Jesus is led from the house of Caiaphas to the Roman governor’s headquarters. The priests stop at the entrance. They will not enter the building because doing so would make them ritually unclean before Passover. They remain outside, careful to preserve their purity, while the One who is truly pure is handed over to be killed.
The Gospel reveals the tragic irony: those guarding religious purity stand outside the truth.
Inside, there is Pontius Pilate, the representative of imperial power. Pilate understands kingdoms. Rome’s authority rests on legions, taxes, surveillance, and fear. Every throne Pilate has ever known is secured by violence. In the world Pilate inhabits, a king is someone who can command death.
Pilate asks the question that makes sense in his world: “Are you the King of the Jews?
Jesus answers in an unsettling way: “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my servants would be fighting…”
Two kingdoms stand starkly face to face. One kingdom is built on force. It sustains itself through fear and death, the kingdom of Rome. This stands for every system that believes power must be protected at all costs, too.
The other kingdom stands before Pilate in chains. Jesus’ kingdom has no soldiers, yet it will not be defeated. Pilate cannot understand this Jesus' power. No governor could. The logic of empire cannot comprehend the authority of sacrificial love. Pilate presses him again: “So you are a king?”
Jesus answers: “For this 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.”
This is the heart of Christ’s kingdom: truth. Pilate’s famous reply echoes across the centuries: “What is truth?”
It is not really a philosophical question. It is the weary skepticism of someone who has lived too long within power systems. Pilate has seen truth bent to serve politics and loyalty. For him, truth is mere convenience and is decidedly negotiable.
The tragedy is that Truth itself is standing in front of him. In the Gospel of John, Jesus has already said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”
Pilate searches for truth while questioning the One who is truth. The deeper drama of the passage is revealed. The trial is not really about Jesus. It is about us. Humanity stands before the truth and must decide whether it will recognize it.
The crowd chooses Barabbas, a revolutionary. A man of violence seems more believable than a king who reigns through love. Yet the Gospel quietly states which kingdom will endure.
Pilate’s empire once appeared invincible. Its legions marched across continents. Its governors ruled with authority backed by force. And now, Pilate’s empire has long since vanished. Rome’s rulers have turned to dust. The kingdom of Christ continues.
It continues wherever someone listens to his voice. This kingdom does not conquer by destroying enemies. It conquers by transforming them. At the end of the scene, Pilate declares, “I find no case against him.” Still, he will hand Jesus over to be crucified. Power recognizes innocence but sacrifices it to preserve order.
While Jesus recognizes and does not resist because his kingdom will not be established by force. It will be established by self-giving love. However, this kingdom does not always grow in ways we easily see.
There is a story often told about bamboo forests in Asia. When bamboo is planted, almost nothing appears to happen for years. The seed is watered. The soil is tended. Seasons pass, and the ground looks unchanged.
One year goes by. Nothing. Two years. Still nothing.Three. Four. Then, sometime around the fifth year something remarkable happens. The bamboo suddenly shoots upward, sometimes reaching nearly ninety feet in a matter of weeks. To someone who has not been watching closely, the growth looks sudden and miraculous. But the growth did not begin in the fifth year.
For years the bamboo has been doing its most important work underground. It has been growing an intricate network of roots, spreading wide and deep through the soil. Only when that hidden foundation becomes strong enough does the visible growth appear.
The kingdom Jesus speaks about grows like that. Much of its work happens beneath the surface of history. And in moments like our own, when wars spread, tensions rise, and communities feel fragile; many people quietly ask a painful question:
Is anything we are doing actually making a difference? When change takes longer than we hoped, it is easy to believe that nothing is happening. But the wisdom of the Gospel suggests something different. The most important growth often happens where we cannot see it. When people gather to support one another, roots are growing.
When neighbors refuse to abandon compassion in a climate of fear, roots are growing. When communities continue telling stories of justice, mercy, and dignity even while the culture grows cynical, roots are growing.
None of that work appears dramatic. It rarely makes headlines. It unfolds slowly, too slowly for our impatient hopes, but it matters.
Jesus often described the kingdom of God in this way. He spoke of seeds scattered in a field, seeds that grow quietly through the night while the farmer sleeps. The growth happens beyond human control and often beyond human awareness.
The work of the community rarely unfolds on the timetable we prefer. Like bamboo, it builds its foundation beneath the soil before rising into view.
