plea: Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.