John 19.1-16

1 Then Pilate had Jesus flogged with a lead-tipped whip. 2 The soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they put a purple robe on him. 3 “Hail! King of the Jews!” they mocked, as they slapped him across the face.

4 Pilate went outside again and said to the people, “I am going to bring him out to you now, but understand clearly that I find him not guilty.” 5 Then Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. And Pilate said, “Look, here is the man!”

6 When they saw him, the leading priests and Temple guards began shouting, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”

“Take him yourselves and crucify him,” Pilate said. “I find him not guilty.”

7 The Jewish leaders replied, “By our law he ought to die because he called himself the Son of God.”

8 When Pilate heard this, he was more frightened than ever. 9 He took Jesus back into the headquarters again and asked him, “Where are you from?” But Jesus gave no answer. 10 “Why don’t you talk to me?” Pilate demanded. “Don’t you realize that I have the power to release you or crucify you?”

11 Then Jesus said, “You would have no power over me at all unless it were given to you from above. So the one who handed me over to you has the greater sin.”

12 Then Pilate tried to release him, but the Jewish leaders shouted, “If you release this man, you are no ‘friend of Caesar.’ Anyone who declares himself a king is a rebel against Caesar.”

13 When they said this, Pilate brought Jesus out to them again. Then Pilate sat down on the judgment seat on the platform that is called the Stone Pavement (in Hebrew, Gabbatha). 14 It was now about noon on the day of preparation for the Passover. And Pilate said to the people, “Look, here is your king!”

15 “Away with him,” they yelled. “Away with him! Crucify him!”

“What? Crucify your king?” Pilate asked.

“We have no king but Caesar,” the leading priests shouted back.

16 Then Pilate turned Jesus over to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus away.

Comments

One thing we should notice today is this is a conversation between leaders. Unlike the other accounts, the crowd says nothing here. Pilate, Jesus, the leading priests, and temple guards do all the talking.
We can see our God-human theme going on within Pilate. He says in v. 5, “here is the man,” then gives real pause at the idea that Jesus might be God (v. 7-9). He seems to take the claim to divinity more seriously, and with more reverence, than the religious leaders ever did. In fact, Pilate simulates the process of coming to trust in Jesus we saw earlier in John: here is the man (v. 5), he is innocent (i.e., holy, v. 6), he is King (v. 14).

As a conversation between leaders, we should expect to find our authority theme, and we do. Pilate is laboring under the delusion that he is the one in power. When Jesus tells him he only has what power is given to him a double entendre is clearly meant. Pilate is little more than Caesar’s puppet. The Jews expose the precariousness of his power with a thinly veiled threat in v. 12: “no friend of Caesar’s,” would be the most dangerous thing for Pilate to be. A well-made accusation along these lines could lead to his own execution. Pilate was also caught up in the divine drama of the Son giving himself for the whole world that God loves so much. There are forces at work beyond Pilate’s control. Pilate is at the mercy of trying to do Caesar’s will and at the same time is bound to carry out God’s will.

Pilate also had quite limited power over the people. Any ruler who abandons the legitimate use of bestowed authority (all authority is bestowed) for the quick coercion of violence loses much of the actual power he or she ever had. Violence can coerce compliance but it cannot inspire obedience. A populace held down by violence is always at risk for revolution; the leader is always sitting on a powder keg without control of the fuse. This applies to the religious leaders as much as Pilate. Annas and his nepotic successors were of the same ilk as Pilate. They had no power over Pilate beyond blackmail with Caesar (a dangerous game for all of them) and no real authority over the people.

Jesus was a threat to all these leaders because he was the only truly free person here. Pilate had no power over Jesus. The religious leaders had no power over him either. And I don’t mean this in some magical, mystical sense. It’s not that they were in charge of the physical realm while Jesus was in charge of the spiritual realm. We think like this but you will search in vain for evidence of that dichotomy here.

They had no power over Jesus because their approach to power and authority had already been condemned. Jesus is inaugurating a new kind of kingdom, not one of oppression, coercion, and guile, but one of trust, hope, and love. They had no power over Jesus because the highest expression of their power – killing Jesus (what Pilate only does out of fear of Caesar and the religious leaders only do by manipulating Pilate) – is precisely the tipping moment where their power is shown to be condemned and Jesus’ power – his glory – is revealed.

Okay, so what does all this mean? One: all forms of worldly power are coercive, self-serving, and manipulative – and thus self-condemning and self-defeating. This is true of governments, businesses, churches, families, and personal relationships. The way the world rules is condemned. Two: true power is what empowers, what leads to human flourishing. It begins with trust which builds unity, a shared identity. It goes forward with hope, spreading freedom for each to flourish. It achieves and lives out the goal of love which creates real equality.