The cross itself looked like a failure on the day Jesus died. However, what appeared to be defeat was, in truth, the deepest planting of the kingdom of God. The roots of sacrificial love were sinking into the soil of the world. From those roots, a kingdom has continued to grow.
So the question Jesus places before every reader of this Gospel remains the same one that stood before Pilate:
Which kingdom do we belong to? The kingdom of fear and power, or the kingdom of truth and love? Those who belong to the truth, Jesus says, hear his voice. The kingdom may grow slowly, quietly, even invisibly, yet the roots are spreading.
And these roots can sustain an entire forest.
My sister read this reflection and uncovered an observation that complicates this reflection. I will try to summarize what she said:
ReplyDeleteIn John’s story, the priests remain outside Pilate’s residence to preserve ritual purity while handing over the innocent. The tragedy is that religious concern for purity coexists with participation in violence.
After Constantine, another tension emerges: the church that proclaimed a kingdom “not from this world” began to live within the machinery of this world’s power. The empire that once nailed Christians to crosses now built their basilicas. The sword that once threatened them now sometimes defended them. The dialectical question becomes unavoidable:
Did the church transform the empire—or did the empire reshape the church? History suggests the answer is: both.
On one hand, the Gospel undeniably altered Rome. The brutal spectacles of the arena slowly disappeared. New institutions of charity arose. Hospitals, orphan care, and organized giving expanded throughout the late Roman world under Christian influence. The moral imagination of the empire began to shift.
On the other hand, the church also absorbed the habits of imperial power. Authority became institutionalized. Political alliances formed. At times, coercion entered Christian history in ways that would have been unimaginable to the small communities that first gathered around the memory of the crucified Christ.
The church that once proclaimed, “My kingdom is not from this world,” sometimes acted as though its survival depended on the structures of this world. This tension does not invalidate the Gospel. In fact, it confirms the depth of its challenge.
The trial before Pilate was never only about Rome. It was always about every human community, including the church. The question “What is truth?” continues not only in political halls but also in religious institutions.
In the reflection, the kingdom of Christ remains difficult precisely because it refuses the ordinary instruments of power. It grows in the hidden places of history, like the bamboo.
Empires rise, including Christian ones. Institutions expand and contract. Power gathers and disperses. Yet the kingdom Jesus speaks about never fully identifies with any structure, even those built in his name.
That is why the Gospel scene continues to judge history. Pilate still stands wherever power protects itself by sacrificing truth. The priests still stand wherever religious certainty ignores compassion.
And the church stands somewhere between them. sometimes faithful to the kingdom that grows like roots beneath the soil, sometimes tempted by the visible strength of empire.
The question Jesus asked Pilate remains.
Not merely: What is truth? But perhaps the deeper question for every generation of believers is this: If Christ’s kingdom is not from this world, how can his followers live within the world’s structures of power without becoming them?
The Gospel never resolves the tension. It leaves us standing in that uneasy space between the palace and the cross, between empire and the quiet growth of roots beneath the earth. And those roots support what can flourish next within us.
I tried to publish a comment and it says: Comment is too long! Ha!
ReplyDeleteWell, I'll just make it two comments. Please forgive me!
As usual, you have written such thought-provoking messages--sort of a double offering this time!! I am still very new to studying the Bible without the big blockade I was raised with! I'm finally a believer and so the world is so different. Most of my life I really believed that we could find justice and work towards it--that it was our birthright in our lifetimes. Really accepting Jesus and seeing the world through his teachings is like having a root canal starting in my heart and cleaning out my brain!! This week's Scripture and this question you pose drives at the very heart of my re-orientation: "If Christ’s kingdom is not from this world, how can his followers live within the world’s structures of power without becoming them?" Your question makes me worry about the seemingly inevitable eventuality of transhumanism and that makes my head (and heart) hurt!
To meet my own selfish needs, I would change the question and ask: How can we live in this world with expectations of Christ's Kingdom being here and now?
What I am arriving at lately, is that we can't. All the striving and struggling I have done expecting to win over the hearts and minds of people perhaps only had meaning for me and the few improvements I may have helped cause (or did I?). I am especially lost lately in all of the social strife as I fear we are barreling towards a future that is pre-written. I believe Christians who truly want to remember, "That what we do to the least of us, we do to Jesus...," must in fact grapple with the complexity of this reality in which we live.
