Sermon Audio
The Twenty-third Sunday After Trinity
"What Is Truth?"
St. John 18:28-19:16a
Caesar Tiberius, who occupied the Roman throne at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion, did not follow a policy of Augustus, his predecessor. Augustus had rotated his provincial governors frequently; Tiberius left them in place for longer periods.
Asked for his rationale, the emperor responded with a fable: A wounded man lay by the roadside covered by blood-sucking insects. A passerby stopped and began to shoo the bugs away but the unfortunate fellow immediately begged him to stop.
“These flies,” he said, “are already sated with blood. They are causing me no trouble now. But if they are driven off a fresh swarm of hungry ones will replace them and I will not survive their attentions.”
Such was the reputation of those provincial officials called procurators. None was more deserving of it than Pontius Pilate.
(Read text.)
The ancient Jewish historians Philo and Josephus agree entirely regarding Pilate. They had an ax to grind, to be sure, but there seems little doubt that Pilate was greedy, inflexible and cruel. He resorted to robbery and oppression whenever he deemed necessary or advantageous.
We don’t know where he served before he arrived in Palestine but he had risen through the ranks of either the military or the civil government. He was a member of the equestrian, or middle, class of Romans, and thus commanded reserve troops. Palestine was not an important enough posting to merit a higher-ranking governor and elite troops.
Pilate had a friend in a high place indeed back in Rome. He had obtained his position through the patronage of his mentor, Sejanus, commander of the Praetorian Guard and possibly the most powerful figure in the empire.
Sejanus was a determined anti-Semite and it was probably to curry favor with him that Pilate went right to work to put the Jews in their place.
He had scarcely arrived in Palestine when he provoked a confrontation. The Roman way of rule was to allow subject peoples a measure of autonomy. They maintained a hand in governing themselves as long as they minded their p’s and q’s.
In matters of religion, as long as they at least played along with the caesars’ claim of divinity they could go on worshiping their own deities as well. This policy played well enough elsewhere but it proved a sticking point in Jewish territory because of the second commandment God had given Moses at Mount Sinai: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image . . . Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.”
His predecessors had avoided offending Jewish sensibilities by downplaying the cult of emperor worship and kept the lid on. Pilate, however, brought to Jerusalem Roman flags with embossed figures of Caesar.
The Jewish authorities there sent a delegation to Caesarea, where Pilate made his headquarters, to plead with the procurator to remove the standards. How it must have grated on these emissaries to have to go to a city named for Caesar to beg for relief from Caesar worship. For five days they argued, to no avail. On the sixth, Pilate scattered soldiers in the crowd, with orders to draw their swords on his signal. When they did, the Jews bared their necks, indicating they would rather die than transgress the law of Yahweh.
After this, a more sober Pilate, fearing that he would uncork a genie that would never return to the bottle, took down the standards.
He collided with the Jews again, however, when he raided the temple treasury for funds to build an aqueduct. It would bring water to the capital from the highlands to the south. The temple required copious quantities of water, in no small measure to wash away the floods of blood that came from animal sacrifices.
In Pilate’s view, it was entirely reasonable that those who would benefit most from the aqueduct should pay for it. This proved not to be a unanimous opinion.
On his next visit to Jerusalem, angry Jews besieged him. Again fearing an uprising, he dispersed soldiers among the crowd, this time in civilian dress. As the tension escalated, he gave a signal and they produced clubs from under their tunics and set to beating the protesters, killing a number of them.
Rome expected its procurators to maintain order in their domains, the better to keep tax revenues flowing. They could and did use force, including lethal force, but they could fall into disfavor in the corridors of power if they provoked the population unnecessarily and precipitated turmoil.
Pilate was already walking a razor’s edge when the ground shifted under him due to events back in Rome. Anti-Semitism proved not a well-considered position for his patron Sejanus because the Emperor Tiberius was well-disposed toward the Jews. Five years into Pilate’s tenure, Tiberius executed Sejanus.
In an apparent bid to gain favor with the emperor while placating the Jews, Pilate set out shields bearing Tiberius’ name, though not his image, in the palace the late King Herod had occupied in Jerusalem.
