The Realm of Truth

The gospel examined is John 18:33-37.

One of the really annoying features of our recent presidential election was how everyone seemed to confuse a constitutionally limited position with some kind of divine right kingship. Both candidates and their supporters were acting as if the president can rule by decree. But as we've seen over and over, unlike a monarch or a CEO, a president has to persuade people, including those in his own party, to go along with his policies or he's stymied. So whenever either candidate spoke as if he could magically create jobs (other than government jobs), or control the economy (which would require controlling the world) or make sure that a foreign country did or didn't do something (ditto), I wondered if they and my fellow countrymen had forgotten the civics lessons we got in school. And I still see Facebook posts that act as if the president can take away Americans' guns (not since the Supreme Court decision in 2010) or as if states can secede (I seem to recall us settling that question in the 1860s). In fact, George Washington, once he had accepted the surrender of the British, was urged to become the first king of the United States. But he did not think that they had defeated a King George III in order to turn around and install a King George 1st.

Early on in human history it made sense to give one man all the power to make decisions for a group. Ordinary life was not much different than warfare. Small family groups faced extinction at the hands of famine, wild animals, and hostile tribes. You needed a tough warrior in charge. As families grew into clans and tribes, as tribes settled together into cities, those strong men gained more power. They then conquered neighboring lands to become nations, and adjoining nations to become empires. There was comfort in having a strong man at the top to protect everyone's home and livelihood and to impose order on an otherwise chaotic society. The safety and stability a king provided were considered way more important than individual rights.

Though they may not call themselves kings, the leaders of many countries today still seek or hold absolute power over their citizens. And for most of history that was fine with the people, provided the strong leader kept things orderly if not perfectly just.

Israel had lived for hundreds of years under the judges, divinely called leaders who arose when needed to protect the people, usually from outside attack. But they wanted the continuity and stability of a king, like other nations had, and urged Samuel, the last of the judges, to anoint one for them. Samuel wasn't happy about this because he foresaw how such power might corrupt any man made king. But he went ahead and anointed Saul as the first king of Israel. When Saul lost God's favor, Samuel was sent to anoint David, who was both devout and a great warrior. He became for Israel the template of the ideal king.

In Jesus' day, under the oppression of the Roman Empire, the hope was for God to raise up and anoint another holy warrior king. That was the popular idea of what the Messiah would be. And it explains why, early in his career, Jesus discouraged those he healed from telling anyone. He didn't want the Messiah talk to begin before he had redefined the term. After feeding the 5000, John's gospel tells us the crowd wanted to make Jesus king by force. His talk of the necessity of eating his flesh and drinking his blood discouraged them. That wasn't the kind of Messiah they wanted.

The same goes for the disciples. They couldn't accept Jesus' teaching about his being betrayed and killed because that didn't sound like something a strong leader would let happen. That wasn't the kind of Messiah they wanted.

In today's Gospel we see Jesus once again faced with an erroneous idea of what kind of king he was. Jesus was turned over to the Roman governor by his enemies, the religious leaders. They were Pilate's enemies, too, and it looks like he wasn't going to give them what they wanted if he could help it. But when they said Jesus claimed to be king, which was tantamount to treason against the Emperor, Pilate had to interrogate him.

"Are you the King of the Jews?' he demanded. To which Jesus countered, "Are you asking this on your own or did others tell you about me?" Pilate retorted, "I am not a Jew, am I?" Pilate sounds a bit contemptuous but he might have actually been ignorant of what the Messiah actually was. Pilate was not very understanding when it came to the Jews he governed. It's one of the reasons his governorship was so tumultuous and why he ultimately was removed by Rome.

Pilate continues: "Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?"  

Jesus hadn't raised an army or issued marching orders or called for revolution. But he didn't defend himself. He accepted the title of king implicitly and said, "My kingdom is not from this world." Note that he didn't say, "My kingdom is not of this world," but "My kingdom is not from this world." The Greek preposition indicates origin. So it's not that Jesus' kingdom doesn't belong here; it's that it doesn't originate from this world.

And the evidence for that fact? Jesus said that if his kingdom came from this world, his followers would be fighting to rescue him. The difference is that, unlike the kingdoms of this world, physical might and violence isn't the way to establish or keep power in God's kingdom. So what is its basis?

When Jesus says, "my kingdom is not from here," Pilate responds, "So you are a king?" And Jesus answers, "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." Notice that he doesn't say, "everyone who belongs to my kingdom," but "everyone who belongs to the truth." And it parallels what Jesus says in chapter 10 about his sheep knowing his voice and following him.

