Luke 23:1-12
Jesus before Pilate
Then the assembly rose as a body and brought Jesus before Pilate.They began to accuse him, saying, ‘We found this man perverting our nation, forbidding us to pay taxes to the emperor, and saying that he himself is the Messiah, a king.’ Then Pilate asked him, ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’ He answered, ‘You say so.’ Then Pilate said to the chief priests and the crowds, ‘I find no basis for an accusation against this man.’ But they were insistent and said, ‘He stirs up the people by teaching throughout all Judea, from Galilee where he began even to this place.’
Jesus before Herod
When Pilate heard this, he asked whether the man was a Galilean. And when he learned that he was under Herod’s jurisdiction, he sent him off to Herod, who was himself in Jerusalem at that time. When Herod saw Jesus, he was very glad, for he had been wanting to see him for a long time, because he had heard about him and was hoping to see him perform some sign. He questioned him at some length, but Jesus gave him no answer. The chief priests and the scribes stood by, vehemently accusing him. Even Herod with his soldiers treated him with contempt and mocked him; then he put an elegant robe on him, and sent him back to Pilate. That same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before this they had been enemies.
How many of you
have ever played the game 'Telephone'? I imagine that most of you,
at some point in life, played this fairly simple game. In it, people
sit in a circle and one person whispers a statement into the ear of
the person next to them, who then relays it to the next, and so on
until the bit of information has traveled around the circle. The
final message is then compared to the original, often with humorous
results. Rarely, if ever, are the two the same. The reason for this
is that the original message gets distorted at some point along the
way, and then that message gets distorted, and each succeeding
message is farther from the truth.
Now, if you were
not in the middle of a game, and you heard a garbled message, the
best thing to do would be to ask the originator what the message was
to be sure you knew exactly what had been said. This would make sure
your knowledge was accurate, and just as importantly, it would ensure
that what you were passing on to the next person was accurate. If
you fail to do so, you simply compound the error. As they say, a
little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
In Christianity, a
little knowledge can be downright scary. In the Presbyterian church,
we encourage each individual member to take up their own independent
study of the Bible. We want you to take responsibility for your
faith—we want you to have your own knowledge. If you never open
the Bible in your house, your faith becomes like a game of
telephone—you're listening to my interpretation of it. Now, I'm
trying to be as faithful as possible in relaying the truth of the
Bible. But I am human, and I make mistakes. It's important for you
to be involved in your own study of the Bible so that you can
double-check what I'm saying—so that you can go back to the source
and be sure that your faith is based on the firm foundation of
Christ. There are plenty of leaders in the world who will
maliciously twist the words of the Bible for their own benefit, and
thousands of followers go along blindly, never opening their own
Bibles to fact-check their leaders. They simply follow a distorted
Gospel.
In Jerusalem, the
Jewish leaders had developed their own distorted faith, passed down
through generations of church leaders like a big game of telephone.
Only this was no party game—this is the single most important thing
going on in the world, and the leaders were leading the church
astray. They weren't going back to the text and seeing the God who
wants all of their hearts and lives offered to him and him alone—they
were simply following along in a distorted, rules-based faith that
depended on works alone to save them. They'd forgotten the God who
stood behind the story. Their distorted faith didn't simply affect
them—they passed it along to others, and to the leaders who came
after them, so generations of believers were affected by their
refusal to allow God to dwell within their hearts. The leaders led
the church astray, and it went farther off course with each
successive leader.
Enter Jesus.
He came to
transform all of this. He invited the leaders back to the truth of
God's love, back into the fold of what it means to follow God. He
invited them to take off the blinders, to see the distortions for
what they were, and to lead the people back from the wilderness into
the promised land. He wanted them to understand that their hearts
were astray, that they had fallen prey to generations of distortions,
and to return to a life of worship. Jesus came to save everyone—that
included the Pharisees, the chief priests and the scribes. Jesus
loved them just as much as he loved the disciples, as much as he
loved those he healed, and he desperately wanted to see them come to
a saving faith in Him alone.
But they resisted.
Boy, did they ever resist. Three years of public ministry by Christ
did nothing to soften their hearts. Countless exchanges with the
Word made flesh didn't weaken their defenses—they had bought into
their distorted faith, and they would not be shaken. Eventually,
they had him arrested, and here we are today in Luke 23, with Jesus
on trial and this crowd accusing him of all sorts of things, most of
them lies, in the hopes of having him put to death, thus enabling
them to continue in their comfortable distortions. They distort the
ministry of Jesus to Pilate in the hopes that it will buy them a
conviction. They want this problem solved.
Now, I don't
believe that Pilate and Herod are very important to this text. I
think Pilate sees Jesus as a curiosity, someone not worth his time.
When Jesus refuses to reveal anything self-incriminating before him,
Pilate is hesitant to join into this inter-family squabble. When the
assembly refers to him as a Galilean, Pilate sees this as golden
ticket—suddenly, Jesus is not his problem.
It's a glorious
realization for Pilate—Jesus is someone else's problem, and so
Pilate passes the buck, sending Jesus off to Herod, who has his own
distorted view of Jesus. Herod wants to be entertained, wants to
have some great story of seeing Jesus perform a miracle before his
very eyes, not so that he will believe, but rather so he'll have a
story to share at cocktail parties. He wants to see Jesus
perform—but Jesus remains silent, so Herod and his soldiers mock
this Jewish carpenter and send him back to Pilate. The King of Kings
has nothing to say to the king. The one who heals beggars and dines
with sinners and prostitutes has nothing to say to the king with an
empty heart.
So back Jesus goes
to Pilate, along with the assembly and their hatred for his
challenges of his difficult faith, his calls to a hard road of
discipleship. They hate him for how he pushes them to give
everything, to give their comfort and their hearts to God. They hate
him for challenging the distorted faith to which they have grown
accustomed. They hate him for calling them to change.
And so here we
have before us the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords—how do we
respond? Is our own faith a distortion? Or do we live the kind of
faith that Christ calls us to?
The best way to
know for certain what kind of faith Christ calls us to is to be in
constant study of Scripture. It's where the answers are for each of
us. We need to be in church, and sermons and worship certainly play
a large part in our spiritual formation—but you need to be working
on your own, studying on your own, because you have a book with every
answer in it. Only by reading it for yourself do you grasp the
complete call of Christ's discipleship. Only by spending hours and
hours in its pages do we understand how complete the call to
discipleship is. Christ wants all of your life, all of your heart,
all of your energy. Christ wants every single day to be an offering
to Him—Christ wants all that you do, in work and play, every second
of every hour, to be lived for His glory. If we believe that
Christ's call to discipleship is not a call on all of our lives, we
are no better than those who had him put on trial—we our attempting
to live our own distorted version of Christianity, and Christ calls
us back to him, to worship with heart, body, mind and soul. He calls
us to complete discipleship.
The scribes and
the Pharisees allowed their faith to grow distorted over the years,
and when Christ called them to change, they refused.
What kind of faith
will you have? One based on a love of and study of Scripture, where
you are constantly aligning yourself with God's call on your life?
One rooted in listening to the Holy Spirit direct your feet?
In Jesus Christ,
God came to earth to save you. On the cross and in the garden where
the stone was rolled away, a message was sent to all people that
nothing on this world will ever be the same. May we live a life that
is constantly reminding ourselves and others that we have been
transformed in Christ, and that we will not allow ourselves to live a
distorted version of the Gospel based on our comfort and
unwillingness to change.
Let us pray.
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