Pilate’s Dilemma

I'm back in the US now, finally with a little breathing room to get caught up on some of the "backblog". On April 17^th, we did the story of Jesus' sentencing by Pilate. We introduced Jesus and talked about how everyone liked him but the religious leaders. Introduced the priests, who talked about how they hated being told that they were sinners when they didn't think they were, and how if everyone followed Jesus they would quit paying the priests to intercede for them with God, and they would lose out. So they were looking for a way to arrest him. Along comes Judas, one of Jesus' disciples who accepts a bagful of money to lead them to Jesus.

Jesus prays in Gethsemane while Judas and the priests plot His downfall in the background.

Judas and a couple of armed soldiers come up to Jesus. Judas kisses Him (that was the stage direction, anyway. We got just cheek-to-cheek) & the soldiers drag Him away. Judas then has a change of heart and wants to repent & give the money back, but it's too late. He throws the bag down and disappears into a side room & the people are told he kills himself.

We skipped all the back and forth between Pilate and Herod as being too complicated, and not adding anything to the point of the story. They went straight to Pilate and stayed there. This was a series on New Testament women, though, so we did introduce Pilate's wife, who sent for Pilate right in the middle of the trial & told him not to harm Jesus, because she'd had a dream about Him & He was innocent. So Pilate doesn't know what to do. He doesn't think Jesus is guilty either, but the crowd is getting ugly. Aha! There's that custom of releasing a prisoner at Passover. He picked the nastiest guy in the prison to have the crowd choose between him & Jesus, figuring they would surely release Jesus.

Actually, our Jesus (in the "trademark" white vest) looks meaner than our backwards-capped Barabbas…

But they don't choose the way Pilate hopes. He's still too afraid to go against the crowd, so he tries to at least shift all the blame onto them by having a basin of water brought, and washing his hands before everyone. Then the soldiers haul Jesus away, and we just put up a flannelgraph picture of Jesus on the cross to show that He was indeed crucified.

For our game, we talked about how Pilate's wife remembered who she had seen in her dream, even though we don't always remember our dream. The game then was to look briefly at a picture of a person ( Xeroxed from the flannelgraph set), and then see if they could find that figure among the many blu-tacked along the walls. For some of the kids, we let them take the picture along to match; we made the smarter kids work their memories a little harder.

For craft time we made these pretty crosses out of ribbon and dismantled clothespins.