What He Came For
John 18:33-37
26 November 2006
Christ the King Sunday

 

What a strange thing it was, to be in another land when the election results in my own country came pouring in.   Without access to 24-hour news channels or streaming web-based video, we relied on slow and sporadic internet connections to get little bits of election information as we could.  How surreal, to get up on Wednesday morning and read of the power shifts in the world’s only remaining empire, while traveling in what was once the world’s greatest empire.  I found myself pondering not only the nature of power and how it affects the course of history, but also how history puts power and change into perspective.

E verywhere I went, there were reminders of Rome ’s vast former power.  It was awesome. But to walk through the ruins of the ancient Roman Forum is to be struck not only by the stunning capacity we humans have for creativity, ingenuity, and design, but also to become breathtakingly aware of how in time, everything we do, everything we make, every institution we create, all of it will pass away – no matter how brilliant, no matter how powerful.  Time bears it all away.

Somehow our knowledge of this does not keep us from trying.  In fact, in our existential crisis, it seems we try even harder to shore up for ourselves power, wealth, privilege, and status, perhaps in some deluded hope that we can overcome the reality that none of it will last.  And when that hope is threatened, we will scramble all the more to protect it.

 

Jesus represented such a threat to the power of the religious leaders of his day.  As much as we have built up religious institution around his name, the truth is, he is still a threat to all our institutions, including the religious ones.  We do not see that so clearly as the religious leaders of his day did, or perhaps we would be more desperate to get rid of him too.

 

They had an inkling of the threat he posed, and they knew he had to go.  In their desperation, they colluded with their oppressors, the Romans.  Pontius Pilate was, by historical accounts, a harsh, mean-spirited ruler who scorned his subjects.  But when power is threatened, unlikely alliances are born.  So the Jewish leaders, and the Roman who ruled them, cooperated in squashing the challenge to their authority.

 

In today’s Gospel story, we are brought into the headquarters of political power.  The religious leaders themselves did not enter those headquarters, so as not to be ritually defiled.  This is often the way we use power against others – cleanly, invisibly, seemingly from a distance.  We do not like to get our hands dirty.

 

Pilate, the one who later would famously wash his hands, now stands alone with Jesus, in the inner sanctuary of political power.  “Are you the King of the Jews?” he asks him.  Here is where religion and politics come together in the trial of Jesus. The Romans knew that the Jewish messianic hopes posed a threat to their governance of Judea.  If Jesus is claiming a throne among Jews, then he could be planning a rebellion against Roman rule.  His life hands on how he answers Pilate’s question.

 

But Jesus answers a question with a question: “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?”  Can Pilate act out of his own inner authority, or only as a politician, responding to the whims of public opinion?  Jesus’ question shows us who is really on trial here, and who is really the judge.

 

“I am not a Jew, am I?” Pilate responds, in contempt for the people he governs.  And yet this trial will show that he is just like the people he disdains, rejecting and resisting the revelation of God in Jesus.  Pilate goes on to push further, asking Jesus, “What have you done?”

 

“My kingship is not from this world,” Jesus replies.  But Pilate does not seem to grasp that Jesus does not operate from the same categories and understandings that he does.  Pilate doesn’t get that Jesus isn’t trying to seize a throne or claim political power.  He cannot think beyond traditional power structures or conventional understanding.  “So you are a king?” Pilate demands.

 

“You say that I am a king,” Jesus replies.  And this is the way it has always been, isn’t it?  No matter who a person really is, we try to put them into our own categories of understanding.  No matter who Jesus really was, or really is, we try to fit him into our own little understandings.  He stands there, facing us, so far beyond all our worldly understandings, so much more than our little categories and conventions, but we insist.  Insist on making him smaller.  Insist on fitting him to what we can understand.  Insist on shackling him to our own perceptions of power, of religion, of ourselves, of the world, of life.  

 

This is not what he came for.  Even after 2000 years of doctrine, dogma, and domestication, even after all our claims to know him and to own him, this is not what he came for.  He did not come to fit into what we claim we know.  He did not come to prop up our power or our religion or even our understanding of God.  “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world,” he says, “to testify to the truth.”  

