John 18:28-40

 

²⁸ Then they led Jesus from the house of Caiaphas to the governor’s headquarters. It was early morning. They themselves did not enter the governor’s headquarters, so that they would not be defiled, but could eat the Passover. ²⁹ So Pilate went outside to them and said, “What accusation do you bring against this man?” ³⁰ They answered him, “If this man were not doing evil, we would not have delivered him over to you.” ³¹ Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and judge him by your own law.” The Jews said to him, “It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death.” ³² This was to fulfill the word that Jesus had spoken to show by what kind of death he was going to die. ³³ So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” ³⁴ Jesus answered, “Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?” ³⁵ Pilate answered, “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me. What have you done?” ³⁶ Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.” ³⁷ Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world— to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” ³⁸ Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”After he had said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told them, “I find no guilt in him. ³⁹ But you have a custom that I should release one man for you at the Passover. So do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?” ⁴⁰ They cried out again, “Not this man, but Barabbas!” Now Barabbas was a robber.

 

Have you ever looked right at somebody and not seen them?  Do you know what I mean?

I once had somebody come to me and tell me that I had caused another person great offense.  (By the way, this did not happen here.  It happened in another state.)  They went on to say that a lady had shared with her that she had seen me in town and I had refused to acknowledge her.  To make matters even worse, the name of the lady who was offended was on the church roll.  She did not attend, and I had never met her, but, technically, she was a church member.

Well, this concerned me for obvious reasons.  I have a great many faults, but, as a rule, ignoring people in public is not one of them.  So I resolved to make it right and apologize to this lady.  I went by her business but she was not there, so I left a card.  A short time after that, I learned that her husband was in the hospital so I thought, “Well, I will just go and see him and apologize.”

When I walked into the hospital room she was standing by the bed of her husband.  Let me just say that the reception was, at best, chilly!  I introduced myself (again, I had never met her), inquired about her husband and then told her that I understood I had offended her and I wanted to apologize.

Her reaction really caught me off guard.  She was ready to talk!  She said that I had indeed offended her, that she had passed me in a parking lot, had looked right at me and smiled and that I had looked at her, frowned and walked away.  Well, that did not sound like something I would do, but she was adamant.  I told her that I had no recollection of it happening, that I would never do so on purpose and that all I could imagine was that I was lost in thought and did not see her.  She assured me that, yes, I most definitely had seen her, had looked right at her, had turned up my nose at her and walked on.

Have you ever gone to apologize to somebody and it does not go well?  Have you ever started out apologizing and then ended up almost undoing your apology?

I asked her if she had spoken to me and she responded that she had not but that she had smiled at me. Then she revealed that she had gone into the store, had encountered my wife and that my wife had offended her by doing the exact same thing!  Well!  My wife has much less faults than I do, and I can assure you that shunning people is not one of them.

I told the lady that surely she was mistaken and that my wife was not the type of person to be rude to anybody.  She was adamant.  She insisted that she saw Mrs. Richardson in the store, that she made eye contact, that she smiled at Mrs. Richardson and that Mrs. Richardson met her smile with a rude frown and then turned her back on her and walked off.

My temperature was rising.  I asked her if she had spoken to or said anything to my wife.  She again said that she had not but that Mrs. Richardson most surely saw her and frowned at her.  I assured her that neither Mrs. Richardson nor myself were the type of people to do such a thing and that, if such a thing happened, it must have been that we did not really see her or that we were lost in thought and somehow missed her smiling face.

THEN she said:  “I could not believe it!  You were so rude to me, and then your wife was!  And here I ama member of the church!”

I was praying for grace, but this was too much:  “That’s odd,” I said, “I have never seen you in church.”

“I do not attend,” she said, “but I do send in my money.”

“Well,” I responded, “perhaps if I had seen you sitting in a pew at least once over the last many years I would have recognized you.  Even so, I think you are mistaken about what had happened.  If I looked at you but did not acknowledge you, it must have been because my mind was elsewhere, or I was hurrying, or something caused me to look at you but not see you.”

She asked, “How can you look at somebody but not see them?  You looked right at me!”

Church, it was one of the most frustrating conversations I ever had, and I regret to tell you that I entered the room with only her irritated but I left it with both of us irritated.

It is a reasonable question:  “How can you look at somebody but not see them?”  But if you think about it, this happens all the time.  You have probably experienced the exact same thing.  It is possible to be out and about, to look right at somebody, but not really see him at all.

Sometimes we do that to others, sometimes others do that to us.  It happens.  Sometimes you can look right at somebody but not see him.

Sometimes you can look right at somebody but not see him.

Would you like to know who experienced this?  Jesus.  It happened all the time to Jesus.  People looked right at Him.  Many people sat and listened to Him speak.  Some people even followed Jesus.  Some people met him just once.  Regardless, this “looking but not seeing” dynamic happened all the time with Jesus.

