This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 11/24/24, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: 11.24.24 Revelation 1:4-8 & John 18:33-40. You can listen to the audio, or keeping scrolling to read my manuscript. (The spoken sermon differs from the written text.)
Today is Christ the King Sunday. This year, I’m acutely feeling the appropriateness of the festival.
I had to look up when Christ the King was first established, and it turns out that it was in 1925 for the Catholics and a few decades later for many Protestants. This is interesting to me because it means that Christ the King Sunday was clearly not set up with the United States of America in mind, but it always lines up with our general election season. Christ the King Sunday consistently falls a few weeks after our elections, in a time that we are exiting the space of what might be and entering the space of what is about to become.
In our reading this morning, there are elements of both these feelings. The crowds outside the temple are eager for the awaited Messiah and hungry for the political order that they believe could, should, and will come. It is a political order based on the reign of King David. It is an order that, in many ways, mimics the established order—the order of Rome, the order of Caesar, the order upheld by legions, banners, violence, and titles. The Jewish people want a different political order. They want self-rule and a Kingdom of God that they think is based in Scripture, as opposed to the pagan idolatry of the Romans.
On the other hand, Jesus is held shackled in the Roman headquarters with the governor, Pontius Pilate. The Romans are very aware of the tendency of the Jews to rebel against them and attempt to set up their own Davidic kingdom in Palestine. The Romans are not just aware of it; they have had to respond to it many times before, often with devastating force, including the crucifixion of thousands of men.
So when Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you the king of the Jews?” he’s expecting Jesus to answer on the terms that everyone—both Jew and Gentile—understand: whether Jesus is a revolutionary who intends to overthrow the current order and replace it with a kingdom built on the force of arms and a religious ideology that blesses human power.
There have been theological tugs of war over the last 20 centuries about who is responsible for Jesus’ death. The common Christian view for a long time was that the Jews (or Jewish leadership) were responsible and that the Romans were not. More recently, in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, social justice-oriented theologians have pointed out that the Romans were actually the principal oppressor class here in 1st-century Judea. Pontius Pilate, far from being a hapless politician stuck between a rock and a hard place, was a brutal governor who knew exactly what he was doing and was quite prepared to sacrifice human beings on the altar of his own power and the predominance of Rome.
Both of these perspectives draw on scriptural and historical evidence, but they both ultimately miss the mark. What we see here in the 18th chapter of John is the whole of humanity fundamentally misunderstanding who Jesus is.
The Jewish leadership correctly sees Jesus as a threat to the current order but incorrectly considers him to be a false Messiah. Pilate, for his part, seems not to consider Jesus a real threat but is more concerned about the political realities of giving the local leaders a token so that they will be more pliant in the coming year. Both are operating under the principle of “it is better… to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed” (John 11:50).
The truth is, everyone there that day when Jesus was put to death profoundly misunderstood who Jesus was and what his mission was. Even his closest disciples did not seem to understand what Jesus intended to do and what his life and death would accomplish. This is evidenced, among other things, by Peter’s reaction: when he pulled out his sword and attacked the servant of the high priest when the religious leaders began to take Jesus into custody. It seems likely that Peter and the other disciples still thought that Jesus was going to be a David-style Messiah who would rule with a rod of iron, establish a system of coercion, make Israel great again, and cast out the Roman occupiers.
This is certainly where the crowd’s head was at when Pontius Pilate gave them the option of redeeming Jesus from the cross or giving back to them Barabbas. It becomes starkly clear what choice the people are being offered. The text of the NRSV translation says that Barabbas was a bandit. But the Greek word used here commonly refers to political insurrectionists, guerrilla fighters, revolutionaries. Barabbas was explicitly and openly a violent threat to the established order laid down by the Romans.
(Just as a side note, which seems interesting to me, Barabbas literally means “son of the father,” which is, of course, one of the titles Jesus has for himself. So in Barabbas, we can see someone who is quite literally an anti-Christ—that is, someone who stands in the place of Christ and whom we choose over the true God.)
So who was at fault here? Was it the Jewish leadership and the crowds, who preferred a violent, revolutionary, a David-style king to the disruptive but peaceable Jesus? Was it the Roman occupiers, led by Pontius Pilate, who tried to have Jesus released because they thought he was less of a threat but, once they saw they could get more political benefit from crucifying him, did that instead?
When asked whether he was a king, Jesus said to Pilate, “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.” And Pilate’s response? “What is truth?”
No one in the story could conceive of a world in which the power of truth was real and objective and stronger than the power of brute force. No one in the story could see what was truly happening. All of them thought this was a game in which Jews and Gentiles jockeyed for greater political power and the right to wield the sword over their enemies. In that context, I believe we must say that the Jews did not kill Jesus, and neither did the Romans: We killed Jesus. We, collectively—humanity—each and every one of us, are responsible because, in our natural state, we understand only violence and coercion as the basis for society.
But for us who have been redeemed and called into the story of Christ Jesus, we are invited to hear his words anew and understand the kingdom he represents and the truth he testifies to.
When, with Pilate, we ask one another, “What is truth?,” we remember the words of Jesus: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” When, with the rest of the church, we celebrate Jesus as king of the universe, we remember that Jesus is a very different kind of king—a king who comes into the world to testify to the truth because he is the truth.
Jesus is a king who lays down his life for us, his friends. He is a king whose kingdom is not of this world—not of the system of tactical arms, strategic deterrence, and realpolitik—but of a deeper, more powerful system of love, self-sacrifice, and submission to God and one another.