 

The first thing which strikes us [Paul Tillich writes] is that the truth of which Jesus speaks is not a doctrine but a reality, namely, He Himself: “I am the truth.”  This is a profound transformation of the ordinary meaning of truth.  For us, statements are true or false; people may have truth or not; but how can they be truth, even the truth?  The truth of which the Fourth Gospel speaks is a true reality – that reality which does not deceive us if we accept it and live with it.  If Jesus says, “I am the truth,” he indicates that in Him the true, the genuine, the ultimate reality is present; or, in other words, that God is present, unveiled, undistorted, in His infinite depth, in His unapproachable mystery.  Jesus is not the truth because His teachings are true.  But His teachings are true because they express the truth which He Himself is.  He is more than His words.  And He is more than any word said about Him. [i]

It is one of the deepest mysteries of our faith: that this person came to testify to the truth, to show us the truth of God’s heart and God’s being, but that this truth cannot be boiled down to anything we can say, even about the One who embodied it.  Words are not high enough, not deep enough, not big enough to capture God’s truth.  That truth had to be poured into a life, a life that smashed traditional concepts of religion and power, that subverted understanding and institutions, and that finally bore its highest witness by laying itself down for others.  When that truth was lifted up on a cross, snuffed out and sealed in a tomb, it burst forth in such a way that we still struggle to make sense of it.  And in our struggle, we mostly fail.  Because our minds and our words are simply not big enough to hold all that truth, in all its mystery and complexity and beauty.

The only thing that can hold such truth is another life – yours, mine.  God’s truth came to us not as a proposition, but as a person.  We respond to it, then, personally.  We reach for it not with intellectual understanding, or religious doctrine, but by living it, by trying to put our trust in it, in him.  By abiding in him.  We let His being become our being, too.  We let him in.

In Rome, behind the Pantheon, which was built in the first century as a temple to Rome ’s seven gods and was later converted into a Christian church, there stands a smaller church.  Built over the ruins of a temple to Minerva, it does not draw the big crowds of the Pantheon, or of the great basilicas.  The exterior is unimpressive; the inside is quiet, and dark. 

Off to the side of the front altar, standing in the shadows, is one of Michelangelo’s lesser-known statues, his sculpture of The Risen Christ.  It is not on a high pedestal, out of people’s reach, like the David.  It is not behind glass, like the Pietà.  Anyone can walk up and touch it, if they wish.  And two things strike you when you see it.   One is that, next to the triumphant Christ, the cross looks tiny.  It is only a little taller than he is, and in his arms it looks like little more than a couple of two-by-fours.  Clearly, the forces of death, even death on a cross, are no match for this Christ.  Yet the way he holds the cross is tenderly, almost an embrace, a reminder that it was by his love that he gave himself to this death.

The second thing you cannot help but notice is this.  The Christ Michelangelo carved was nude, a celebration of the God-given glory of the human body.  But the Pope insisted on covering up the statue, for the sake of modesty.  The brass loincloth is garish, ridiculous, ugly, not at all in keeping with the beauty of the Christ it covers.  This is what we also do to the Christ, is it not? – in our embarrassment over who he is, we cover him up.  We cannot bear the naked truth he brings.   

In our day and time it is not the possibility of Jesus as king that threatens or offends us.  It is the notion that he is the Truth.  In an enlightened society of tolerance and respect, living as we do in the midst of a plurality of religions and truth claims, how can we follow a person who claims to be The Truth?  It makes us cringe.  It makes us want to cover him up.

And yet, there he stands, eyes boring into each of us.  He is not talking to us about those people out there, about what they think, what they believe, what they do.  He is standing in the inner sanctuary of our power, our lives, saying simply, “Here is what I came for: to testify to the truth.”  To tell the truth about God’s love and grace, and to tell you the truth about yourself.   

He tells the truth so clearly it may make us want to kill him for it, or at least to shut him up.  And we discover then, that we are the ones on trial, not him.  He came to testify to the truth, and now we must decide.  The radical truth he came to tell was only love and grace.  It shames all our powers – political, economic, military, intellectual, religious.  It subverts our conventions, questions our claims, threatens our status quo, challenges our very being.  Can we listen to such a voice as this? belong to his truth? live our lives by its absurd calculations of love?

He is the one asking the questions now.  Our living is our answer.