Some of His own disciples looked at Jesus but did not see Him.  All of the disciples struggled here and there to see Him.  It is doubtful that Judas ever really saw Jesus at all.

And the Jews who condemned Him.  They looked at Him.  They looked closely at Him.  They scrutinized Him.  They looked right in His face.  But they looked at Him without seeing Him.

And Pontius Pilate.  He looked at Jesus.  He only met Him once, but He looked at Him.  He looked at Jesus but He did not see Jesus.

Why?  Why were so many people able to look at Jesus without seeing Jesus?  What were they blinded by?  What clouded their vision?  To be sure, many things caused them to look without seeing, and that is what I would like us to consider tonight on this Wednesday of Holy Week.

I. The Jews Could Not See Jesus Because They Were Blinded By Religion (v.28-32)

Jesus has been betrayed.  Jesus has been arrested.  Jesus has been denied.  Jesus has been interrogated by Annas.  Jesus has been struck.  And now Jesus is being delivered to the representative of Rome, Pontius Pilate.  These are scenes of large personalities and large crimes, but here, in the middle of the story, we find a telling detail about the blindness of those Jews who delivered Jesus to Pilate.

²⁸ Then they led Jesus from the house of Caiaphas to the governor’s headquarters. It was early morning. They themselves did not enter the governor’s headquarters, so that they would not be defiled, but could eat the Passover. ²⁹ So Pilate went outside to them and said, “What accusation do you bring against this man?” ³⁰ They answered him, “If this man were not doing evil, we would not have delivered him over to you.” ³¹ Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and judge him by your own law.” The Jews said to him, “It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death.” ³² This was to fulfill the word that Jesus had spoken to show by what kind of death he was going to die.

How very interesting!  Just as Peter stopped at the gate before his entry into the High Priest’s courtyard, so too the Jews do not enter Pilate’s headquarters.  They deliver Jesus to Pilate, but they do not go in. Pilate must come out to them.  Why?  The text tells us:

²⁸ Then they led Jesus from the house of Caiaphas to the governor’s headquarters. It was early morning. They themselves did not enter the governor’s headquarters, so that they would not be defiled, but could eat the Passover.

Unbelievable!  Almost incomprehensible!

The Jews do not enter Pilate’s headquarters because they thought they would have been defiled by entering a pagan, Gentile place.  It being the Sabbath, this was especially undesirable for them as it would have meant that they could not eat the Passover meal.

In other words, they delivered Jesus to Pilate, but refused to enter his residence so that…wait for it…they could remain religiously pure.  Talk about swallowing a camel but straining at a gnat!  They are concerned about maintaining their ritual, religious purity at the exact time that they are perpetrating the most heinous crime the world has ever seen!

These Jews could not see Jesus for who He was because they were blinded by their religion.  In the name of their religion, they handed Jesus over to be killed.  In the name of their religion, they were blinded to their great defilement while thinking that they were avoiding defilement!

Let us make no mistake:  the religious people were the ones who turned Jesus over to be hostile hands. The religious people loved their theories more than they loved God.  The religious people were the most blind to the truth of who God was.

In the name of religion, they missed God.  In the name of “purity” they became impure.  In an effort to avoid defilement, they are ten times defiled.

Please do not miss Jesus because of your religion.  Please do not think that keeping the customs means that you are being obedient to God.  Please do not let the self-righteousness of your adherence to the smaller laws blind you to your great shame in violating the bigger laws.

How about you?  Is this you? Ask yourself this:  “Do I really love Jesus…or do I love my own devotion? Do I really know Jesus…or do I just know the rules?  Do I really walk with Jesus…or do I walk in the ways of the religious establishment?”

They were blinded by their religion.  Their religion meant more to them than their God.

II. Pilate Could Not See Because His Mind was Trapped in the World (v.33-37a)

Those who delivered Jesus over were blinded to who He really was.  So was the one to whom they delivered Jesus.  Listen to this conversation:

³³ So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, “Are you the King of the Jews?”

Pilate begins his interrogation of Jesus by seizing hold of an idea that he understands:  kingship.  “Are you the King of the Jews,” he asks Jesus.

This makes perfect sense, of course.  Most people approach Jesus from the vantage point they happen to posses at the moment in which they encounter him.  We all do.  Pilate is a man of politics and he approaches Jesus like a politician.  There is no evidence that Pilate understood theology.  There is even less evidence that he understood philosophy.  But politics?  That he could do.

He knew what a king was.  A king was a person of power who possessed a kingdom and had authority over his subjects.  There can be no doubt whatsoever that this is the understanding of the term that Pilate poured into his question, “Are you the King of the Jews?”

Immediately, we sense a tension and a disconnect between Jesus and Pilate.

