John 18:33-36 (NIV)
Pilate then went back inside the palace, summoned Jesus and asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?”
“Is that your own idea,” Jesus asked, “or did others talk to you about me?”
“Am I a Jew?” Pilate replied. “It was your people and your chief priests who handed you over to me. What is it you have done?”
Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place.”
The religious leaders had accused Jesus of claiming to be the Messiah, the rightful king of the Jews, whose intention was to forcibly wrest rule of the land from the empire. If true, this would fall under the charge of sedition, inciting rebellion against the leader of the nation, in this case, the Emperor. And that was indeed a capital offense under Roman law.
But Jesus didn’t look much like a rebel to Pilate. And He didn’t look much like a king, either. But Pilate asked the question anyway: “Are you the king of the Jews?”
It should have been either a yes or no answer – simple, basic. But as soon as He heard the phrase “king of the Jews,” Jesus’ raised His head to look Pilate in the eye. He had not been present for the conversation between Pilate and the religious leaders, having been marched inside to a holding area as soon as they had arrived, while Pilate heard the charges against Him. Jesus wanted to know if that was what the religious leaders had charged Him with (as opposed to the blasphemy charge that the Sanhedrin had convicted Him of earlier, but which carried no death penalty, no penalty at all, in fact, under Roman law). Or perhaps Pilate had heard about Jesus from other sources and was wondering himself if He might be the Messiah.
Pilate’s answer was sharp and dismissive. As the governor, the representative of the Roman government, he had to be impartial in matters of the law. Of course it was what the chief priests had accused Him of! But he was curious as to what Jesus had done to cause that kind of backlash, the kind that would make the whole religious establishment array itself against Him.
Jesus’ answer was two-fold. Yes, He was indeed the king of the Jews, the Messiah. But no, that word did not mean what the religious leaders were claiming. He had no designs on overthrowing the imperial power in Israel. As evidence, He pointed to the fact that there had been little resistance to His arrest. (Pilate would have heard of a pitched battle going on at the fringes of the city.) Nor were there riots in the city that surely would have been happening if Jesus had been gathering followers to seize control.
Instead, Jesus claimed that His kingdom, real as it was, was not even of the world – it was a spiritual kingdom, from another place entirely. Jesus realized that Pilate would not fully understand the truth He was presenting. But He also knew that the truth was important, because it completely negated the claims that the religious leaders had made against Him.
Father, even though Jesus was silent for much of the legal wrangling that was going on around Him, when directly asked, He always directly answered with the truth – never filtered or spun, but the straight truth, even if He knew that it was over the heads of His hearers. Lord, help us all to have that same, very simple approach to the truth, keeping ourselves out of the picture as much as possible. It is the truth, and only the pure, unvarnished, unspun truth that is able to set people free. Amen.
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