The Losers of the World Have a New King.

John 18:33-38

November 25, 2018 + Christ-the-King

I.

Jesus stands on trial in Jerusalem before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.  Pilate has been told that this fellow is yet another hapless, deluded Jew imagining himself to be a king, which of course, is a crime.  Only Caesar and his client lackeys get to be called king.

Pilate’s first question, looking down at the prisoner, is, “Are you the King of the Jews?”  In other words, are you a political problem for me?  Are you another seditious rabble-rouser I need to make an example of?  Or are you just standing here because you offended the easily offended leaders of your own people, and they want me to get rid of you for them?  Is that what this is about?  A disagreement about some meticulous point of your ridiculous theology?  Or are you more of a threat than you look?

When Jesus answers that his “Kingdom is not from this world,” all Pilate hears is the word “kingdom”.  That’s what Pilate cares about.  “So, you are a king,” he concludes.

The Lord then responds: “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.”

To which Pilate cynically scoffs, “What is truth?”  You’re way too naive to be the king of anything if you think there is any truth other than what the Emperor says it is.  You’re just some pathetic, irrelevant, hopeless, harmless mystic with an imaginary “kingdom” in the clouds somewhere.  But why do they want me to execute you, I wonder?  Because you testify to a different truth, no doubt.  There is no truth, loser.  “There is only power and those too weak to seek it.”  (That’s actually a quote from Lord Voldemort.)

One of the biggest crises we are facing right now may be summed up with Pilate’s words: “What is truth?”  We are losing our grip on what is true.

When I was a kid there was an accepted consensus about truth.  Truth was what Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, and Howard K. Smith said it was.  We had a basic agreement about the fundamentals of our history and institutions.  

We considered ourselves vastly superior to our Communist enemies who rather blatantly and regularly adjusted the “facts” to suit their ideology.  The Nazis infamously did this too.  But not us!  We were about objective truth, justice, and the American way! in the words of Superman.  

That consensus began to fray when we gradually discovered that what we thought was true, was also conditioned and framed by our ideology.  Our accepted truth was not measuring up to the facts on the ground in people’s lives.  

It may feel good when everyone seems to be united in accepting the same things as true; but it is a big problem if a lot of it is actually not the case.  As Mark Twain is supposed to have said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.  It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

II.

An experienced political operative like Pilate would think that truth was actually malleable and relative.  It changed daily, depending on who had power, and what the needs of the Roman State happened to be.  The basic fundamentals of the truth were that Rome is good, Rome is progress, Rome is peace, and anything that was good for Rome, was good for everyone.  What was true is whatever the rulers decided was good for Rome.

Pilate’s only calculus, when he looks at Jesus, is, What is best for Rome?  He eventually decides it is best for Rome that this guy be killed, with a sign posted over his head proclaiming him to be King of the Jews.

All empires are built on lies that are perpetrated as ultimate truth, which is the main reason why all empires fall.  Eventually, their loudly proclaimed delusions are so out of synch with reality that they just can’t hold anymore.  Which is what happened to the Soviet Union.  They could not handle the possibility that what they thought was true just wasn’t so.  Just like Pilate could not understand what Jesus is talking about, empires have no capacity to listen to other voices giving them new information.  If it did not fit into their ideological preconceptions it does not register, or it sounds like sedition.  They especially do not want to hear from their victims.

When Jesus Christ appears, he represents those other voices.  He is the bearer of a truth far deeper, broader, higher, and better than some ideology invented to prop up a ruling class.

This is why every great reform movement in the church has been based on the Bible; specifically on Jesus, the Word of God.  Because the Word is like dynamite.  If we pay attention to it — and most of the time we don’t — but if we pay attention, we hear other voices.  We hear “the voices of people long silenced,” who have a different perspective and experience, people who simply do not relate very well to the self-satisfied self-image of a powerful empire.

The Bible is the story of a band of slaves whom God delivers from bondage in Egypt.  It therefore and thereafter tells the story of poor, suffering, weak, victimized, oppressed, and beaten people, repeatedly conquered by stronger foes, whom nevertheless the Creator of the Universe chooses, loves, heals, redeems, delivers, and blesses.  And it reaches its fulfillment in Jesus Christ, who is born in a barn to refugee parents, and who ends up executed as a criminal.  It is the precise opposite of any imperial ideology.  It is not a cooked up justification for the power of the powerful; rather, it always takes the perspective and the side of the powerless: people whose real bodies are experiencing real pain. 

That is the truth that Jesus embodies when he stands before Pilate.  That is the truth that Pilate cannot see and doesn’t believe exists.  He asks, “What is truth,” while the Truth is standing there right in front of him.  God loves us and identifies with us and saves us in our most humble, ordinary, basic places.  God sees and cherishes us in our material, creaturely, humanness.  And that is where we will find God, because God flows into our open, empty, broken, and vacant spaces.  The more we lose of ourselves, the more God appears.  

III.

In the old, classic Bob Newhart Show, there was a scene in which Bob, a psychiatrist, has to deal with a hapless and inept patient who is a failure at everything, including his new job, which is giving away money.  No one will take it; they think there’s a catch.  Upon hearing this, one of the other patients, the cynical Mr. Carlin, quips, “The losers of the world have a new king.”

I imagine Pilate having the same thought, looking down from his imperial seat of authority and judgment and power, at this beaten rabbi from Galilee.  “This is what they call me into the office for so early on a Friday morning.  This is what was so urgent?  Look at this guy.  The losers of the world have a new king.”

The losers of the world are the ones who explode our false truths and open us up to an encounter with the One Truth.  When we listen to their stories we move closer to the truth, and closer to God.  It is when we begin to hear the cries of excluded, marginalized, poor, working, and disenfranchised people.  When we even hear the voices of animals and trees, that’s when we broaden our perspective.  That’s when we begin to perceive more from God’s all inclusive, universal point of view. 

If we insist on sticking to Pilate’s view that, since truth is relative, we should just enforce the version that suits us best, we will perish.  We will fall like every empire that founded itself on lies.  We will end up like Pilate, who is now and forever an object lesson of what not to do.

It grieves me how often, over the centuries, Christians, for the sake of power, followed the cynical, jaded, self-serving words of Pilate, and sacrificed the lives of the very people with whom Jesus Christ identifies.  We allowed slavery, lynchings, genocide, war, torture, conquest, and other atrocities, because we went with our self-serving ideologies instead of the truth.  The church was often more Pilatian than Christian.

The Lord says that everyone who belongs to the truth listens to his voice.  Belonging to the truth means belonging to him, the One who is the Truth, and the Way, and the Life, the One in whom true God and true humanity are united, the One through whom we identify with all people and all creation.  And listening to his voice means hearing the Word of God come to us in everything that God speaks into being, and cherishing and caring for everything and everyone as the marvelous, wondrous, miraculous works of God they are.  It means realizing our deep connection to each individual, and living in respect and gratitude and awe for this amazing life.

IV.

For once we realize who our true King is, we are turned from losers into people who are receiving everything.  We move from a focus on what we are giving up to seeing that we are being given everything.  

When Jesus stands before Pilate, he has only a few hours to live, and most of those will be spent in excruciating pain and humiliation.  He is about to  give his life for the life of the world.  He is about to witness to the ultimate truth of God’s love, poured out for the redemption of all.  In giving up his mortal, temporal existence to the violence of the empire, he will emerge in a resurrection life that will spread through all the world.

We who belong to him listen to his voice, and we keep his commandments, all of which have to do with love.  We love one another as he loves us, and spread that love in all we do, in all the world.

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