This scheme blew up in his face when the Jews, including four of Herod’s sons, took umbrage despite the fact that the emperor’s head was nowhere to be found. They demanded Pilate remove the shields. When he refused, the Jews complained to the emperor by way of a letter. An enraged Tiberius ordered Pilate to remove the shields to Caesarea.
So it is a chastened and unsteady Pilate before whom the Jerusalem authorities haul Jesus on an accusation of trying to establish Himself as a king. It’s no surprise, then, that the governor first tries to pass off the matter like a hot potato.
When the Jews contend that Jesus has stirred up trouble in both Judea and Galilee and Pilate learns He is in fact a Galilean, Pilate sends Him to Herod Antipas, who rules Galilee.
The procurator’s hesitation betrays his concern for how his actions will be seen back in Rome. He no longer has Sejanus to watch his back and Tiberius wants the Jews kept content, or at the least pacified.
It’s abundantly clear that the itinerate preacher from Nazareth has attracted a sizeable following. If any proof were needed on that score, the events of Palm Sunday had supplied it. Pilate sends Jesus to Antipas . . . but Antipas promptly sends Him back, deferring to one dispatched by Rome and so of higher station. Pilate cannot avoid acting in this delicate, troublesome matter.
If he releases Jesus, will the high priests and their parties rise up? If he executes Jesus, will His followers erupt in revolt? The Jewish leaders play him like a Stradivarius. Jesus claims to be a king. As such He makes Himself a rival of Caesar. What must a loyal and true officer of Caesar do?
We know well enough, you and I, that Jesus was not seeking to set Himself up as a king in competition with the one who ruled in Rome. Yet if we take the narrative along with its own suppositions it frames brilliantly the conflict of that day and this: Who rules, God or man?
The answer from both camps is: Both. Rome exalted a man, making him a god. God descended from heaven, making Himself a man. Both Caesar and Christ make a claim of transcendence. Now, whom will you serve?
Jesus has already instructed His followers to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. He has acknowledged the need for a civil authority. Separation of church and state was God’s idea, not man’s
.
But Pilate is not one of His followers. He is a servant of Caesar and he now confronts the critical moment of everyone who stares into the gospel message, just as you and I once did. Is it the truth? The difference is that we encountered a set of propositions set forth as the truth; Pilate beholds a man who claims to be the Truth.
Did this Jesus not say, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6)? Yet Pilate stands nose to nose with Him and asks, “What is truth?”
We do not suppose he is an honest inquirer, seeking illumination, as Socrates or Plato might have done. He seems instead to be mocking, as though to say, “He who holds the biggest sword owns the truth.”
For those who can see only the kingdom that surrounds them in the moment, this is a credible answer. Every government is a protection racket. It takes money or crops or cattle from its subjects or citizens and promises in return to look out for them when the barbarian is at the gate.
Rome did this very well. The pax Romana – the peace of Rome – had made the world the most secure it had ever been. But the God of the Jews for many centuries had been holding out hope of a far, far better kingdom than Rome could ever impose.
Compared to that land of eternal milk and honey Yahweh promised His faithful followers, this world is no more than a forlorn shadow of what is to come. The Book of Ecclesiastes begins: “The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. ‘Vanity of vanities,’ says the Preacher; ‘vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’ What profit has a man from all his labor in which he toils under the sun?” (1:1-3).
Now comes Jesus to preach: "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal” (Matthew 6:19-20).
This enchanted place of eternal joy offers something much grander than protection in the here and now. It’s all far-fetched, even fanciful stuff, never-ending bliss in the glory of the eternal King. Pilate has his orders; he must keep these unruly Jews, with all their delusions, under control.
If he could only tell them to manage their own affairs. But nothing but the blood of this trouble-maker Jesus will satisfy their leaders, and Roman law denies them the ultimate punishment. Only the Roman governor can order an execution.
