大象传媒

We are in the National Gallery in London, standing in front of Rembrandt’s Good Friday meditation – Ecce Homo. Pilate, the Roman governor, is presenting Jesus to the crowd for the second time; earlier, he had brought him out and said simply, "Behold the man!" – now, he dramatically raises the stakes. Pilate has just questioned Jesus carefully in private, and has at last made up his mind about who this man is – and, as he’s a diligent imperial administrator, he will in a few minutes make sure that he writes it down, on the notice that will be put on the cross. He has come to the conclusion that Jesus of Nazareth is the King of the Jews.

It’s a small picture, roughly twice the size of a sheet of A4 paper, and it’s painted on paper, in oils. It’s almost entirely in browns and greys and whites, because it was made as a preparatory study for a black-and-white etching, which was produced shortly afterwards, and turned out to be extremely popular. Indeed, if you look at this picture in a certain light, you can see that the outlines have been gone over with a stylus, to transfer them to the copper plate for the etcher to work on.

So this is not official religious art, commissioned and approved by a particular church. It’s very much a private image, intended to be looked at closely, to be bought in the market place or the print shop, and taken home, where you ponder what it means for you there, in your daily life. And the more I look at it, the more disturbing I find this image becomes.

On the right hand side, below the platform, we look down to the city gate and the shadowy square in front of it, packed to overflowing with a large crowd. All we can see of the people there is a multitude of sketchily painted heads, crammed close together, with no discernible features.

This is literally a faceless mob, but Rembrandt, by repeating the curving rhythms of the anonymous, amorphous heads, suggests a suppressed violence that could at any moment explode into riot.

This crowd, we sense, is dangerous. This is a twitter storm waiting to break, about to turn into very ugly action on the street.

Now a figure on the platform gestures to them to hush, and they look up, watching, waiting, as their religious leaders insistently hold out to Pilate the long rod of justice which he must take in order to pronounce the sentence of death on Jesus.

But Pilate, for the moment, refuses to take it, and asks one last question: "Shall I crucify your king?" ‘The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.”

At this point, we notice the top right hand quarter of the painting. There, on a tall column in the city square, is Caesar himself – or at least an over- life-size bust of the Roman emperor, whose troops occupy the country and control the city, wearing round his shoulders a military commander’s cloak, and on his head the laurel wreath of victory in battle.

Like Jesus on the other side of the picture wearing his mock-royal cloak and his crown of thorns, Caesar looks serenely outwards. The two heads echo each other – they’re the highest heads in the whole composition – one in stone, one in flesh; the opposing poles of this drama. Caesar or Jesus? The might of the Roman legions, or the refusal of all force? The security of power and the established order, or the powerlessness of humility and love, with its unavoidable suffering? Between these two figures, we have to choose.

Most painters tackling this subject ask us to focus on the suffering which Jesus has already endured and will now undergo on the cross. To contemplate the distress of Jesus, fearful and alone, abandoned by the friends who had promised to stay with him, watching the crowd which a week before had saluted him as their King, now rabidly shouting for him to be killed.

Rembrandt does that, of course, but he asks us to do something more – and something much more demanding: to empathise with each of the human actors here, to feel what they are feeling, to notice how they all try to avoid taking final responsibility – and to find in them part of ourselves.

We can all imagine what it is to be Pilate at this moment. He’s not a Jew, and he is responsible for public order: he doesn’t want to risk a riot that could easily get out of control, and might well cost him his career – as well as leaving many dead. So, although he feels bad about it, he does what he knows to be wrong, and gives the priests and the crowd what they are clamouring for. In a minute he will take the rod of justice, to commit what he knows to be an injustice. Jesus will be marched out through the city gate that we can see below, and led to Calvary.