³⁴ Jesus answered, “Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?” ³⁵ Pilate answered, “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me. What have you done?” ³⁶ Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”³⁷ Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?”

This is not only a disconnect between Jesus and Pilate, it is a disconnect between two totally different views of reality itself.  Jesus knew the truth.  Pilate merely knew the world, and his mind was trapped in it.

That is why this conversation bears the frustrating marks of two people talking past each other.  It is because Pilate was using the term “king” in the only way he knew, but Jesus was speaking of it on a totally different level.

³⁴ Jesus answered, “Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?” ³⁵ Pilate answered, “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me. What have you done?”

Ah, we see the defining marks of a secular man.  Jesus wants to know where Pilate got this idea.  “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me.”  Pilate is thinking in the world’s terms.  All he knows is a world of territorial rulers and powers and kings…even if that territory was as wide as the Roman Empire.

So Pilate enforces the boundaries:  “You are a Jew.  I am a Roman.”  That is the upshot of his comments.  In exasperation, he seems to want to point out the obvious:  “I am not a part of your small Jewish world.  I am a foreign ruler here.  Your world is not my own.  This is a local matter.  I am just having to deal with it.”

Pilate was seeking to minimize the potential threat of that about which Jesus was speaking.  A local, upstart “king”?  That, Pilate could handle.

Of course, this was not the kind of King Jesus was.  Jesus explains:

³⁶ Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”

Jesus does not intend to grant Pilate’s premise, to concede to the assumption that Pilate has any idea what a “King” really is.  His answer is not merely a rebuke, it is an illumination of the difference between the way the two are thinking about reality.

Jesus is not a localized King.  He is not merely, “The King of the Jews.”  Jesus does not have a corner in which He must sit.

On the contrary, the One who stood before Pilate, the One Pilate addressed, the One Pilate dared to question and the One on whom Pilate was seeking to hoist his failed and limited little political conceits was none other than the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Pilate understood the territorial kings of the world, but he did not understand the idea of one King over all creation.  Pilate understood national identity:  Jews there, Romans here.  He did not understand that all of humanity really only had one King.  Pilate understood the power to control, but he did not understand that there was a power over all the powers.

Pilate’s mind was trapped in the world.  He was a secular man.  Jesus and Pilate pass like ships in the night because Pilate could not and would not think beyond the categories that had been defined for him by the world.

Sometimes I think Pilate’s great tragedy was a lack of imagination.  He could not imagine that this man was not only a king but the King!  He could not imagine that reality transcended the petty politics in which he was enmeshed.  He could not think beyond his view of reality and that view had been shaped by the world.

What has defined your thinking about God?  The world?  God Himself?

Jesus came to reveal the reality of a King and  Kingdom that is beyond the surface politics of the world. As such, many will not open their hearts to His radical, new vision of reality.  Pilate could not and neither do many people today.

III. Pilate Could Not See Jesus Because He Was Blinded By Intellectual Despair (v.37b-38a)

And yet, it was not merely worldly thinking that blinded Pilate.  There is a kind of despair in his words as well.

^37b Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world— to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” ^38a Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”

To bridge the gap between their conflicting visions of reality, Jesus tells Pilate that he is speaking the truth to Pilate.  Pilate responds with the famous question, “Quod est veritas?  What is truth?”

Now we begin to understand why Pilate’s mind is enslaved by surface, worldly thinking.  In truth, what he sees constitutes the sum total of his vision of reality.  He does not believe there is a truth beyond what he can see, what he knows, the little world he inhabits.  This is because he wonders if truth even exists at all!

“What is truth?”  That is the question our world is asking today.  There is a despair that has gripped the world today.  Is the despair of ever discovering, much less knowing, truth.  David Samuels wrote this in the New York Times Magazine:

“It is a shared if unspoken premise of the world that most of us inhabit that absolutes do not exist and that people who claim to have them are crazy.”[1]

The world hates the idea of absolute truth…except, of course, the world’s own creed that “there is no absolute truth.”

Truth is scary.  Truth imposes boundaries upon us.  Truth gives us parameters.  This is because if there is a “true” there is also a “false.”  If there is a “right” there is a “wrong.”

Mankind builds its own idol of reality on the altar where it has just killed truth.  If there is no truth, I am free to make my own truth.  When I make my own truth in the absence of the truth, then I am free to begin saying really crazy things like, “What may be true for you may not be true for me.”

But that does not work at all if truth exists, if the truth is a reality.

Jesus is truth.  Pilate is a walking doubt.  It is no wonder this meeting did not go well.

Jesus offered Pilate the truth.  Pilate was blinded by intellectual despair.

IV. Pilate Could Not See Jesus Because He Was Blinded by Personal Advancement (v.38b-40)

Unfortunately, Pilate’s main dilemma was not romantically philosophical or intellectually strident.  His main dilemma involved rank careerism and opportunism.  In truth, Pilate could not see Jesus because he was blinded by personal advancement.

