Hilton Head Island, SC – April 2, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 59:9-15; John 18:28-40
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” After he had said this, he went out to the Jews again, and told them, “I find no crime in him.” – John18:38
The Gospel of John is surely the least accurate of the four Gospels in portraying the historical Jesus. The Jesus we encounter in the Fourth Gospel says and does things that are not even hinted at in the Synoptic Gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke apparently wanted to depict what they thought Jesus actually said and did, and especially to convey Jesus’ teachings about what he called “the kingdom of God.” John has Jesus declare many deeply Christological and theological things about Jesus himself. The Jesus of the Synoptics is a proclaimer of God and His kingdom, but the Jesus of John is primarily a self-proclaimer.
For reasons we shall never fully understand, because they were never recorded, the early Church decided to include the Fourth Gospel in the list of accepted books of the New Testament, despite its major discrepancies from the other three Gospels. And because John was the last of the four Gospels to be written, it gives a different slant about many things from the other three.
The Gospel of John is notoriously anti-Jewish in tone. That is seen in many places. Whenever John uses the word “Jews,” it always puts the Jewish people of the first century in a bad light. By the time John finished his Gospel, there had been an almost-total split between Jews and Christians. Jesus was a Jew. Virtually all of his followers were Jews. Paul was a Jew. But by the end of the first century of the Common Era, which is when John wrote his Gospel, Christians had very deliberately distanced themselves from their Jewish theological forebears.
Curiously, we can observe that in the depiction of the man before whom Jesus stood on trial on Good Friday, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor. Mark was the earliest Gospel to be written. The scholars think it was completed about the year 60, which was almost ten years before the Jewish armed revolt against Rome. In Mark, Pilate is the main culprit behind Jesus’ crucifixion. A Jewish crowd who opposed Jesus convinced Pilate by their noisy clamor that it was better to condemn Jesus than to find him innocent of any crime, even though Pilate said he believed Jesus had committed no crime. Matthew was written about the year 70, when the Jewish revolt was going on, and Matthew also says Pilate didn’t declare Jesus guilty. Matthew alone tells us that Pilate’s wife had a dream about Jesus, and she urged him not to condemn Jesus. Luke was written about 80 CE, ten years after the failed revolt. By that time Christians wanted to convince the Romans that they were not Jews, so Pilate seems even less complicit in the crucifixion of Jesus. When we get to John, however, it is an angry, howling mob of “the Jews” who quickly convinced Pilate that he must find Jesus guilty, and John seems solely to blame “the Jews,” not Pilate.
What is the truth of this matter? Was Pilate a really bad person, was he merely a weak administrator with no moral courage, or was he a pawn in a much larger theological issue being played out on that long-ago Friday morning?
In John, Pilate himself addressed the question of the nature of truth (See John, chs. 18 and 19). John tells us the Jewish leaders would not even enter the Roman administrative center, because it would defile them from eating the Passover seder meal. (This was intended to demean “the Jews” as falsely-ritualistic legalists.) Therefore Pilate went out into the courtyard to speak to them. Without even having seen Jesus, Pilate argued for Jesus’ release, but they insisted that Jesus be tried and found guilty. Therefore Pilate ordered Jesus to be brought before him. And, as in the other three Gospels, Pilate asked Jesus if he claimed to be the king of the Jews. Then some intellectual sparring goes on, during which Jesus said his kingship was not of this world. Pilate asks, “So you are a king?” And, as in the other gospels, Jesus makes that enigmatic statement which has rung clearly down through the ages, “You say that I am a king.”
What is the truth here? Is Jesus a king, or isn’t he? All four of the Evangelists want to force us to answer that question for ourselves, to discover its truth for ourselves. But in John, after acknowledging that Pilate said Jesus was a king (which Jesus really didn’t say, at least not technically), Jesus says, “For this reason I was born, and for this reason I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice” (18:37-8). Pilate, by now even more positively disposed toward Jesus, but feeling the great weight of the office he holds, with its necessity of maintaining law and order, plaintively asks Jesus, “What is truth?”
Well - - - what IS truth? Do we know it when we see it? Do we recognize it when we hear it? Every day, especially recently, we are bombarded with all kinds of statements from many different directions. Are they all true? Is any of them true? Do our politicians speak truth? Do the media (who are “the enemy” to some of the politicians) speak truth? What is truth?
For the past two or three months, we have been hearing a lot about “fake news.” This is presumably to be contrasted with “real” news, or in other words, “truthful news.” But how can we know what is fake and what is real, what is false and what is true?
For many centuries, philosophers and philologists have argued about what constitutes truth. For example, must truth be factual to be true? Or can truth be theoretical and still be true? Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was just a theory for many years until another physicist later proved it to be factually true. The theory was factual all along, but it took a few decades to prove it to be factual. As a similar example, is the theory of climate change factually evident, or is it at this point merely theoretically evident?
Maybe Pilate was having a bad week when Jesus was brought to him, and he couldn’t figure out what was true and what was false in the allegations about this strange Galilean. “What is truth?” he asked Jesus.
Most of us are old enough personally to recall what Watergate was all about. When the break-in of the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington, DC occurred in 1968, it was not immediately known who did it. Eventually it came out that some fairly low-level operatives of the Nixon administration were ordered to break into the Democratic Party office, and to search for certain factual documents. And, as we remember, eventually that led to one thing, and that led to another, and in the end, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency.