Pilate keeps wetting a finger and holding it up to the wind . . . and we begin to wonder: Is he in fact in control? Or is it Pilate, not Jesus, who is on trial? Pilate twitches and squirms; Jesus never breaks a sweat. And then Jesus says: “You could have no power at all against Me unless it had been given you from above.”
What effrontery! Pilate is the emissary of the great king to whom all earthly kings must bow down. Surely this self-inflated schemer will respond to a direct assault on his authority with a summary execution. But no: “From then on Pilate sought to release Him . . .”
Even in the realm of human affairs, the governor has lost his grip. The insignificant rabbi is pushing him from one side and the Jewish politicians are pulling him from the other. “. . .but the Jews cried out, saying, ‘If you let this Man go, you are not Caesar's friend. Whoever makes himself a king speaks against Caesar.’"
The Jews have maneuvered him into a rhetorical box. In the empire of Yahweh, worshipping false gods is violation of the first commandment and the gravest sin. In the empire of Caesar, it is the same. Accusing Jesus of exalting Himself to Caesar’s rank leaves Pilate open, if he fails to act, to a charge of betraying his emperor. If he pardons Jesus of sedition, he will bring the same accusation down on his own head.
Who is the true king? And what sort of king does Jesus claim to be?
Pilate asks Him, “Are You a king then?”
He is not claiming sovereignty over a patch on the map. Borders and checkpoints and taxes and human courts and armies and navies have no meaning in His kingdom. He doesn’t contend He rules a particular ethnic group. He is not emperor of the Babylonians or Egyptians or even the Jews alone. In His realm everyone calls everyone else brother and speaks the same tongue.
Over just what, then, does He hold sway?
He is making Himself the king of all truth. Pretend, like Pilate, if you will, that truth resides in power. Make it a slippery thing – yours equal to hers and his equal to mine.
But in the end you will bow down before the one king whose very dominion is truth. Because He is truth, no other truth can contend with His. Not his or hers, yours or mine. You will bow down before the immutable, never-ending truth.
Oh, no! Not if we send Him to the cross. And so we shall.
Pilate asked, “’Shall I crucify your King?’ The chief priests answered, ‘We have no king but Caesar!’”
After protesting they cannot bow to an image of the emperor because of their allegiance to their Lord, they cry out for the death of the Lord’s anointed . . . of God made man, the King of kings.
Here is the nub of it. The people of the one true God hail Caesar as their king. Is it not so today? Refuse the King of kings and bow down to your human governors and they will keep you safe . . . but there’s more, so much more.
They will feed you and clothe you and house you. They will educate you, and you will know the land where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, and nothing more. The difference is that today the authorities threaten less and cajole more . . . and even that is changing.
Well, the leaders of the Jews have carried the day. Having avoided setting foot in the Praetorium to remain ceremonially pure, they will sit at table in a few hours and consume the Passover lamb . . . as the Lamb of God they have murdered hangs upon a cross.
But those who have eyes to see and ears to hear detect a different reality, one grounded in truth. They hear the echo of Jesus’ words to Pilate: “You could have no power at all against Me unless it had been given you from above.”
Events are following the script not of a middling bureaucrat in a backwater of an empire stitched together by men but of the King of the realm of truth.
Now, you may wonder, as we conclude, whatever happened to Pontius Pilate.
A clash with some Samaritans finally finished him in Palestine. A false prophet among them told his followers he would reveal sacred vessels, which, according to tradition, Moses had buried on Mount Gerizim, site of their holy shrine.
They gathered – bearing arms – in a village at the foot of the mountain, preparing to ascend. Pilate sent cavalry and heavily armed infantry to block their route. Some of the prophet’s followers died in the ensuing battle; others were taken captive and later executed.
The Samaritans took the matter to Pilate’s immediate boss, Vitellius, the Roman prefect of Syria. He sent a temporary replacement to Palestine and ordered Pilate to report to the emperor in Rome. By the time he arrived, Tiberius had died. Pilate was not reinstated in Palestine and appears to have disappeared from history.
But this much we know: It was he, not Jesus, who stood trial on that fateful day in Jerusalem, and so it must be for all the Pilates to follow. Amen.
