John 18:1—19:42
Good Friday, April 9, 2004
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Maybe the reason why we have on Fridays pay-for-view TV Friday Night Fights is because heavyweight Pontius Pilate wearing the white trunks was going for 3-rounds with middleweight Jesus Christ wearing the red trunks on Good Friday. Some people have even described our sunken sanctuary like a boxing ring.
Who was this Pontius Pilate who is the only other name in the Apostle’s Creed other than Jesus and the Virgin Mary? He was a person of not much consideration in the annals of Roman history, a government bureaucrat who had been sent by Rome to keep these troublesome Jews in their place in the occupied territory of Judea. Pontius Pilate’s job was to keep the lid on Judea, mostly through a beloved form of Roman punishment for troublesome non-Roman criminals and revolutionaries—crucifixion.
The local religious authorities had passed a verdict upon Jesus which they lacked the power to carry out—death. They appealed to Pontius Pilate for the execution and he consented, thinking that by doing so he would quiet the revolutionary passions of the crowd. Pilate was just following order. But he found himself boxing with Jesus.
The Fight
The fight was over who will be king. Pilate asked Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews? But Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”
Pilate boxed him again, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For that I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
Pilate had no theological or religious interest in Jesus. He was concerned only about this talk of a “king.” When Pilate found Jesus not guilty of any crimes against Rome, he tried to release him. But the crowd cried out, “If you release this man, you are no friend of the emperor. Everyone who claims to be king sets himself against the emperor.”
So when Pilate heard the crowd’s cries to crucify Jesus, Pilate asked another time, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but the emperor.” Then Pilate handed him over to be crucified.
The much popularized fight ended with hardly a fight at all. Pilate refused to fight and allowed the mob crowd to fight his fight for him. The kingdom of Rome was unscathed at least for the moment because the crowd and even the chief priests protected the emperor while the kingdom of God in Jesus took a fall so that in the end, there will be a true victor!
Two Kingdoms
In the old days, the Saturday newspaper would contain a Religion Section and a complete list of churches and the times of their services. Today when you open up your SF Chronicle, you can hardly find anything on religion at all unless it’s about clergy scandals. The church seems to be absent from the world. The church seems to have nothing to say about what’s happening outside of these four walls.
To see that Pilate, representative of the almighty state and Jesus, representative of the kingdom of God, go head to head, one on one, and wondering who would be standing at the end of the battle should mean something to us today. If God in Jesus was willing to box with Pilate, representing one of the world’s most powerful empires, what does that say about our involvement in the world? Jesus represents a “kingdom not of this world,” but the world was ready to box with him anyway. Whose politics shall triumph this night? The message of Good Friday is a political one. The fate of the world rests upon what happens tonight.
The fact that Jesus was willing to challenge Pilate on who ultimately is king reminds us of the great mystery of our redemption. God’s saving us from our sin and death, God’s war against our evil, did not take place in heaven, but in history, right here in our world where we live, where political intrigue, compromise, cowardice, and cruelty exist.
You might have been offended by me to suggest that our Jesus was having a fight with Pilate. How crass and cruddy to say that. We want to see Jesus and meet God someplace like at a spiritual retreat, aloof and detached from the cruddy facts of life in this world. We don’t like to think that Jesus was in a smoked-filled, beer-drinking place like Friday Night Boxing in Madison Square Garden or in the shadows of Chinatown.
But if we want to see God, we need only to open our eyes to God’s work in human history; more precisely, in the very worst of human history, where people make unethical and compromising decisions for personal political gains. It is there that God came out to fight for us.
In Jesus Christ, the Almighty God entered into our real world. “The Word was made flesh” really means what it said. Mentioning Pontius Pilate, along with the suffering of Jesus, is to say that we are not left alone in this frightful world. God is with us and is in the world that is reported out everyday in our morning newspapers.
Pontius Pilate is representative of all the worldly powers in our modern world. And in him, we see that he was unprincipled, vacillating, and a political coward. Our call today is to serve as the conscience to the state and the world we live. Jesus had said, “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but render to God what is God’s. Such a statement might lead some to conclude that the state has power over an area of human life, while God has power over another. Christians are to keep the two areas separate. But if that is a valid intention of Jesus words, “Render unto Caesar,” then why is Jesus standing before Pilate ready for a fight?
Here, that which we called law and order, state power, the domain of the government, all of that is being called into question, criticized, and challenged. Here we see state power in its most negative form. Jesus becomes the light, the powerful spotlight that focuses on the boxing ring that highlights how cruel the state can be.
On Good Friday, Jesus stands before Pilate and what we see is that God’s kingdom and our kingdoms meet, clash, struggle with one another. By the end of the fight, one kingdom triumphs, while another bites the dust and is a faint memory in history. The name of Jesus Christ would be remembered and revered, while the name of Pontius Pilate would have been forgotten if it wasn’t for the Apostle’s Creed.
This Day We Fight
Pilate’s sin is the sin of the state down through the ages. He attempts to maintain order in Jerusalem, to preserve his own position of power. He decides between what’s right and wrong purely on the basis of what is most expedient for the state. And if we look at the modern nations of the world today, I wonder how much we look like Pontius Pilate.