I remember that I was 25 years old when Rachel Corrie was run down by a bulldozer in Palestine. I remember knowing that might as well be me (because of my idealistic personality). When you want to do the "right thing" it can be straightforward or it can be incredibly mysterious and require untold amounts of endurance. I think it is a "both, and.." situation, much like you say. We can try to be followers of Christ living within the Empire and share the Gospel with others or we can stand up choose Jesus, not Barrabas. We can get run over by the bulldozer. Sometimes I think both roads are equally challenging. The choice to stay within the Empire and nurture the roots of the Kingdom below the soil requires a spiritual war with daily battles. The choice to stand with Jesus and go against the Empire will most definitely mean a premature death. What I struggle with is this daily battlefield. Which battles do I wage? What is trickery? What is pre-written? What will help others to find Jesus?
I know I do not see this life the same as I did just a year ago. So I am not the person to really be commenting wisely on your reflection. But I thought I would go ahead and reflect as the practice itself will help me in my own development!! All I know is that I once really believed our political leaders could lead us to a more just future and I no longer believe this. I know that I will still seek out justice but I will measure my energy and try to be more balanced because I know now that the Empire does not share my values nor does it seem to want to. I will spend more of my energy developing those roots and God's light within myself and all those with whom I can be in contact.
Here is the last bit..!
ReplyDeleteJesus always knew that his road on Earth led to the Cross. It breaks our hearts to really know this. That he made this sacrifice for us. And then we are lost when we try to live without sin and follow him. Living in the Empire means we are inextricably linked to sin no matter how much we want to extricate ourselves from it. Maybe this is obvious to most but idealists really struggle with it!! I apologize for the rambling nature of this reflection. I have no wisdom to impart... only the ability to share that I am struggling with this. I sometimes imagine a moment when every human pauses and stops engaging in whatever unkindness, broken relationship or sin they find themselves in the middle of. They just stop. And I see the whole Passion of the Christ in reverse. I see Jesus being taken off the Cross, his wounds healing from the scourging and crown of thorns, and I see him back in the Garden of Gethsemane with his apostles. It is daytime and they are picnicking. There is no agony or bloody sweat. It is sweet connection and community. And I see that as the Kingdom of Heaven. I pray that comes to pass. In the meantime I will wake each day and practice discernment so that I never choose Barrabas willingly. I may be a part of the Empire which continues to choose Barrabas and worse, but I will try not to help the Empire do this. And I hope that in furthering my study, I will find more peace in this. I confess that my heart still hopes for the day the Empire will read its own money...the part that says, "In God we trust!"
Your response is not rambling at all, Sarah, It is honest. And in many ways, it is exactly what the Gospel does to a person. it unsettles the heart and rearranges the way we see the world.
ReplyDeleteThinking the teaching of Jesus feels like “a root canal starting in the heart and cleaning out the brain”, is actually close to what the New Testament calls repentance. The Greek word metanoia literally means a change of mind, a reorientation of how we see reality. When someone begins to see the world through Christ, it can feel disorienting because the assumptions that once seemed solid suddenly shift.
You describe something many Christians eventually face: the slow realization that the kingdoms of this world cannot finally deliver the justice they promise. That realization initially feels like a loss. But it can also be the beginning of freedom.
Jesus said, “My kingdom is not from this world.” Notice he did not say it was absent from the world. He said it was not from it. Its source is different. The power of that world operates differently, growing quietly rather than through domination. That is what I think the bamboo is like in what I wrote about.
Your mention of Rachel Corrie reminds me of the enormous cost of true belief. It reminds me that this slow transformation is its own form of martyrdom. We find ourselves dying, together with the belief that we can save the world ourselves.
You ask,: "Which battles do I wage?"
Your vision of the Passion running in reverse answers that question. A God-inspired vision. Jesus lifted from the cross, wounds healed, friends gathered peacefully in the garden is a profoundly beautiful image.
In a sense, that is exactly the hope Christians carry. The resurrection is God’s declaration that the story of the cross is not the final chapter. The world often moves toward crucifixion; God moves toward resurrection.
Your closing commitment, “I will try never to choose Barabbas willingly”, is actually a profound form of discipleship. Most of us do not face the dramatic choice of a single historical moment. Instead, we face the smaller daily versions: truth or convenience, compassion or indifference, courage or silence. And the peace you are hoping for, that deeper peace that does not depend on the empire changing, often grows slowly as those roots deepen.
From my perspective you are already walking that path.