Steve Lindsley
(John 18: 33-38a; 2 Samuel 23:1-7)
Are you King of the Jews?
It’s a simple enough question, right? There are two possible answers: yes or no. You either are, or you aren’t. It’s simple.
Are you King of the Jews?
Unless….unless it isn’t simple. Unless it’s more than that. More than a yes-no question. Maybe it’s something deeper; maybe it’s a question of identity. That’s not a binary kind of thing, is it? Who someone is. Who Jesus is.
Who are you, Jesus? That’s the real question Pilate’s asking, isn’t he? That’s what he really wants to find out – who Jesus is. The “king” thing is less about a title and more about – well, more about the truth. “King of the Jews.” There’s a whole lot wrapped up in those four little words; a lot that Pilate wants to know, needs to know; because these are crazy times he is living in, and knowing the answer to that question, knowing who Jesus really is, just might mean the difference between “Roman peace” or the world turned upside down.
Are you, Jesus? Are you King of the Jews?
See, it had been a mixed bag when it came to kings in Hebrew history. There was David, of course, the standard by which every other king was measured. It was David who, long before, slayed the warrior Goliath as a boy, creating the legend. It was David who centralized power and worship of God in Jerusalem, the holy city. It was David who wrote songs of praise and thanksgiving:
The spirit of the Lord speaks through me,
his word is upon my tongue.
The God of Israel has spoken,
the Rock of Israel has said to me:
One who rules over people justly,
ruling in the fear of God,
is like the light of morning,
like the sun rising on a cloudless day,
gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.
David, the great king of Israel. But for every David there was a Saul. A Solomon. A Jeroboam, an Ahab, a Zedekiah. More bad kings than good, because, as the old saying goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Or at least it makes it very, very easy to.
Are you King of the Jews?
Pilate asks the question, knowing full well that the man before him is not a king in the classical sense. For Jesus of Nazareth is nothing more than a Jewish carpenter, a peasant; far, far down the pecking order in a Rome-centric world. Through the world’s eyes, Jesus poses no threat to a man like Pilate. Not a one.
But Pilate also knows that a conquered people, a people like the Jews, are at their most dangerous when they have hope – and when that hope is embodied in one who people see as something more than what the world might see in them. Pilate knows that “King of the Jews” is more, much more than a title. And that’s what concerns him.
Pilate