This Sunday, the lectionary invites us to ponder John 18:33-38. The English Standard Version supplies the passage with the heading “My Kingdom Is Not of This World.”
The passage is a portion of John’s account of Jesus’ encounter with the Roman governor, Pilate. The encounter happened after Caiaphas, the high priest, pronounced the sentence of death on Jesus.[1]
After pronouncing the sentence, Caiaphas, with others, led Jesus to the governor’s headquarters. There, Pilate encountered Jesus.
John doesn’t tell us what the high priests[2] tried Jesus for on the night they sentenced him to death.
John doesn’t need to. Because early in his gospel he reports that they persecuted Jesus for healing people on the Sabbath, instead of resting. And because Jesus claimed to be God’s equal. You can read it in John 5.[3]
This was Pilate’s first encounter with Jesus. It’s odd that Pilate hadn’t summoned Jesus earlier. After all, Jesus had become famous.
He’d become famous for his acts of healing and feeding; acts which the religious and civil rulers failed to do.
Jesus embarrassed the authorities by helping people in need. Just like Amri Che Mat and Raymond Koh did.[4]
Just like our police and Islamic departments have dossiers on Amri and Raymond, Pilate must’ve had a dossier about Jesus.
Much more must’ve been said between Pilate and Jesus. But we’re not told. Because the purpose of the gospels is not to satisfy our curiosity, but to show us who Jesus is, and what he expects of us.
From Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we know that Jesus spoke often about the Kingdom of God.[5] But up till this point in John’s gospel, Jesus has spoken of the kingdom only once before.
That one time was in the encounter with Nicodemus, the “Teacher of Israel,” which I wrote about in a column which I titled The Serpent, the Son, and Nicodemus.
In today’s passage, John has Jesus saying “my kingdom” three times. The repetition is for emphasis, to stress the ridiculousness of the situation.
For all practical purposes, Pilate, was king. The high priest brought to Pilate a poor man who entered Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey, the cheapest, lowliest, means of transport in the city.
The high priest said Jesus claimed to be king. So, Pilate should kill him.
John wants us to see that both Jesus and Pilate got the irony. The “joke.”
Pilate asked Jesus if he was a king. Jesus played along. He asked Pilate whether he’d figured it out for himself or whether the high priest had told him. Of course, they both knew the instigator was the high priest.
Pilate asked Jesus what he’d done to get the high priest so seriously annoyed. Jesus didn’t answer the question.
Instead, Jesus said it’s true he has a kingdom. But his kingdom is not like worldly kingdoms. It’s a kingdom in which the king serves the people. Not a kingdom in which the king lords it over the people.[6] It’s a kingdom whose king tells his people “don’t fight,” “don’t turn to violence.”
Pilate must’ve laughed. Because violence was how he got his job, how he kept it. Violence was how the high priest expected him to finish off Jesus.
Pilate continued the charade. He urged Jesus to speak more about his kingship. He must’ve expected Jesus to speak about power and honour. Because that’s what kings care about. But Jesus spoke about truth.
Jesus said he came into the world to speak about the truth.
Jesus spoke of truth as a side, a party, a faction. He said everyone who belongs to the truth listens to his voice, his witness, his testimony. Pilate responded cynically. He said, “What is truth?”
What “truth” did Jesus speak to Pilate?
John gives the answer in the next chapter. He tells us Jesus told Pilate that it was God’s plan that though innocent, he must be crucified.[7]
John began his gospel by introducing Jesus as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”[8] On the day Jesus was killed, hundreds of lambs were being killed, as sacrifices. The people were reenacting the Passover through which God saved their ancestors from death in Egypt.
Jesus, the Lamb of God, was also slaughtered, crucified, sacrificed. After he was killed, the Temple was destroyed, because there was no longer any need to sacrifice lambs.[9]
Jesus was the last sacrifice. But not quite. Because Jesus calls us to take up the cross and follow him.[10]
There is mystery in the cross. The Presbyterian theologian Carl R Trueman reminds us how Martin Luther expressed the mystery.[11] He writes:
“Luther sometimes referred enigmatically to Christ crucified as “God’s backside”—the point at which God appeared to be the very contradiction of all that one might reasonably have anticipated him to be.”
Another Martin, Martin Luther King Jr, the Baptist Minister and Nobel Laureate[12] who fought for civil rights in the U.S.A., also spoke of the cross. Soon after his house was bombed in 1956, Dr King gave a sermon about the Good Samaritan and about taking up the cross. He said:
“Taking up the cross is the voluntary or deliberate choice of putting ourselves without reservation at the service of Christ and his kingdom; it is putting our whole being in the struggle against evil, whatever the cost.” (Link)
Peace be with you.
[1] The account begins at 18:28 “Then they led Jesus from the house of Caiaphas to the governor’s headquarters,” and ends at 19:22.
[2] There were two trials. The first, before Annas, the former High priest and father-in-law of Caiaphas, the ruling High priest.
[3] John also tells us in chapter 19 that the crowd said Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, a claim for which they said their law requires the punishment of death.
[4] For more, see Ripples of Raymond Koh.
[5] 53 times in Matthew, 18 times in Mark, 45 times in Luke.
[6] Matthew 20:25-28; Luke 22:25-27.
[7] John 19:11 “Jesus answered [Pilate], “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above…”
[9] See my column Do you see the Temple in the fig tree?
[10] See Matthew 16:24; Luke 9:23.
[11] Another Presbyterian writer, Rev. Kathleen Henrion, gives a fuller quote: “Luther writes, ‘Like Moses, we are denied a direct knowledge of God. Instead, we see God revealed in the cross, the posteriora Dei (backside of God) revealed in the humility and shame of the cross. What is made visible are the very things that human wisdom regard as the antithesis of deity, such as weakness, foolishness, and humility. To those who are not in faith, this revelation is concealed. God is not empirically discernible to be present in the cross of Christ. Those in faith, however, know that concealed in the humility and shame of the cross are the power and glory of God. His strength is revealed in apparent weakness, His wisdom in apparent folly, and His mercy in apparent wrath.’” (Link)
[12] Click here to read or watch his stirring Nobel acceptance speech in 1964 in which he speaks of “a civil rights movement which is moving with determination and a majestic scorn for risk and danger to establish a reign of freedom and a rule of justice.”
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