If human history consists of the struggle to survive and to live out the vocation that one perceives in one’s people, then history can end in one of two ways. Both know the scent of evil.
In the first, a people fulfills its historical ambition. Struggle ceases and, with it, the identity that one discovers too late to have been fueled by struggle itself. In the second, pettiness and other corrosive villainies wear down—or shout down—the noblest essence of national vocation.
Perhaps we are more defined by our struggle than we knew.
On the surface, the narrative of the prosperous ease that Solomon so quickly achieved for Judah and Israel seems unblemished by introspection. It is all about rest, the absence of accusers (curiously, of ‘satans’), the quantity of meat, grain, and wine that was consumed daily at the royal table. This literary elixir is poured into a carafe that gleams with Abrahamic polish, for we learn that ‘Judah and Israel were like the sand of the sea for greatness’. Her geographical limitations align with those promised to Abraham, that ‘wandering Aramean’ who dreamed of this land but never possessed it, never knew its ease, never in his peripatetic life caused one single table to groan night after night with the land’s good fruit.
Solomon even gives attention to building a house for YHWH now that he’s got such a nice one for himself.
It seems the best of times, save the troublesome Deuteronomic disapproval of such careless luxury that does not fail to seep up from the text through lines that give themselves to joyless description of bounty.
Israel’s history—her struggle—pivots on an Abrahamic fixed point that regards blessing for the nations as its goal, to the silent exclusion of taxation of those nations. Solomon finds peace, indeed, and the multiplication of the fineries that smoothly administered conquest makes available to the conqueror and his coterie. Yet the narrative erodes its superficial admiration by commenting upon the nations chiefly in terms of what they could provide, via taxation, for the king’s table.
Has history ended this badly? Has an unequaled vocation concluded in such soulless prose? Has its chronicler captured by subtlety a tragedy too awful for frontal denunciation? Perhaps.
Another son of David, endowed by his recorders’ pens with the burden of Israel’s vocation as he walks through his people’s recapitulated history, drinks the bitters of her cup in his own person, groans out the longings of her hopes, nears the extinction that she herself suffered at Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Roman hands, only to be raised when resurrection had become impossible. History walks here too the razor’s edge. Struggle is threatened with envelopment and asphyxiation, not by lux ease but by a villainous mob’s crescendoed conquest of justice.
Three times Pontius Pilate declares that he’s found nothing worthy of death in this Galilean wanderer, in over his head in the capital’s politics. By now the gospel’s narrative has cautiously named this Jesus to be Israel’s messiah, Israel’s David, Israel’s king. As in Solomon’s day, things are not quite as they appear, so one must imagine a kind of royalty that conceals itself in a pitiful preaching rabbi being hustled in and out of the private spaces of powerful men who will determine just when and how he dies.
What the mob cannot accomplish by reason, law, or principle, it achieves by sheer volume. ‘Execute! Execute!’ they shout, overwhelming Pilate’s sense of proportion and his will to resist. Indeed, wills are front and center in this threatened end of history.
The text carefully establishes what the Roman governor did and did not do.
Pilate handed him over to their will.
Struggle ends—as history may—by more than one scenario. In both cases, it seems that history outlasted its apparent demise. In each case, and variously defined, it took a death. And required a resurrection.
Canter Bridge 
Greaat read thankyou