John 18:38b-19:16a

09/19/10
John 18:38b-19:16a
Hudson UMC

Here, in this passage, we have both Pilate, the Roman authority in Jerusalem, refusing to stand on the side of justice, preferring rather to avoid the political consequences of standing against the angry mob, and also the crowd of people, especially those who led them, insisting so strongly that Jesus needed to die that they insisted that a violent revolutionary be released instead of the innocent man they had betrayed. None of the people, whether religious or secular, Jew or Gentile, come out looking very good at the end of this passage.

One of the things I have noticed about much of the history of interpretation of texts like this, especially in the Protestant tradition, is that it tends to demonize those people in the gospels who stand against Jesus. For example, we hear all the time about how evil the Pharisees were. Now, I don’t want to say that they were not evil because Jesus claims that they are, and it is probably because Jesus claims that the Pharisees were evil that so many Christians have really played up this theme in their sermons and commentaries. However, it tends to paint a one-sided picture of them.

We do not only see this with passages that deal with the Pharisees, though. There is a tendency to demonize people like Pilate, the rich young ruler, and anyone who does not behave according to the highest standards of the Christian life. Part of the problem is that this way of thinking does not do justice to the fact that, while we live on this side of the resurrection, ascension and the giving of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, the people we are reading about in the gospels didn’t. How could we expect the people to understand who Jesus was before the resurrection? Perhaps faith has come easily to us, but many of us grew up in communities full of believers and we inherited a way of life and thought that not only did not consider Jesus to be an enemy, but lifted him up as the greatest of all humans, if not the fullness of God in our midst, as traditional Christian faith has proclaimed.

However, in spite of all that, I think that there may be a hidden motive in our tendency to treat these people harshly. If we demonize the people who so clearly do not believe in the gospels, we distance ourselves from them. The problem with that is that, if we do that, we prevent ourselves from seeing that we are more similar to them than we might like to admit. If we do not come face to face with our own problems as revealed in people like Pilate and the Pharisees, we can never let God truly reconcile that area of our lives.

It is easy for us to condemn the Jewish leaders for trying so hard to secure Christ’s conviction, because we clearly know in this time and place that they were wrong. However, I don’t think it does justice to the actual people involved if we assume that they were doing evil with the express intention of doing evil. We need to understand that they believed, deep in their heart of hearts, that they were doing right, that they were opposing some solitary religious quack who had some bizarre cult following who was teaching some deeply destructive ideas about God. Just to be clear, I don’t mean that in a sarcastic way as some do today, as if they were saying, “That Jesus tells us to love one another; isn’t that terrible?” Instead, I mean what were seen as really destructive ideas about God, like attacking the unity of God, overthrowing the traditions that had stood for centuries, and seriously disrupting the social order. I don’t mean to soften this in any way. The people were genuinely convinced that Jesus had destructive religious ideas.

I want to put forward two very contemporary examples in hopes to show that, perhaps, we as human beings and even we as Americans, are not as far away from this kind of reactionary behavior as we might wish to think. A word of caution is required here, though, before I go on as it is possible that I might be misunderstood. Someone could say to me, “Pastor Travis, do you really think that those are parallel to the mob demanding the crucifixion of Christ?” My only point is to demonstrate the power that religious convictions, and they violation of those convictions, still has, even in a culture that is, by and large, secular and pluralistic.

There is a religious group who makes their religious convictions concrete and public by going from place to place, protesting one thing or another. I first came to be aware of them when they were protesting the funerals of American soldiers who had died fighting for a country that, in their mind, is fighting for sin in all its forms. Very recently, they were planning on coming to UNI’s campus to protest an upcoming theatrical production, although I understand that they never actually showed up. The point is that, they have become so well-known and so incredibly disliked, that their protests tend to mobilize the people in the areas to which they are traveling to organize counter-protests. Even though these counter-protests are intended to fight against hatred and intolerance, many times, the content of the signs that are made are no less hateful and intolerant than the ones they are protesting against.

Thinking just a little bit further back, just over a week ago, there was a man who said that he was going to publicly burn the sacred book of another religion. America got up in arms, posting this thing and that on the internet, getting upset over it and even threatening to physically harm this man who was deemed as insufficiently concerned with the cares of others. In the end, he decided not to do it, but not before there were riots in parts of the world over what this pastor of a relatively small church might do.

Now, I hope you all know me well enough by now to know that I am in no way affirming, defending or glorifying the actions of these people, nor am I saying that everyone in America is either like them or like the ones who violently and dramatically stand against them. My point is much more general than that. My point is that human beings have a tendency, even if they are calm and laid back about most things, to get very excited and angry when other people flagrantly violate their deepest religious convictions.

We can all see how Jesus violated the religious convictions of the ancient Jewish people gathered in Jerusalem for Passover. He claimed to be the Son of God, that He and the Father are one, that His actions are the very acts of God. He pointed out, both by His words and by His actions that the way things have always been done were not God’s ways and that the tradition was so far from honoring God that it was hindering people from knowing and loving God like they should. By looking at these contemporary examples, we can see that people still get excited when people claim that our ways of understanding God and the godly life are wrong, but by looking at Jesus, we can see that this reaction is not reduced but rather increased when that challenge is right.

