“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.” John 18: 33-37
Pilate had no sooner launched into interrogating Jesus about rumours of his being a king than he found himself well out of his depth. To hear Jesus stating that his mission in life was “to testify to the truth” would have been beyond Pilate’s limited comprehension. In our own day and age, I could not entertain that any one of us could imagine hearing Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, Ali Khamenei and Vladimir Putin stating that their role in life was to proclaim, live and promote truth, justice and equity. Pilate behaved as a leader who was afraid of the crowd in front of him. He had realised that failure to satisfy the crowd could cost him his job. In his mind, kingship and authority were synonymous with power, position and status. Jesus had discerned that his vocation as Messiah was to usher in the kingdom of God, which would be built on servant leadership. Yes, Jesus was committed to a kingdom but it is a kingdom in which all its members are equal in rank and dignity and enjoy the freedom of the children of God. It is a kingdom in which we all have the privilege of reflecting to one another the freedom and love of God in which we all share as citizens because of our baptism into Christ.
Pilate belonged to a social structure that defined people by the power they held to control others. It was power which defined the importance of people and allocated status. The extraordinary personal characteristic which Jesus revealed about himself in his brief engagement with Pilate was that he had no doubt about who he was and where he was going. He knew that all he was and had were God-given and he knew that his mission in life was to proclaim and model living in the kingdom of God. That gave him the ultimate in freedom. He had no need to compete for position, power or recognition.
And that, surely, is the message on which each of us is meant to focus as we ponder today’s gospel-reading. Once we are convinced that all we are and have are gifts from a God of boundless munificence and love and that our mission as disciples of Jesus is to engage in building the kingdom of God through servant-leadership, reaching out to the most needy of our brothers and sisters, we will come to experience what it feels like to be truly free.
Pope Francis said as much in his Apostolic Exhortation entitled: Evangelii Gaudium (November 2013), when he wrote: “The Church which ‘goes forth’ is a community of missionary disciples who take the first step, who are involved and supportive, who bear fruit and rejoice. An evangelizing community knows that the Lord has taken the initiative. God has loved us first.” (Paragraph 24)
In his exchange with Pilate, Jesus acknowledged that the kingdom of God to which he belonged would be incomprehensible to the Roman Governor. He effectively repeated the message he had repeatedly tried to convey to his close followers who had hopes that he would rescue the people of Israel from the foreign powers who were occupying their land and getting rich by taxing them. It was only in retrospect that his close followers came to appreciate that Jesus’ glory and kingship were in the supreme sacrifice he made in dying on the Cross out of love for humanity.
In responding to Pilate, Jesus pointed out that, if he resonated with the only kind of power and kingship that Pilate understood, his followers would rise up and engage in battle to free their people from the occupying Romans. In stark contrast, it was in his dying on the Cross that Jesus revealed the depth of God’s love for humanity. It was that love that vindicated him and raised him to new life on the morning of his resurrection. It is paradoxical that, in celebrating the kingship of Jesus Christ, we are celebrating the powerlessness and utter poverty that he displayed on the Cross, qualities that were totally foreign to the kings and rulers of Pilate’s day and are today to those who compete for power, status and notoriety in our contemporary world currently being devastated by violent conflict and war. Coming to terms with that is the confronting challenge of today’s gospel-reading.
