Pilate and Herod were politically competitive. Part of their dislike for each other was in their natures, but much of it was in their jealousy of power. They did not like each other for either might succeed or fail to disadvantage of the other. Both served at the permission of Rome, and neither had assurance of guaranteed authority. On occasion their authorities overlapped. Things could be touchy. Their main duties were to keep an uneasy province of Rome in their part of the world, at peace, and feeding tax revenues to Caesar. If they did their duty to Rome, they held continuing power over the populace in their appointed provinces. Herod’s power was greater than Pilate’s, but assignments for each were cast in ways that neither could change. Herod and Pilate limited each other somewhat. Rome’s power figures did not hold high opinion of them.
Herod was a puppet king and Pilate was a governor. They reflected similarities. Their interest in Jesus was serious, and both questioned him intelligently. They wanted to gain insights that might contribute to their own effectiveness in managing obstreperous subjects. Jesus was a special kind of celebrity. Herod was eager to see a miracle like those of which he had heard. The reason he was seeing Jesus was that Pilate shuffled Jesus off, not wishing to deal with the problem leaning toward civil uproar among the religious leaders, with accusations resting on flimsy legal ground. Herod, after unsatisfactory exchange with Jesus, sent him back to Pilate. The two area authorities were made instant friends, after years of enmity between them. Interesting!
One of the mysteries of life is how we win friends, and lose them. Most of us have had friends for years, only to suddenly lose them for no reason that we can identify – (unfriending). When this happens we wonder if there is something sinister that we know nothing about that made a friend drop us, or grow aloof in contacts. We are the same we have always been, have held no ill will toward the person, and may have reason to believe that the friendship had grown and flourished. But it is gone. The loss may become indelible. The feeling of loss can be very deep.
There can be birth of a friendship in former conflicting parties. A student once came to my college office to report that he did not like me. I replied that I felt that I did not like him either. He had done something that so violated what I thought right, that I permitted the event to affect my spirit. He embellished his feelings. Of a sudden I said: Well, what are we going to do about it? He responded that he had no idea. I said: Let’s see if we can build a friendship starting with an admission that we don’t like each other? So it began. To shorten the story – we became sincere friends, extending beyond his college years. When I would travel between Spokane and Seattle, he and his wife insisted I stop for coffee or have lunch with them. We found that friendship is not total approval of each other, but genuine acceptance in a way that, practicing friendship, we improved each other. Friendship means so much to life that one wonders why so many persons fail to care enough to find it. At this writing I wish there was space to write about a lifetime of friendships that blessed my life. I continue with some of my students as friends of more than fifty years past. One of the reasons I deplore the current situation relative to the outing of the homosexual community is that it has reduced or diluted the understanding of friendship. What is the possible relationship of the love of brotherhood/sisterhood has become a turn that includes a sexual context. The magnificence of a David/Jonathan friendship must now bear the burden of sexual context? It changes meaning of a God-given concept of friendship. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020