Separating truth from mere allegations in such instances is ordinarily very difficult. Millions of Americans were glued to their television sets, watching the Senate Investigating Committee and their chairman Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina going through reams of material, trying to get to the bottom of what increasingly appeared to be corruption at the highest levels of government. It became evident to everyone, including President Nixon, that he would be impeached, and that he would lose his impeachment trial. And so Mr. Nixon resigned.
America is once again faced with a situation as potentially disruptive a Watergate, if not more so. It is the so-called Russian connection between the Trump Administration and Vladimir Putin of Russia. Is it true and factual, or isn’t it? And will it be thoroughly investigated, or not? And who will do the investigating, the House Intelligence Committee or an independent prosecutor with an experienced legal staff? What is the truth in this matter? Who ,if anyone, shall determine it?
What is the result when “the people” do not seek the truth or want to know the truth? What is the political result when an influential segment of the leadership of the people want to uncover the truth and another segment wants to keep it covered? The latter was the situation following the Watergate break-in, and it has reappeared now in the purported Russian Connection. Do we want to discover the truth, or would it be better for the good of the country to let sleeping dogs lie?
Last Sunday, there were protests all over Russia against corruption in their government. Hundreds of people were arrested, many of them simply for showing up. Samuel Greene is an expert on Russian protest movements. Samuel Greene is an expert on Russian protest movements. He was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “People – both in the Kremlin and the 80 percent or so who tell pollsters they support Putin – have all been acting for years on the assumption that the ice is very thick and will never break….Once people begin to believe the ice is in fact thin, it doesn’t matter how thick it really is, and everything can change very suddenly.”
According to the Gospel of Luke, after Pontius Pilate first interviewed Jesus, he sent Jesus to King Herod, who happened to be in Jerusalem for Passover. Curiously, only Luke tells us that. To understand what that episode implied, we quickly need to review some biblical history. And remember, in all of this we are trying to uncover the truth about the claims regarding Jesus of Nazareth in his own time and in our time.
This particular King Herod is unofficially known as Herod Antipas. He was the son of Herod the Great. The first Herod was the Roman-installed king of the Jews who ruled during the years 37 to 4 in the first century before the Common Era, or as we might say, from 37 to 4 BC. He was a vicious autocrat, but an extraordinary builder of monumental structures. There are numerous magnificent buildings all over Israel which can still be seen that Herod the Great ordered to be constructed. Nevertheless, he also ordered the assassination of his wife, several of his children, and hundreds or thousands of other subjects within his puppet kingdom.
Two of his sons ruled after him. His oldest surviving son, Herod Archelaus, ruled Judea (modern southern Israel), Samaria (northern Israel), and Idumea (the southern part of the modern Kingdom of Jordan) for ten years. He was so ineffective that the Romans deposed him and banished him to Gaul, or modern France, taking over most of the kingdom for themselves.
Herod’s second-oldest surviving son (the oldest ones were killed by their paranoid father) became the tetrarch, or king, of Galilee and Perea, or modern-day northern Jordan. He is sometimes called Herod Antipater and sometimes Herod Antipas. Both titles mean the same thing. “Antipater” literally means “Against the Father.” Herod Antipas represented an opposition to his father by the way he ruled. He was not nearly as strong a ruler as his father, but he was much more acceptable to the Romans.
Luke (and Luke alone) tells us that it was Herod Antipas to whom Pilate sent Jesus on Good Friday morning. Luke further says Herod wanted to try to determine if the astonishingly positive reports the king had heard about Jesus were true. In the Broadway rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, Herod sings to Jesus, “Prove to me that you’re no fool/ Walk across my swimming pool.” But as Jesus did with Pilate earlier, so he did with Herod Antipas when asked if Jesus claimed to be a king; he said nothing. Then Herod mocked Jesus, having a royal robe thrown over Jesus, mocking him even more. Then Luke says, “And Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day, for before this they had been at enmity with each other” (23:12).
What is the truth regarding the trial of Jesus before Pilate and the others? No two Gospels tell the story in exactly the same way. So we are left with trying to answer the haunting, age-old question of the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?”
None of the four Gospels was ever intended to be an objective brief history of the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Rather they are what the German biblical scholars of the nineteenth century called Heilsgeschichte, literally “holy history.” But holy history puts its emphasis on the “holy” part, and not the objective history part. The Four Evangelists do not want us to be objective about Jesus; they want us to be subjective. They want us to inject ourselves into the narrative, to become part of it, to become devoted to it. Is Jesus who they tell us he is, or not? Is Jesus God’s Messiah, or not? Is he the incarnation of God, the Savior of the World, or not? What is true about this story, and what might be false? WE must decide!
Pilate believed he found himself in a moral dilemma. No doubt he had faced many such moral impasses before, and he would do so again, until he, like many other vacillating Roman officials before and after him, was deposed by a later Roman emperor.
If the four accounts together paint an accurate picture (and there is no reason to doubt they are essentially true), Pilate truly didn’t find Jesus guilty of any crime against Rome or its vast empire. It appears as though Pilate was positively disposed to the beaten and bloodied Galilean standing before him. But the crowd was loud, the outcome of their animosity was very uncertain, and so, reluctantly, and with the conservative political philosophy which probably drove most of his decisions, Pilate ordered Jesus to be crucified, as the enraged Jewish religious leaders demanded. Other Jews, the sort who hailed Jesus on Palm Sunday as the Messiah, were not there to insist on his innocence. And so Pilate gave in to political expediency. Politically, that often seems like the best thing to do when important decisions are required to be made.
Jesus Christ has always stood on trial before everyone who wants to become a Christian. And for us, as for Pilate, the question shall always be, “What is truth?”