"Pilate therefore went forth again, and saith to them: Behold I bring Him forth to you, that you may know that I find no cause in Him. (So Jesus came forth, bearing the crown of thorns, and the purple garment.) And he saith to them: Behold the man! When the chief priests, therefore, and the officers had seen Him, they cried out, saying: Crucify Him, crucify Him! Pilate saith to them: Take Him you, and crucify Him, for I find no cause in Him. The Jews answered him: We have a law, and according to that law He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God." - John 19:4-7
Pilate, by making this public show of Our Lord crowned with thorns, sanctioned the cruelty of the soldiers. If they had not done it at his order, at least by this he gave it his approval. Indeed, he must have known all the time what was being done, since he chose this particular moment, and this particular condition of the Victim, for the demonstration. And he gives his reason for his connivance; in his own mind he is cruel that he may be kind. By reducing Our Lord to this pitiable condition, he hopes to win the pity even of His enemies. Hence we may conclude that never in all the Passion does Our Lord appear more pitiable, more "a worm and no man, and the outcast of the people," than when He drags Himself up those steps, bent with exhaustion and agony, a mangled remnant of a body, clad in nothing but a scarlet rag, with a helmet of thorns upon His head, to be shown as a spectacle to His own people.
"Ecce homo" - "Behold the man!" For indeed it needs to be labelled as a human being, this grovelling creature, this "worm and no man," whose humanity seems to have been beaten out of Him, and to have left nothing but a heap of blood and flesh. "From the crown of His head to the sole of His foot there is no soundness in Him"; this is literally true. And on the other hand, while He is a man and not a lower creature, who will say now that He is more than man? Who now will say that He is God? He is man, "the most abject of men," and no one, pagan or Jew, can reconcile this with their idea of God. Surely then, now, if only out of pity and contempt, they will let Him go. So might well argue the pagan Pilate, and comfort his conscience that this act of flagrant injustice was after all most just that line of argument which the merciless, temporizing world is for ever using to itself.
But not so the Jewish chief priests. It was not that they were by nature more cruel than Pilate; paganism is always by nature cruel; it was that religious cruelty corruptio optimi pessima can outstrip any cruelty that is in human nature. And the reason for their cruelty is at last made manifest. We have had it expressed in the courts of Annas and Caiaphas; we have heard it in the course of our Lord's life; but so far it has not been uttered before Pilate. Now, in the paroxysm of their rage, the truth appears. "We want His life, not because He is a malefactor, not because He perverteth our nation, not because He forbiddeth to give tribute to Caesar, not because He sayeth He is Christ the King, but because He made Himself the Son of God. We want His life because this declaration goes against us and our ideas. Such a Son of God is not the Son of God for whom we look. Therefore, let Him be crucified."
- from The The Crown of Sorrow: Meditations on the Passion of Our Lord, by Archbishop Alban Goodier, SJ. It has the Nihil Obstat of Canon Franciscus M Wyndham, Censor Deputatus, and the Imprimatur of Canon Edmund Surmont, Vicar General, Diocese of Westminster, England, 16 May 1918