To Testify to the Truth

Reign of Christ Sunday. Christ the King Sunday. Which fits better? Context is everything we are told. Interpretation shapes our understanding. And words matter, let’s keep that in mind too. Can we talk about Christ as king without the history of patriarchy and dubious morality of human kings getting in the way and muddying the picture? Does Reign of Christ give us that sense of authority we are looking for, calling for obedience in a way that is transforming and directing? Is the tradition too strong to make the switch easily or comfortably?

There is so much to decide here at the end of the Christian year. Our calendar brings Year B to a conclusion this week. So, we need a declaration. We need a commitment, a culmination of another year long journey with Christ where we ponder his life and ours in equal measure. This week we come to as much of a decision as we can make, we claim the authority of Christ over our lives and declare Christ as king, the one who reigns.

Pilate struggled with the designation too, we can be sure. Our text for this week shows us that. The conversation, as with so many conversations in the gospel of John, takes place on more levels than we might realize. Certainly, more than Pilate realized.

You’ve read this story before, preached this text before. Perhaps it was much closer to Good Friday or Easter. You might have encountered this text in reference to the passion narrative and thought that it speaks mainly about the trial before the crucifixion. But there is a sense in which this narrative, this dialogue is a most important episode in the whole story of Jesus. In these 5 verses (well, five and half, we really need Pilate’s response in verse 38a) there is a kernel and a capsule of the whole meaning and purpose of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the made manifest in the flesh here in this world. There is also a response to that human form that may be our unfortunate response to the God in our midst.

Pilate returns to his palatial offices only to find that once again the Jewish leaders help this man Jesus, bound and beaten and thrust before Pilate for condemnation. Pilate was reluctant, partly because he really didn’t want to get involved in internal squabbles here in Judea. After all, he was here to represent Rome and to keep the peace. Law and order, that’s what Pilate stood for. Temple politics and mystical religions didn’t interest him in the least. As long as people kept quiet and paid their taxes, Pilate couldn’t really have cared less what kind of God they worshipped.

He was also reluctant because he could see no harm in this man. Perhaps he was bit deluded, a bit over excited about the God he spoke of, but he was really just a country kid with a messiah complex. To condemn such as one to death by crucifixion did not sit well with Pilate’s ulcers.

Yet, he was there to keep the peace, and the leaders of the people complained that he was stirring up the populace. And they didn’t take the hint that Pilate gave the first time around and take this poor, bruised, wounded man away. So, he was obligated to at least make some kind of interrogation, to at least ask some questions.

He sat down behind his big oaken desk with the picture of his wife and the paperweight bust of Ceaser himself and said to man they held bowed and bloody before him, “so you are the king of the Jews?”

The man with his hands tied behind his back and his bruised lips beginning to swell said, “my kingdom is not of this world. If it were, I would have subjects who would have risen to fight to keep me from being captured and beaten and bound. If it were I would have tried to rule and to lead and to act like a king. But my kingship, my reign comes not from this world.”

Pilate, hearing and not hearing, understanding kingship to be a thing only of this world, with laws and power and sword, wanting to believe that maybe for a second there is treason here, leans forward and points an accusing finger, “so you are a king?”

The quiet reply, that takes the steam out of Pilate’s outrage, deflates the argument. “You say that I am a king. You say, they say, everyone says that I am king. But I was born, I came into this world to bear witness to the truth.”

There is a brief pause, Pilate leans back in his chair and addresses the ceiling as much as the man before him and asks, hoping and not hoping, “what is truth?”

The question is asked. Behind the question lies at one end the bored complacency of this bureaucratic ruler, stuck a thousand miles from home in a backward little country sitting as judge over backward little squabbles between backward little peoples. What could one of these possibly know about truth? He knew that truth was malleable, hammered into specific situations to bring about specific outcomes. He knew that truth was a commodity, like patriotism and power, to be bought and sold for the benefit of the ruling class. You could hear the sneer at the very idea even as he asked the simple three-word question.

Yet, at the other end lies, perhaps, a spark of hope that maybe this man, broken and bruised as he is, bound and tied as he is, can give some kind of response and tell, finally, what truth is. Or at least can say that there is no truth at all and thus end the question forever. Maybe this man.

The response to this off-hand, sarcastic question, the response to this plea for light in a world of darkness is silence. Silence that cuts the easy confidence and forces one to struggle, however ineptly, to face oneself and to answer our own question.

What is truth? How many times do we ask that question? Not in that form too often, but in many and various ways we ask it. “What’s it all about?” “Why am I here?” “Why can’t I ever get ahead?” “What or who is God and why is God so far away when I hurt the most?” “What must I do to be a follower of Christ in a world that tries so hard to go another way, it own way?” “This wonderful, almost magical, somehow mystical story of Jesus, who is the king but not of this world, tell me, is it true?” Those are the questions, those and many more, that we bring to church, that we carry with us at work, that sit in the back of our throats as we wait for a place to ask and for someone to answer. And no one will give us an answer.

At the same time, the silence in response to Pilate’s question shows somehow that even to ask in the first place is to misunderstand the truth. The irony of this scene in Pilate’s office is that the truth was staring him in the face, and he completely missed it and still asked “what is truth”. By asking the question he was turning away from the only truth that can mean anything in a world such as ours. The truth is embodied in one who lived and loved and gave of himself to create a sense of connection and belonging, restoration and transformation. The truth that is discovered in relationship, in obedience and freedom, in bowing down and rising up in heart and in soul.

Someone said, have you ever known someone who told you the truth so strongly that you wanted to kill them for it? This one who reigns, this king who is a king beyond this world and yet who’s kingdom touches this world through and in us, those who follow, this is the one to whom we pledge our allegiance this last Sunday of the Christian year. Jesus the Christ is not the king because he rules by law or decree, but because he bears witness, he testifies to the truth, the truth of this world, the truth of our lives, the truth of the world that is coming.

Our obedience is to join in testifying to the truth, in love and in invitation.