This is the social order we call the church. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection make this way of life together possible. His Holy Spirit makes it actual.

New Living Translation (NLT) Holy Bible. New Living Translation copyright© 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale HousePublishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

John 18.28-40

28 Jesus’ trial before Caiaphas ended in the early hours of the morning. Then he was taken to the headquarters of the Roman governor. His accusers didn’t go inside because it would defile them, and they wouldn’t be allowed to celebrate the Passover. 29 So Pilate, the governor, went out to them and asked, “What is your charge against this man?”

30 “We wouldn’t have handed him over to you if he weren’t a criminal!” they retorted.

31 “Then take him away and judge him by your own law,” Pilate told them.

“Only the Romans are permitted to execute someone,” the Jewish leaders replied. 32 (This fulfilled Jesus’ prediction about the way he would die.)

33 Then Pilate went back into his headquarters and called for Jesus to be brought to him. “Are you the king of the Jews?” he asked him.

34 Jesus replied, “Is this your own question, or did others tell you about me?”

35 “Am I a Jew?” Pilate retorted. “Your own people and their leading priests brought you to me for trial. Why? What have you done?”

36 Jesus answered, “My Kingdom is not an earthly kingdom. If it were, my followers would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jewish leaders. But my Kingdom is not of this world.”

37 Pilate said, “So you are a king?”

Jesus responded, “You say I am a king. Actually, I was born and came into the world to testify to the truth. All who love the truth recognize that what I say is true.”

38 “What is truth?” Pilate asked. Then he went out again to the people and told them, “He is not guilty of any crime. 39 But you have a custom of asking me to release one prisoner each year at Passover. Would you like me to release this ‘King of the Jews’?”

40 But they shouted back, “No! Not this man. We want Barabbas!” (Barabbas was a revolutionary.)

Comments

I only want to make one point today. What Jesus says here about his kingdom not being of this world, not being an earthly kingdom, we tend to think of that meaning that Jesus’ kingdom was a spiritual kingdom not a material kingdom. This feeds into the already/not yet thinking so popular in some circles (including the Vineyard, which I am part of). But is that what Jesus meant here? Is he drawing a distinction between here and now worldly kingdoms and his own, somewhere else and not now (or not fully now) kingdom? Read it again closely, does the text say that or do we read that into the text?

I think the most obvious thing Jesus is saying here (and remember, we use the obvious parts to help with the less obvious parts) is that his followers are not going to engage in violent opposition to Pilate’s Roman soldiers. We already saw Jesus speak to protect his followers during the garden arrest, at least part of what he is doing here is trying to protect them from Pilate. More than that, remember what I shared last week about the Spirit-Paraclete coming to convince the world that its ways of expressing authority have been condemned (click here to read that)? What Jesus says in v. 36 here echoes that. Jesus is not saying his kingdom is not here and now. He has been declaring the kingdom to already be here throughout his ministry. Here, let me give my own paraphrase:

In v. 36, Jesus basically says, “my kingdom doesn’t do things the way your kingdom does them, Pilate. If it did, my people would fight to set me free, but that’s not how we do things.” In v. 37, Pilate thinks he has Jesus pinned, “You said kingdom, so that means you do claim to be a king?” To which Jesus responds, “You use the words ‘king’ and ‘kingdom’ because you can only think in those limited categories, but I came to tell the truth – that your way of ruling people has been condemned. The people who understand this will gravitate to me and that’s how my alternate kingdom will grow, not through conquest, but through shared love of the truth.”

Please understand, I am not suggesting an entire takedown of the already/not yet idea. That idea does have some good, textual basis. But this is not part of that and by reading it in (which I think a lot of people do, even ones not associated with already/not yet teaching), we miss what Jesus is actually saying to Pilate. Jesus is speaking prophetically to a representative of Rome, explaining the basic defect in their system. And I do think we sometimes make too much of already/not yet, using it as a shortcut instead of doing the work to answer hard theological questions. (Looks like another topic I will need to explore next year.)

In short, Jesus tells Pilate, “I don’t do kingdom like that,” which is a message many present day church leaders need to hear as well. We are more prone to fight than to love, more prone to argue against than stand with, more prone to all those expressions of worldly power that have already been condemned. Jesus gives us a very different way of leading and influencing, but it involves washing feet (literally and figuratively), so we would rather not. When we lead more like Annas, Caiaphas, or Pilate than like Jesus, we undermine the work we are trying to do for the kingdom. Because we don’t do kingdom like that.

New Living Translation (NLT) Holy Bible. New Living Translation copyright© 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale HousePublishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.