"What Is Truth?"
St. John 18:28-19:16a
Caesar Tiberius, who occupied the Roman throne at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion, did not follow a policy of Augustus, his predecessor. Augustus had rotated his provincial governors frequently; Tiberius left them in place for longer periods.
Asked for his rationale, the emperor responded with a fable: A wounded man lay by the roadside covered by blood-sucking insects. A passerby stopped and began to shoo the bugs away but the unfortunate fellow immediately begged him to stop.
“These flies,” he said, “are already sated with blood. They are causing me no trouble now. But if they are driven off a fresh swarm of hungry ones will replace them and I will not survive their attentions.”
Such was the reputation of those provincial officials called procurators. None was more deserving of it than Pontius Pilate.
(Read text.)
The ancient Jewish historians Philo and Josephus agree entirely regarding Pilate. They had an ax to grind, to be sure, but there seems little doubt that Pilate was greedy, inflexible and cruel. He resorted to robbery and oppression whenever he deemed necessary or advantageous.
We don’t know where he served before he arrived in Palestine but he had risen through the ranks of either the military or the civil government. He was a member of the equestrian, or middle, class of Romans, and thus commanded reserve troops. Palestine was not an important enough posting to merit a higher-ranking governor and elite troops.
Pilate had a friend in a high place indeed back in Rome. He had obtained his position through the patronage of his mentor, Sejanus, commander of the Praetorian Guard and possibly the most powerful figure in the empire.
Sejanus was a determined anti-Semite and it was probably to curry favor with him that Pilate went right to work to put the Jews in their place.
He had scarcely arrived in Palestine when he provoked a confrontation. The Roman way of rule was to allow subject peoples a measure of autonomy. They maintained a hand in governing themselves as long as they minded their p’s and q’s.
In matters of religion, as long as they at least played along with the caesars’ claim of divinity they could go on worshiping their own deities as well. This policy played well enough elsewhere but it proved a sticking point in Jewish territory because of the second commandment God had given Moses at Mount Sinai: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image . . . Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.”
His predecessors had avoided offending Jewish sensibilities by downplaying the cult of emperor worship and kept the lid on. Pilate, however, brought to Jerusalem Roman flags with embossed figures of Caesar.
The Jewish authorities there sent a delegation to Caesarea, where Pilate made his headquarters, to plead with the procurator to remove the standards. How it must have grated on these emissaries to have to go to a city named for Caesar to beg for relief from Caesar worship. For five days they argued, to no avail. On the sixth, Pilate scattered soldiers in the crowd, with orders to draw their swords on his signal. When they did, the Jews bared their necks, indicating they would rather die than transgress the law of Yahweh.
After this, a more sober Pilate, fearing that he would uncork a genie that would never return to the bottle, took down the standards.
He collided with the Jews again, however, when he raided the temple treasury for funds to build an aqueduct. It would bring water to the capital from the highlands to the south. The temple required copious quantities of water, in no small measure to wash away the floods of blood that came from animal sacrifices.
In Pilate’s view, it was entirely reasonable that those who would benefit most from the aqueduct should pay for it. This proved not to be a unanimous opinion.
On his next visit to Jerusalem, angry Jews besieged him. Again fearing an uprising, he dispersed soldiers among the crowd, this time in civilian dress. As the tension escalated, he gave a signal and they produced clubs from under their tunics and set to beating the protesters, killing a number of them.
Rome expected its procurators to maintain order in their domains, the better to keep tax revenues flowing. They could and did use force, including lethal force, but they could fall into disfavor in the corridors of power if they provoked the population unnecessarily and precipitated turmoil.
Pilate was already walking a razor’s edge when the ground shifted under him due to events back in Rome. Anti-Semitism proved not a well-considered position for his patron Sejanus because the Emperor Tiberius was well-disposed toward the Jews. Five years into Pilate’s tenure, Tiberius executed Sejanus.
In an apparent bid to gain favor with the emperor while placating the Jews, Pilate set out shields bearing Tiberius’ name, though not his image, in the palace the late King Herod had occupied in Jerusalem.