It might be argued that the reactions against these fringe groups, who do not represent the mainstream of American culture, is not religious in nature, but social or perhaps even political. It is those things, but it is really and truly religious as well. Perhaps it is because I am a pastor and am attracted to religious responses to events like these that I have seen a large number of reactions pointing out a misunderstanding of who God is. However, there have been many people, who claim not to believe in a god at all, who have insisted on putting a religious spin on their commentary. They might claim that they are responding with religious convictions, not because they have deeply held belief in God, but because those who are inciting this reaction are making religious claims, but I think there is more to it than that.

Let’s say that I were to do something like misrepresent the Cub’s World Series record, saying that, since nobody can actually remember a World Series in which the Chicago Cubs won, they must not ever have won, there are probably many of you who wouldn’t care. The most I would get out of many people is, “Oh, well, that’s wrong, but who cares?” There are some, however, who would get very upset about such a misrepresentation. Why? Because they love the Cubs and they know in their hearts that I am wrong and that, by misrepresenting the Cub’s history, I am doing real violence to something they love.

I say all this because people would not make a point to complain about how other people misrepresent God if they did not have deep-seated feelings about who God is and what He is like. Sometimes, this objection is made on the basis of who Christ is, other times, an appeal is made to God as an idea, God in the abstract (which, as a Christian, I can make no sense out of. So far as I am concerned, there is no God in the abstract, but only the God that actually exists). The point is that the religious claims of fringe groups deeply offend people who do not think they have religious convictions because these other people have violated the convictions that they do not even believe they hold.

The people in Jerusalem at that time were having their religious convictions trampled upon. Their actions showed that they believed very concrete things about God and that Jesus violated them in a serious way. By their actions, they proclaimed that they did not believe that God would come among them, that God would meet them where they were at, that God would be more concerned with their hearts and souls and minds and lives than with their political independence. They did not believe that God would come so close as to become one of us and one with us, to shoulder our burdens, to share in our shame that we might share in His glory. They did not believe that God would stand against all the clever religious activity that they had thought up. If those are some of the things that their actions showed they didn’t believe about God, what did they believe?

They believed that, at the end of the day, the one thing that God really wanted for them was to be free of the Romans. God wanted them to be free of a political oppressor and the only way they could imagine that He would do that is by raising up a political leader, someone who was willing and ready to overthrow the government, to take lives in their following of God’s call. This is why, when Pilate offered to release Jesus, the one who had done no wrong, the people refused, choosing instead to have a man named Barabbas released. Our text just says here that Barabbas was a bandit. What this means, however, was that Barabbas was a participant in a political insurrection against Roman rule. Barabbas had shed blood in the fight for political freedom. He was a military hero, one like the great Judas Maccabeus, who would lead them to victory over the overwhelming force of the Roman army. What the people wanted was a God who would give them military glory like He had done in the past. What they wanted more than anything, though, was a God who thought just like they did.

When we consider the fact that it was the religious leaders who were so violently opposed to Jesus, we as the church cannot dare to walk away from texts like this with nothing more than a warm and fuzzy feeling. Texts like this humble us and remind us to hope in grace, not only because grace is promised to us, but because without grace, there would be no hope for us. As a preacher I both love and hate texts like this. I hate them because they expose all my sin and shortcoming; after all, as a pastor, I am a religious leader and yet, in spite of my status as a leader, in spite of my training, both formal and informal, in spite of all my best efforts to be faithful, I see in this text, among others, the sober fact that the religious leaders of the time were so far from supporting and defending the work of God that they set themselves against it and the same could very well happen in our time and place.

However, I love this text and those like it because it reminds me of the incredible nature of grace. In spite of all the faithlessness of the Jewish leaders and their shocking thirst for the blood of the Son of God, where human beings do not come off looking very good at all, the grace and love of God has not abandoned us, but binds us to Himself. After all, when Jesus is hanging from the cross, innocently enduring indescribable pain at the hands of people who hate Him without cause, He cried out, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

But what we need to reflect on is whether there are any deep convictions that we have about God that Jesus, by His words, actions and being, challenges. I mentioned at the very beginning of the sermon that, so long as we tend to demonize the angry mob that wanted to put Jesus to death, we would never be able to come to terms with the similar passions that exist within each of us. If we come at this question from the start by presupposing that our view of God is not challenged by Jesus, we will never take it seriously.

Perhaps most importantly of all, we must not assume that we are immune from this critique by the Word of God because we go to church or perhaps even are greatly involved in the church. After all, the people who wanted Jesus to be executed were not the evil people, they were not the Gentiles, the “other nations.” Instead, it was the Jews, the very people of God, and their leaders more than the rest. It was those who seemed like the most faithful, the greatest religious leaders, those who seemed to know the way of God better than anyone else, that were the most likely to reject Jesus. This is not a warning to the violent or to those who have nothing to do with God; it is a warning to us, for whom it is so easy to rest secure in our relationship with God.

Again, there is no sugar coating of this passage, no way to twist it around and make it warm and fuzzy, no way to avoid the searching questions it directs toward us. And yet, there are few passages more hopeful and joyful than this one. The reason it is a source of such hope and joy is because we know that Jesus was not taken by surprise by all this; He had seen it coming a mile away, and yet He had no problem coming to be one of us and take our burdens upon Himself, bearing and bearing away our sin so that we might be restored to relationship with the God who loves us. So, as we reflect on the ways that we are challenged by this text in the weeks to come, let us also live knowing the grace that God has extended, even to us. Let us pray.

AMEN