In The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, we see King Aragon and Gandalf the White win the bloody battle of the Pelennor Fields, losing many of their men in the fray. As they stand before the Black Gate, which bars their way to the evil Sauron’s Mount Doom, they have given up hope of further victory against the huge army of Orcs waiting to fight them.
They know that somewhere on the slopes of Mount Doom the two Hobbits Frodo and Sam are struggling to make their way up to the fiery mountain to destroy the evil Ring in its fires. All along the supernatural Eye of Sauron has been searching for the whereabouts of the two Hobbits so that he can dispatch his evil agents to kill them and seize the ring.
Aragorn decides that this final battle, though hopeless, will draw the attention of the Eye of Sauron away from the Hobbits to themselves, giving the little Hobbits a better chance at success. Their deaths will thus be a sacrifice for the good of all.
Aragorn’s words to the troops of men, elves and dwarfs before the final battle shows that he will not “wimp out,” “There may come a day when the courage of men fails…an hour of wolves before the Age of Men comes crashing down—but it will not be this day. This day we fight.”
There are times in the world when righteous and honorable people must speak out against not only the evil in the world but against indifference and maintaining the status quo. Like Jesus stood up against Pilate, we are to stand up to the state too.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The church…is not the master or servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.”
On the Hearts of People
Pilate, such a powerful man, with all of these Roman legions backing him up, appears weak, vacillating, indecisive, jerked around by the will of the crowd. Jesus, who had no legions of armies behind him, no legal authority, no state, appears powerfully triumphant.
In what will happen this weekend with Jesus on the cross, a new kingdom of God will take visible form, not with monumental state buildings, capitals, courts, military bases but rather beginning with those at the foot of the cross, Mary and the other women who arrived at the empty tomb, the disciples who were hiding behind locked doors. Beginning with these ordinary people, Jesus is calling them forth to become a part of the kingdom of God.
It may appear that Jesus lost the battle on Friday but at the end we know that he won on Sunday. Whether it was the Roman laws or the Jewish laws that were used to crucify Jesus, the new law that was eventually followed by his disciples were written on their hearts. This one act of Jesus on the cross as a sacrifice once and for all for all of our sins is now the truth that we believe as his disciples. In Hebrews 10:11-18, we read,
Every priest stands day after day at his service, offering again and
again the same sacrifices that can never take away sins. But when Christ offered
for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, and
since then has been waiting until his enemies would be made a footstool for his
feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. And the Holy Spirit also testifies to us, for after saying,
“This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds,”
he also adds,
“I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.”
Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin.
Pilate may have been in power sitting on his judge’s bench but in the end, Jesus challenges any person or power who would attempt to take what belongs to God, to usurp God’s authority to name what is going on in the world and what all of this means.
We may not want to admit it but we all here want to be king or queen too. We know that there are presidents, prime ministers, chiefs, ayatollahs, and shahs. Because God has created us in his own image to have responsible dominion, what follows is that we all have a little kingdom of our own.
When we were babies, we have baby kingdoms. Our will has a short range, but highly effective, as we determine whether anybody else in the house will get a night’s sleep. When we were college students, we have bigger kingdoms, including, for instance, a part time job and half a dorm room. We also have a say over the kind of education we get. By the time we get in to be middle managers, heads of households, self-employed professionals or pastors, our kingdom expands further. But none of us reign in isolation. Much of the time we have our say only in community with others. Successful living in God’s world means learning how to get along with the kingdoms of others.
But most of all, successful living depends especially on fitting our small kingdom inside God’s big kingdom always recalling where we got our dominion in the first place. Each of us is king or queen over a little. God’s kingdom is over all.
God’s power is over not only our lives writing the law of love, peace and justice on our hearts and minds but also the God of the world who empowers us to be the kingdom of God in our world today.
For the life of me, I will never understand why many think of Christians as people who live in some sort of fantasy world that does not relate to the “real world” of our newspapers.
Christianity is a faith that is based on history that arises from within the goings and comings of life. Our God did not remain aloof from the tugs and pulls of the real world. Jesus did not hunker down with a few religiously inclined followers and discuss high-flown spiritual matters.
Jesus got into the boxing ring with Pilate. He stood toe-to-toe with the principalities and powers. And at the end, Jesus won. Pilate’s name appears in the Apostle’s Creed as one who has been defeated by Jesus. Pilate’s power was usurped by God’s force of love. Thus he is mentioned in the Creed, only in passing, as a way of reminding us of God’s triumph will be worked out on this night.
With the grace and mercy of God’s love, our sins forgiven, we too are called to enter the boxing ring and stand tall against the principalities and powers of this world today. And in the end with the single sacrifice of Christ for our sins, we also know that we will win.
Let us pray.
Merciful God, forgive us when we think that our little kingdoms are more important and bigger than yours. Teach us to be like Jesus who was not afraid to address the problems of the world and the oppressive power that put down people. May our service in the name of Christ bring peace and justice into your hurting creation. Amen.