Behold Your King!
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
April 9, 2004 (Good Friday)
John 19:12-22
“Behold your King!” said Pilate to the crowd.
What we know of Pontius Pilate is that he was not a very nice person. He was a brutal, repressive colonial governor. When he stood out on that pavement and said “Behold your King!” to the people of Jerusalem, he was being sarcastic. He was being obnoxious. He was trying to offend the crowd. He was trying to put the crowd in its place by saying, “Look at the kind of King you Jews deserve.” Someone beaten and mocked. Someone with a crown of thorns. Someone worthy only of crucifixion. “Behold your King!” says Pilate to the crowd.
The crowd, of course, reacted angrily to this. Both at the implied insult–this man is unworthy of being their king–and at the fact that they’re being put in a very awkward position. To declare allegiance to a king is to declare treason to Rome. And so they respond, “We have no king but the Emperor. Anyone who sets himself up as a king sets himself against Caesar,” they said. And so with those words Pilate handed Jesus over to be crucified. And he was crucified under a sign that said, “Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews.” Again, when the people object, he says “What I have written, I have written.”
We reflect on this on Good Friday. What does it mean for us when we refer to Jesus, as we continue to do, as the “King of the Jews?” This does not fit any model of kingship that we know. There is nothing glorious about the way Jesus died—in fact, it is meant to be the most humiliating and degrading death that we, fallen humans, have yet managed to come up with. In crucifixion, a person’s own body weight can no longer support itself. The diaphragm collapses, and the person suffocates a long, agonizing death. This is an undignified, unworthy way to die. It is a death reserved specifically for those who are the enemies of Rome, for non-Roman citizens who are seditious or who are rebellious. It is a way to tell people, “This is what happens to you when you challenge Roman might. This is the kind of death that awaits you.”
And yet, in the Gospel of John there is always something else lurking below the surface. There’s always another message waiting between the lines. In the Gospel of John, those who speak often say things they don’t realize are true. They often say things on one level that have an entirely different meaning on another. So it is with the high priest who on the beginning of Holy Week says, “It is better that this one man should die than the whole nation perish.” We read that he is making simply a political calculation. Jesus is becoming popular. The Romans may crush the Jewish people if they suspect that he is leading a rebellion. And yet, we who sit on this side of Easter understand that phrase very differently. That one dies so that many should not.
In the same way, when Pilate comes out and says, “Behold your King,” he is intending to be obnoxious. He is intending to be sarcastic. But he is speaking a word that is true on a level he cannot comprehend. When the crowds say, “Anyone who sets himself up as king challenges the Emperor,” they are saying more than they know.
For those of us who are Christian, we proclaim our faith in Jesus Christ. When we proclaim him as our King, as our Lord and Savior, it means that we are declaring our loyalty. That we are putting Christ before anything else. That we put our loyalty and our faith in Christ before any earthly loyalty, before any national fealty, before any ideology, any group. That we are proclaiming loyalty to Jesus.
What we discover on Good Friday is that this is a King not like the king that we are used to swearing loyalty to. This is a King who does not demand of us blood for no reason. A king who does not take our riches from us. A king who will not lord power over us. But a King who for the sake of his people, goes to the cross. A King who for the sake of you and me undergoes an ignominious, an ignoble, a humiliating death. Out of love for us, so that we might know the depths that God is willing to go to reconcile God’s self with us. So that we might know that not even the basest, vilest, most humiliating death can conquer God. That we might know that God triumphs through our pain and our suffering, through our humiliations, through our utter debasement.
God sends his only Son that we might know this. To suffer and die upon the cross in humility, in love. And that tells us something. If we are proclaiming loyalty to this King, we as citizens of this kingdom live differently than citizens of other kingdoms. When we have given our loyalty to this King, we have given our loyalty to one who has come to serve us. Therefore, we serve him and serve one another. Jesus comes to us on Good Friday. Jesus comes in humility, in suffering, and though the words on the cross are meant to mock him as an insult–“Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”– we might yet gaze upon the cross, and with Pilate we might say, “Behold our King.”