This scheme blew up in his face when the Jews, including four of Herod’s sons, took umbrage despite the fact that the emperor’s head was nowhere to be found. They demanded Pilate remove the shields. When he refused, the Jews complained to the emperor by way of a letter. An enraged Tiberius ordered Pilate to remove the shields to Caesarea.
So it is a chastened and unsteady Pilate before whom the Jerusalem authorities haul Jesus on an accusation of trying to establish Himself as a king. It’s no surprise, then, that the governor first tries to pass off the matter like a hot potato.
When the Jews contend that Jesus has stirred up trouble in both Judea and Galilee and Pilate learns He is in fact a Galilean, Pilate sends Him to Herod Antipas, who rules Galilee.
The procurator’s hesitation betrays his concern for how his actions will be seen back in Rome. He no longer has Sejanus to watch his back and Tiberius wants the Jews kept content, or at the least pacified.
It’s abundantly clear that the itinerate preacher from Nazareth has attracted a sizeable following. If any proof were needed on that score, the events of Palm Sunday had supplied it. Pilate sends Jesus to Antipas . . . but Antipas promptly sends Him back, deferring to one dispatched by Rome and so of higher station. Pilate cannot avoid acting in this delicate, troublesome matter.
If he releases Jesus, will the high priests and their parties rise up? If he executes Jesus, will His followers erupt in revolt? The Jewish leaders play him like a Stradivarius. Jesus claims to be a king. As such He makes Himself a rival of Caesar. What must a loyal and true officer of Caesar do?
We know well enough, you and I, that Jesus was not seeking to set Himself up as a king in competition with the one who ruled in Rome. Yet if we take the narrative along with its own suppositions it frames brilliantly the conflict of that day and this: Who rules, God or man?
The answer from both camps is: Both. Rome exalted a man, making him a god. God descended from heaven, making Himself a man. Both Caesar and Christ make a claim of transcendence. Now, whom will you serve?
Jesus has already instructed His followers to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. He has acknowledged the need for a civil authority. Separation of church and state was God’s idea, not man’s
.
But Pilate is not one of His followers. He is a servant of Caesar and he now confronts the critical moment of everyone who stares into the gospel message, just as you and I once did. Is it the truth? The difference is that we encountered a set of propositions set forth as the truth; Pilate beholds a man who claims to be the Truth.
Did this Jesus not say, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6)? Yet Pilate stands nose to nose with Him and asks, “What is truth?”
We do not suppose he is an honest inquirer, seeking illumination, as Socrates or Plato might have done. He seems instead to be mocking, as though to say, “He who holds the biggest sword owns the truth.”
For those who can see only the kingdom that surrounds them in the moment, this is a credible answer. Every government is a protection racket. It takes money or crops or cattle from its subjects or citizens and promises in return to look out for them when the barbarian is at the gate.
Rome did this very well. The pax Romana – the peace of Rome – had made the world the most secure it had ever been. But the God of the Jews for many centuries had been holding out hope of a far, far better kingdom than Rome could ever impose.
Compared to that land of eternal milk and honey Yahweh promised His faithful followers, this world is no more than a forlorn shadow of what is to come. The Book of Ecclesiastes begins: “The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. ‘Vanity of vanities,’ says the Preacher; ‘vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’ What profit has a man from all his labor in which he toils under the sun?” (1:1-3).
Now comes Jesus to preach: "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal” (Matthew 6:19-20).
This enchanted place of eternal joy offers something much grander than protection in the here and now. It’s all far-fetched, even fanciful stuff, never-ending bliss in the glory of the eternal King. Pilate has his orders; he must keep these unruly Jews, with all their delusions, under control.
If he could only tell them to manage their own affairs. But nothing but the blood of this trouble-maker Jesus will satisfy their leaders, and Roman law denies them the ultimate punishment. Only the Roman governor can order an execution.
