The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
November 20, 2009

Thy Kingdom Come
John 18:33-37 

“Are you the King of the Jews?” These are the first words Pilate speaks to Jesus in all four Gospels. Jesus is on trial before the Roman governor and his life hangs in the balance. Palestine in the first century is a Roman territory. This is the Roman Empire at its height; 2.2 million square miles surrounding the Mediterranean Sea are united under the Caesar. Even in a backwater town like Jerusalem, any would-be king caught and tried will be dead by sundown. 

By dark on that fateful Friday, Jesus will be dead and buried. And though this Sunday is the day in the church year often unofficially referred to as Christ the King Sunday, we don’t actually think Jesus was guilty of the charge—certainly not in the sense that Pilate meant the accusation. Yes, King of Peace Church is named for Jesus, who we know to be the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. But, no, Jesus did not intend to become the King of the Jews or the King of Israel, or the king of any earthly kingdom. 

Pilate has a central place in Christian proclamation. The Apostle’s Creed says of Jesus that “He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.” The Nicene Creed puts it, “For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.” Thus, Pilate’s name is pronounced each week in worship by hundreds of millions of Christian worshippers who connect this minor Roman official to Jesus’ death on a cross.  

I want to teach you more about what we know about Pontius Pilate. Far from merely academic, this brief digression will help us better come to know this Roman governor whose name we say each week and in the process I hope will reveal something more about what we mean when we refer to Christ the King or Jesus as the King of Peace.[1] 

With more then a decade in his position, Pontius Pilate was the longest serving governor of Judea. His title was, technically, prefect. The term meant that he was a military leader overseeing a given physical area. As a prefect, Pilate not only had troops at his command, but he also presided over the judicial system, oversaw taxation and disbursing funds for use in the province. He was responsible for generating reports back to Rome, which accompanied his tax funds. If he needed real military might, he could appeal to the nearby Legate of Syria, whose additional legions could back up Pilate’s own troops. Pilate spent most of his time in the coastal town of Caesarea, but would stay at the Praetorium in Jerusalem on holy days to oversee the peace. His whole purpose in being there was crowd control. 

We know that the Christian portrayal of Pilate is fairly kind, especially compared to that of Jewish authors. The Jewish philosopher Philo and the Jewish historian Josephus who were writing alongside the early Christian church both paint a much darker portrait. The usually philosophical Philo derided Pilate as corrupt, insolent, and cruel “man of most ferocious passions” with not just a “habit of insulting people” but ordering “continual murders of people untried and uncondemned” and “never ending, and gratuitous, and most grievous inhumanity.” (Quotes taken from Philo’s ad Gaium #302 and 303 found online at http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/book40.html ) 

The historian Josephus tells of a few significant run-ins that Pilate had with the Jews, none of which concerned Jesus’ crucifixion. In one instance, he routed an aqueduct through a cemetery. This fit with Roman efficiency, no doubt, but crossed with Jewish ideals concerning purity. Pilate endured those protests.  

The second incident was much more serious. Josephus and Philo both tell of how Pilate brought Roman images into Jerusalem some of which were even visible from within the Jewish Temple. As these symbols attached to military standards were images of Caesar, who the Roman’s proclaimed as a god, Jews considered their presence blasphemous.  

Jews went en masse to Pilate’s palace in Caesarea to protest. He refused to back down and for six days protests continued. Finally, Pilate lured the protestors in for a hearing, having his soldiers hide their weapons. Then when all were in, he had the soldiers bring out their swords and Pilate threatened immediate death to any who did not disburse. The protestors were surrounded by armed soldiers but rather than retreat, they bared their necks for Roman swords.  

A prefect can kill a rebel or two in endless succession, Pilate proved this by putting thousands to death over his years in Judea. But putting an entire mob to death is something very different, as it foments rebellion. Pilate sent the protestors away unharmed. The Jews wrote to the emperor Tiberius who supported their cause and ordered Pilate to remove the images from Jerusalem.  

Finally, we know how Pilate came to leave Palestine. About four years after Jesus’ death, Pilate faced armed Samaritans at their holiest site, Mount Gerazim. Little is known for certain about this last incident except that he put to death their leaders and others arose who he also put to death. The Samaritans complained to the Legate in Syria, who removed Pilate. Forced into early retirement, Pilate took his own life within two years.  

Assuming that we know Jesus and now that we know more about Pilate, we return to our reading from John’s Gospel to see it anew. Pilate’s own power is much more tenuous than it would have seemed to everyone in Jerusalem that day. Certainly he has the power of life and death over those in Palestine. For all who are not Roman citizens, his word could send a person to torture and death with no court of appeal.  