Though our lectionary text cuts off on the verse just before it, Pilate's reply to Jesus is to ask, rhetorically, and possibly cynically, "What is truth?" And, frankly, it's a question anyone reading John's gospel would eventually ask as well. The word pops up more than 2 dozen times in John and in almost every chapter. But by the time Pilate asks about the truth, the astute reader would already know the answer. In chapter 14, Jesus says, "I'm the way, the truth and the life." The answer to Pilate's question is standing in front of him.

The kingdom of God is not based on brute force but on the truth of who Jesus is. He is the God whose power is love. Those who belong to him, who know the voice of the truth, listen to him and follow him. Unlike every earthly kingdom, which expands by conquering the unwilling, the kingdom of God expands exclusively by incorporating those who listen and respond to Jesus' call. It grows by love. The church gets in trouble whenever it tries to expand in the way worldly realms do, by imposing itself upon others or forcibly converting people.

Another thing that has gotten the church into trouble is converting people to something other than Christ. By that I mean converting them to a theological system or a style of worship or an ethical system or a philosophical point of view or an institution. People have shown themselves to be quite capable of putting parts of Christianity ahead of Jesus. They have loved the church or an issue or even a certain interpretation more than Christ. They will nullify Jesus' plain words in order to defend something they actually value more. We see people trying to be more Christian than Jesus by either denying his emphasis on social justice or his emphasis on personal holiness.

The truth has an inconvenient habit of not hewing to our personal opinions of what it should be. Nor is the truth concerned with being simple or one-dimensional. Jesus wasn't. That's why it takes 4 gospels to tell the story of Jesus from various perspectives. That's why it takes 39 books of the Old Testament to establish the background and precursors of the gospel. That's why it takes 23 books to examine the implications and aftermath of the gospels. But to interpret them you have to keep Christ in the center. If you don't, you get a skewed version of the truth.

Of course, this puts Jesus at a disadvantage as a king. If he only rules the consenting, those who respond to his truth, he isn't going to have as many followers as leaders who use their power to make people their subjects.

And yet Christianity grew. Gentiles, slaves and women were especially drawn to this religion of love, where everyone is equal in the sight of God. A woman could be an apostle, a slave could be a bishop, Jews and Gentiles were both saved by God's grace through faith, not by their achievements. When Rome decided to wipe out Christianity through brute force and death, it had no better luck than when it killed Jesus. As he rose from the dead, so too faith in him lived by the blood of the martyrs. Pagans start to feel sorry for Christians, whom, they noted, went to their deaths with nobility. And when Christians stayed in Rome to care for victims of plague rather than flee, people began to admire the faithful. For more than 300 years Christianity was illegal. And during those same three centuries, Christianity spread throughout the Empire, so much so that tolerance of the faith was the best political option for Constantine when he becomes emperor.

After this, however, Christianity enters into an uneasy marriage with the state. It gains power and extends its influence but it loses much of its prophetic stance, it compromises its ethics and takes up the traditional role of religion in a society: the blesser of the status quo. And when it does find itself in conflict with the rulers of earthly kingdoms, it finds that few so-called Christian princes will submit themselves to its authority.

It is ever thus. When the church is too closely allied to the state, political power corrupts it. It gets used and when it is inconvenient, just like Pilate, politicians will sell out Jesus and try to kill the truth. In Romans 13, we are commanded to obey our national leader, to obey the laws and to pay our taxes. But as we see in Acts 5, when specifically forbidden to preach the gospel, we must obey God rather than men.

As Christians we are to live in this world but not to be of it. Our kingdom does not originate in the passions of this world but comes from the realm of God's Spirit. Finding a dynamic balance of expressing the spiritual in the physical realm is a difficult one. But we must always remember who has the last word and the final say: our true king, Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God. And we must follow his example. What he did was not what the rulers of this world would do. They would never show themselves to be vulnerable, nor sacrifice themselves or their power. He, by contrast, was never motivated by gaining power but by the truth he must express, the truth of God's self-sacrificial love for all those created to bear his image. Jesus was that truth incarnate and he has passed that mission on to us. Now we are to live out that truth. And in some ways it is harder today than it was when the faith was young. The first Christians had little or nothing to lose in a culture where they were a small illegal group. We are a large and prosperous portion of the population. If we live according to the commands of our king, we risk sacrificing our comfortable and respectable lives. And so we must ask ourselves: whom do we serve? This world or God's kingdom? The worshippers of power or the one who is the truth? And how do we prepare for the coming of our king?