To understand how Pilate’s behavior reflects a desire for personal advancement, you need to understand the tenuous nature of his position as governor of Judea.  He served in that post from AD 26 until AD 37. It was a difficult post and Pilate had done a number of things to exasperate the Jews over whom he had rule.  He had also exasperated his superiors in Rome.  R.C. Sproul explains:

When he came to Jerusalem, he brought the Roman standards with the image of the emperor into the city, which incensed the Jews.  To see the image of the emperor set up in the Holy City was outrageous to the populace of Jerusalem, and Josephus tells us that they responded by coming into the city and staging a literal sit-down strike.  They surrounded the house of Pilate, then sat down in the street and refused to move for five days.  Finally, Pilate called in his troops and warned the Jews that if they did not leave, the soldiers would cut off their heads.  The Jews then laid back and stretched out their necks, awaiting execution.  Pilate finally backed down and removed the standards from the city.

Later, Pilate tried again.  He brought the votive shields of the emperor into the Holy Place, which was another sacrilege in the sight of the Jews, and once again the people gathered in protest.  The four sons of Herod sent a protest to the emperor, and the emperor commanded Pilate to respect the Jews’ religious freedom and to remove the shields from the Holy Place.  Once again, Pilate was frustrated by the insurgent Jews.

Pilate again stirred protests when he took the sacred treasure from the Jewish temple to build an aqueduct in the province.  This sparked another protest by the Jews. This time, Pilate sent his soldiers into the crowd, and they clubbed people to death.  That created even more trouble for Pilate.

One other incident bears mentioning.  A Roman governor had the privilege of striking coins with any image he so desired.  Pilate made copper coins bearing images of pagan religion.  That was another outrage in the eyes of the Jews.[2]

You can see, then, the precarious position in which Pilate found himself.  His career and any hope of personal advancement he had could not survive the twin trials of (a) revolt from below and (b) displeasure from above.  He is caught between the mob and Rome.  Whatever his personal feelings about Jesus might have been, he needed a way to save face and to save his neck.  So he worked a loophole.

^38b  After he had said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told them, “I find no guilt in him. ³⁹ But you have a custom that I should release one man for you at the Passover. So do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?” ⁴⁰ They cried out again, “Not this man, but Barabbas!” Now Barabbas was a robber.

He avoided condemning Jesus directly (“I find no guilt in him.”) and, instead, shifted the burden to the crowd.  He let them choose who they wanted free:  Jesus or Barabbas.

Do you see how cowardly this is, this evasion of having to make a choice in favor of personal advancement?  Pilate was trying to climb the ladder…or, more accurately, he was trying to avoid being thrown off the ladder.  He did not need a controversy.  He did not need the disruption.  He did not need the personal price he would have to pay if he stood by Jesus.

It is amazing how disruptive Jesus can be to a person’s family, a person’s career, a person’s sense of comfort, a person’s hopes for advancement.  It costs to follow Jesus.  Sometimes it costs you a job. Sometimes it costs you a relationship.  Sometimes it costs you that next promotion.

Of course, the great paradox of the gospel is that what we give up to follow Jesus does not compare to what we gain, but in the painful throes of the decision lots of people choose to sell their souls for a step up.

Pilate tried not to make a decision.  But, of course, that is itself a decision.

Make no mistake:  when confronted with Jesus, you will make a decision.  The decision to make no decision is still a decision.  The decision to make no decision is, in truth, a rejection.  To say nothing is to say “no.”

Pilate rejected Jesus by trying not to accept or reject Jesus.  His neutrality was itself a loud and clear, “No!”

It is amazing how many people are so blinded by their hopes of personal advancement that they delude themselves into thinking they can avoid the decision altogether.  “I will not accept Jesus,” they say. “Neither will I reject him.”

Is that you today?  Do you stand with Pilate?  Seeking to say neither “yes” nor “no” to Jesus?

It is odd but true that the Jews clamoring for His death were showing more honesty and integrity than Pilate who was seeking to save his own hide with a loophole.  It is more honest to reject Jesus than to try to avoid Jesus when He’s standing in front of your very face.

May I say this to all of you who are gathered here today:  you have looked at Jesus, but have you seen Him?  Have you really seen Him?

If you have seen Him, what have you done?  Rejected him like the angry mob?  Avoided him like spineless Pilate?  Or accepted Him, trusted in Him, believed on Him and His great work?

Paul wrote in Romans 10 these words:

⁸ But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); ⁹ because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.¹⁰ For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. ¹¹ For the Scripture says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” ¹² For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. ¹³ For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

Call on Him today.  Do not miss Him from merely looking at Him.  Do not be blinded by the world, by your mind, by your doubts or by your own safety.  Call on Him today, and He will give you life.