John 18: 33-37
Pymble and Chapel 22.11.15
Kingship on trial
What do really believe about our world and how it operates?
What sort of power do you think truly prevails in our world?
Today’s reading is like a showdown of 2 approaches to power.
As Pilate interviews Jesus
there is a clash of different types of power and authority;
over what it means to be a king.
Looking at it one way, Pilate has the power in this scene.
He can sentence Jesus to death or not.
But the writer John presents the narrative in such a way
to reveal Jesus as the one with the true authority.
Today we’ll reflect on different forms of power
and see what the arrested and bound Jesus
has to say about what makes for a real king.
When we think about power our first thought is often political power.
We have so much of politics in our media it is difficult to get away from it.
5 Prime Ministers in 5 years reflects the fight for power in Australia.
And one of them famously said
he’d sell a certain part of his anatomy to gain the top spot.
The prize – the Holy Grail for political parties and individuals –
is to be able to influence the nation,
to implement your policies, hopefully for the benefit of the country or state.
However, as we have seen all too often from both sides of politics,
such power also becomes a temptation to reward your cronies
and punish your enemies;
to top up your “meager” public service income,
or to advance your own standing in corrupt ways.
Such corruption of political power is not as prevalent here
as it is in some countries,
but it is common enough for there to be strong checks and balances
on all our elected officials.
Closely aligned with political power might be economic power.
At a personal level I guess this is about having sufficient resources
to do as you please,
to not be affected by the highs and lows of the economy.
But at an international level economic power is about influence.
You might have power as the supplier of certain resources,
like oil or iron ore or cheap labour
or you might have the power of being the source of huge demand,
like the growing Chinese middle class
or the Wal-Mart phenomena in the US,
where a one percent reduction in sales can drastically affect employment
on the other side of the world.
Either way, economic power is having what other nations want
and therefore being able to exert influence.
What about the power of terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda?
They build fear through random acts of violence
designed to intimidate and unsettle regular communities.
Their power is in their ability to spread such fear
through a relative small number of high profile attacks,
and therefore impact the way we go about our days.
And so to fight such terrorism, it is right we heed the encouragement
to continue our lives as normally as possible.
Or we could think about military power.
This is the ability to bomb your way to control,
to knock out your enemy by having the biggest weapons.
Yet like an after-school punch-up
such a victory doesn’t say anything about the rightness of the cause
or the character of the winner.
It only says you have the strongest weapons
and in an age when many nations
have the ability to destroy the world numerous times over,
there comes a limit to how useful the cache of such power really is.
While there is appropriate use of military power
it also schools our societies in the “might is right” approach to conflict resolution
and contributes to violence being accepted as the solution
in many areas of life.
Ah, but what about religious power?
Surely that would be a good thing.
We might think so, yet all of Jesus’ harshest words
were reserved for those we would call powerful religious leaders;
priests who were the leaders of the temple,
scribes and Pharisees with great Scriptural knowledge.
Again, power is readily corrupted in the hands of those who seek to use it
to manipulate others for their own benefit,
to maintain the status quo which just happens to work in their favour.
Sadly the misuse of religious power is at the heart of most of the stories
from the Royal Commission into Sexual Abuse
where it is so often trusted religious leaders who abused their positions of power
in order to satisfy their own misplaced desires.
Yes, there are lots of different sorts of power
but what is common to them all, is influence,
and that can be for better or worse.
Pontius Pilate knew about power.
He exercised considerable power in the Judean province of the Roman Empire,
and did so under the authority of the Caesar of the day, Tiberius.
He held the power of taxation,
power to implement the policies of Rome
and the significant power of the army.
As he met with Jesus he also had the power of deciding Jesus’ fate,
a fact that Pilate highlights in some versions of this encounter.
But it is in Jesus that Pilate comes across a different type of power,
a different type of kingship than he has seen in any of the Caesars.
Jesus states it himself:
“My kingdom is not from this world.”
Sometimes this is interpreted as Jesus saying
his only real realm of influence is in the heavenlies, in the afterlife,
but that is not what he meant.
Jesus means that his authority and ethos originate with God,
and not the world.
Pilate is getting an insight on the divine idea of power.
Pilate’s chief concern is whether Jesus was a leader of a revolution.
He asked him if he is the “King of the Jews” –
a title brimming full of political and military overtones.
Was Jesus leading a movement that would challenge Rome’s control of Judea?
No he was not that sort of king, Jesus intimates.
And given that he did not round up and kill Jesus’ followers
Pilate must have agreed.
Yes he would eventually have Jesus handed over to be killed
in order to placate the Jewish leaders,
who seemed to be baying for his blood,
but there didn’t appear any further threat of violent unrest
from his followers.
Pilate correctly understood that Jesus’ kingdom was a spiritual
and not nationalistic one.
And though Pilate cared nothing for spiritual matters
he knew that Jesus wasn’t about to lead an insurrection.
Jesus instead points to the realm of his kingdom being truth,
and that his whole purpose was to testify to the truth,
leaving Pilate to utter his famous question: “What is truth?”
There’s so many ways we could hear that question
but I think there is some desperation in his words.
For Pilate, truth has become dispensable;
it is whatever he needs it to be.
Yet here is someone proclaiming that his life
has been about serving and testifying to some absolute; to truth.
And though this man must know his life is seriously threatened,
still nothing Pilate says can shake him from his fate and calling.
And so this is the true power of Christ as King.
He serves not his own influence, not his own wealth
but Christ serves the truth, God’s truth.
Jesus is not about protecting his own power,
or shoring up his own support,
rather, Jesus longs to fulfill God’s calling on his life.
As such, though Pilate will hand him over to death,
he really has no power over Jesus, for he is truly free.
I began by asking you what you really think about the world and how it operates;
what sort of power prevails in our world?
To be one who follows the Christ,
like him, we will trust in God even when everything looks hopeless;
we will understand that though the world’s powers are great and obvious,
still God is able to work in, through and around them,
creating his own will from what appears disaster.
Like sentencing a pesky man to death
only to discover his death revealed the glory of God.
Let me conclude with a poem I found on the web, by Andrew King,
written as a reflection on this passage.
You, upon your throne of self-giving love
set upon a garbage-heap – that tower
of wood where on a dark day you are shoved
(to be rid of you) by the world’s powers –
you who called the blind to new ways of sight
and freed from their chains the captives to fear
and despair; who, with love’s strength in fresh light,
called the lost from graves, yet commanding here
no armies, holding here no sword, allow
yourself to suffer death for others – your
rule is surely not of this world. But how
surely it is our need! Show us the door
to true peace, O Christ. Rule our hearts: your voice
our one guide. Your way of love our one choice.