When the Marquis de Sade attempted to raise moral transgression to an art form, the results were repulsive, but they were also sad and more than a little ridiculous, a minor man of letters shaking his fist at Heaven and demanding: “Notice me!” (Perhaps he was only shaking his fist at polite society — it is not clear he knew the difference.) In the end, the man turned out to be something of a milquetoast: Freed from the Bastille and put in charge of a revolutionary court, he found himself on the bad side of the revolutionaries, because he declined to hand down death sentences. If you sometimes find yourselves wondering at the viciousness of our modern progressives, consider that their spiritual forebears were executioners for whom the man literally synonymous with sadism was too soft and too liberal. He was the beast only in his imagination, the Walter Mitty of moral turpitude.

“He is not here.” But we are, here, in the real world with Pontius Pilate. It is a world of little things — tradeoffs, compromises, and accommodations. There is a mortgage to be paid — “the yuppie Nuremberg defense,” Christopher Buckley calls that — and debts to be serviced, work to be done, doctors to be visited, lawyers to be paid, IRS agents to be satisfied, and, overseeing it all, the American God, the one who helps those who help themselves. That is our truth. We would be the Good Samaritan, but we know that guy will just use the money to buy a bottle of wine. (Maybe MD 20/20, from Mogen David.) Everyone knows no good can come of that.

The story was supposed to end the way it began: that same body, swaddled once again, laid in a place that is low and obscure, the scent of myrrh masking the stench of decay. The soldier goes back to his garrison, Peter returns to his nets, Caiaphas continues his plotting and politicking. The mass that follows because it follows anything that moves goes on to the next excitement. Pontius Pilate buys his political tranquility at a bargain price — the life of one man of no particular importance.