Pilate keeps wetting a finger and holding it up to the wind . . . and we begin to wonder: Is he in fact in control? Or is it Pilate, not Jesus, who is on trial? Pilate twitches and squirms; Jesus never breaks a sweat. And then Jesus says: “You could have no power at all against Me unless it had been given you from above.”
What effrontery! Pilate is the emissary of the great king to whom all earthly kings must bow down. Surely this self-inflated schemer will respond to a direct assault on his authority with a summary execution. But no: “From then on Pilate sought to release Him . . .”
Even in the realm of human affairs, the governor has lost his grip. The insignificant rabbi is pushing him from one side and the Jewish politicians are pulling him from the other. “. . .but the Jews cried out, saying, ‘If you let this Man go, you are not Caesar's friend. Whoever makes himself a king speaks against Caesar.’"
The Jews have maneuvered him into a rhetorical box. In the empire of Yahweh, worshipping false gods is violation of the first commandment and the gravest sin. In the empire of Caesar, it is the same. Accusing Jesus of exalting Himself to Caesar’s rank leaves Pilate open, if he fails to act, to a charge of betraying his emperor. If he pardons Jesus of sedition, he will bring the same accusation down on his own head.
Who is the true king? And what sort of king does Jesus claim to be?
Pilate asks Him, “Are You a king then?”
He is not claiming sovereignty over a patch on the map. Borders and checkpoints and taxes and human courts and armies and navies have no meaning in His kingdom. He doesn’t contend He rules a particular ethnic group. He is not emperor of the Babylonians or Egyptians or even the Jews alone. In His realm everyone calls everyone else brother and speaks the same tongue.
Over just what, then, does He hold sway?
He is making Himself the king of all truth. Pretend, like Pilate, if you will, that truth resides in power. Make it a slippery thing – yours equal to hers and his equal to mine.
But in the end you will bow down before the one king whose very dominion is truth. Because He is truth, no other truth can contend with His. Not his or hers, yours or mine. You will bow down before the immutable, never-ending truth.
Oh, no! Not if we send Him to the cross. And so we shall.
Pilate asked, “’Shall I crucify your King?’ The chief priests answered, ‘We have no king but Caesar!’”
After protesting they cannot bow to an image of the emperor because of their allegiance to their Lord, they cry out for the death of the Lord’s anointed . . . of God made man, the King of kings.
Here is the nub of it. The people of the one true God hail Caesar as their king. Is it not so today? Refuse the King of kings and bow down to your human governors and they will keep you safe . . . but there’s more, so much more.
They will feed you and clothe you and house you. They will educate you, and you will know the land where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, and nothing more. The difference is that today the authorities threaten less and cajole more . . . and even that is changing.
Well, the leaders of the Jews have carried the day. Having avoided setting foot in the Praetorium to remain ceremonially pure, they will sit at table in a few hours and consume the Passover lamb . . . as the Lamb of God they have murdered hangs upon a cross.
But those who have eyes to see and ears to hear detect a different reality, one grounded in truth. They hear the echo of Jesus’ words to Pilate: “You could have no power at all against Me unless it had been given you from above.”
Events are following the script not of a middling bureaucrat in a backwater of an empire stitched together by men but of the King of the realm of truth.
Now, you may wonder, as we conclude, whatever happened to Pontius Pilate.
A clash with some Samaritans finally finished him in Palestine. A false prophet among them told his followers he would reveal sacred vessels, which, according to tradition, Moses had buried on Mount Gerizim, site of their holy shrine.
They gathered – bearing arms – in a village at the foot of the mountain, preparing to ascend. Pilate sent cavalry and heavily armed infantry to block their route. Some of the prophet’s followers died in the ensuing battle; others were taken captive and later executed.
The Samaritans took the matter to Pilate’s immediate boss, Vitellius, the Roman prefect of Syria. He sent a temporary replacement to Palestine and ordered Pilate to report to the emperor in Rome. By the time he arrived, Tiberius had died. Pilate was not reinstated in Palestine and appears to have disappeared from history.
But this much we know: It was he, not Jesus, who stood trial on that fateful day in Jerusalem, and so it must be for all the Pilates to follow. Amen.