For Pilate, that day of Jesus’ trial, the issue was crowd control. With the population of Jerusalem swelled for the Passover, riot was always a threat. There were zealots who threatened armed revolt and the fear that they could sway the masses who were angered by the heavy taxation and a sense of oppression by a conquering army. Jesus was sent to him as a would-be king, and Rome knew what to do with those—torture and public death as a sign to others who harbored similar thoughts. Whether the Jewish leaders considered him a blasphemer or not was no issue for a Roman Prefect. 

Jesus answer is completely honest. He explains to Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” 

Jesus is, of course, correct. His kingdom is not of this world. He came to preach that the kingdom of God was come near. He did not come to overthrow Rome militarily and set up a new earthly kingdom. The only problem with his answer to Pilate is that Jesus said three times “my kingdom.” Pilate asks, “So you are a king?” Jesus then enigmatically replies, “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.” 

This statement changed the trial. Jesus answer now about testifying to the truth, moves Jesus from would-be king to would-be philosopher. As John’s Gospel continues to unfold the story, Pilate will ask Jesus “What is truth?” and will then go out and declare that he finds no case against Jesus. He will have Jesus flogged. Then the charge of king is taunted by the soldiers as a crown and purple robe are given to Jesus. But it is a crown made of thorns, cutting into his flesh and a bloodied purple robe meant to mock. 

When the crowds call for crucifixion, Pilate will warn Jesus that he has the power to release and the power to crucify. Jesus says that Pilate would have no power over him unless it had been given from above. That is true. Yet, the irony comes when we know Pilate’s whole story and find that he never had all the power, the crowd did.  

It was the mob who carried the day and caused Pilate to back down on the images of Caesar and it will be a mob who has Pilate removed from office when he threatens the worship at the Samaritan temple at Mount Gerazim. Now it is the crowd that wants Jesus dead and the Gospels present the story as if Pilate may feel more inclined to let Jesus go than not, but he is powerless once the crowd speaks as one, crying out for crucifixion. Pilate’s position was precarious. He needed the cooperation of those he governed to stay in power and so the ultimate authority rested with the crowd. 

One way of reading this passage from John led generations of Christians to persecute Jews as “Christ Killers.” This persecution was especially strong at some points in the Middle Ages, but has occurred in the centuries since as well.  

Actually what the Gospels teach is not that Jesus came to the Jews and that the Jews killed Jesus so much as that God became flesh in Jesus and we humans killed him. Jesus life and ministry threatened the way things work and on that Friday, the crowd would rather have had Rome’s rule than God’s rule. The Gospels teach that crowds are always looking for scapegoats to blame. Get rid of this one guy and life will return to normal. But that solution never works. 

Jesus offered an alternative to these power dynamics, in offering truth in place of power. Don’t believe the lie of the empire, that the empire has your best interests at heart. Don’t put your faith in Caesar or his legions. Real deep and lasting peace comes from another source. Real peace comes not by might and not by power, but by the Spirit of God (Zechariah 4:6), which Jesus already referred to in John’s Gospel as the “Spirit of truth.” 

This theme of Jesus as truth weaves its way through John’s Gospel, from the prologue where Jesus is described as being full of grace and truth, to Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well who he told to worship in spirit and truth, on to Jesus’ bold claim, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” When Pilate asks Jesus “What is truth?” we see that Pilate apparently wouldn’t know truth if it were standing right in front of him. 

Jesus did not tell the truth, he was and is the truth. This theme will get picked up in the letters of John, which talk of doing the truth. Truth is an action. One does the truth. Then we see that Jesus’ actions were truth. When he called the unclean leper, “clean,” that was truth. When he made the disgraced Samaritan woman an apostle to her own people, that was truth. When he rose from the dead, showing that God’s love could not be destroyed by human hate, that was truth.  

And when we side with the outcast, the lost, the lonely, the poor, the oppressed, that too is truth. And in these actions, we show that we have come to know what the crowd did not know on the day of Jesus’ trial. We show that Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world. For if his kingdom were of this world, then it would have worked like all earthly kingdoms and been built on the backs of the poor and the oppressed.  

But the truth of Jesus’ kingdom was that it was not from this world. Thy kingdom come means that in the truth of our actions, we are to begin in little ways to let this fallen world of ours begin to reflect the coming kingdom of God. We are not just to pray the Lord’s Prayer and say “Thy Kingdom come.” We are also to do the truth in love so that by our actions we may begin to be Christ’s hands and feet in the world to bring that kingdom about. For Christ is not and never wanted to be merely the king of a given place and a given time. He is the King of Peace, the one who brings in the coming reign of God in which the truth that we now see in part will be experienced in full. 

Pilate thought he had the power—the power to release or to crucify. Jesus stood before him with nothing but the truth. In the end, the truth of Jesus won out. Pilate’s power could not keep Jesus in the grave. The real and lasting power was not in the physical might which was Pilate’s to control. Power was in the truth that Jesus lived and taught us to live. That spirit of truth that works through all too fallible you and me to help God’s kingdom come. 

Amen.