James Emery White in his book ‘A Mind for God’ explains the significance and impact of ideas on behavior as he points out from Historian Richard Weikart’s book ‘From Darwin to Hitler’ in which he examines the revolutionary impact Darwinism had on the ethics and morality of social thinkers in Nazi Germany. Believing that Darwinism had overturned any sense of the sanctity of life, an evolutionary ‘fitness’ (especially in terms of intelligence and health) became the highest arbiter of morality for the Nazis. Weikart concludes that Darwinism played a strategic role not only in the rise of eugenics [which is a set of beliefs that humans can improved through selective breeding], but also in the rise of euthanasia, infanticide, abortion and racial extermination-all ultimately embraced by Nazis. The contention is that Hitler built his views on Darwinian principles.
White goes on to share that the great challenge to Christian faith today is not atheism, but secularism which is a faith system.
The heart of the secular religion is moral relativism, a functional atheism, if you will, which holds that what is moral is dictated by a particular situation in light of a particular culture or social location. With moral relativism, moral values become a matter of personal opinion or private judgment rather than something grounded in objective truth.[i]
In other words, where do we get our basis for making decisions in our lives? Is it defined and determined by the continual shift in cultural and social mores and values? Or do we make decisions from the framework of biblical truth as found in the person of truth, namely Jesus Christ?
In John 18, we discover that Jesus is on trial; or we can frame it another way and say, ‘truth is on trial.’ Yet, the reality, as John will reveal to us, is that truth is a mirror into our inner world. It reveals what is at the core of our being. So, when Jesus is standing trial before Pilate, what we soon discover is that Pilate is on trial before Jesus. Will Pilate act on the truth or will he embrace what is momentarily advantageous to himself? Will he make a judgment based on truth or vacillate into moral relativism and surrender to political expediency?
In one of the most stressful and intense moments of Jesus’ earthly life, Jesus is arrested and tried by a prejudiced religious group of leaders and an unprincipled Roman governor. It is out of this great evil that Jesus’ mission is about to be fulfilled, namely, providing for us the means of being reconciled to God through His death and resurrection for our sins. Jesus, the lamb of God, becomes our substitute so that we will not have to face judgment nor the impending penalty that will bring about our eternal separation from God.
After being betrayed and arrested, Jesus was brought before the Jewish authorities. The injustice of what was transpiring is amazing. He had been a thorn in the religious leadership of the nation because they were threatened by Him and His message. Through their continual conflict, they reached the conclusion that Jesus would have to die. As we continue John’s narrative, we find them seeking grounds of accusation to have Him executed by the Romans.
There is some debate over why the Jewish leadership sought Jesus’ execution by turning Him over to the Roman authorities, but most agreed that the Jewish leadership had lost their authority to execute the death sentence. In their sham court, they accused Jesus of the sin of blasphemy.
The chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for false evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death. But they did not find any, though many false witnesses came forward. The high priest said to him, ‘I charge you under oath by the living God: Tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God.’ ‘You have said so,’ Jesus replied. ‘But I say to all of you: From now on you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.’ Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, ‘He has spoken blasphemy! Why do we need any more witnesses? Look, now you have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?’ ‘He is worthy of death,’ they answered.[ii]
So, they brought Jesus to Pilate, the Roman governor. While the three Synoptic gospels [Matthew, Mark, and Luke] give a picture of both the Jewish and Roman trial, John focuses almost exclusively on the Roman trial. Warren Wiersbe gives a plausible explanation for this.
The Apostle John records only the interrogations by Annas and Pilate, and mentions Caiaphas only in passing. He focuses primarily on the Roman trial. By the time he wrote this Gospel, the Jewish nation had been scattered by Rome, Jerusalem had been destroyed, and Roman power was all that really mattered.[iii]
Merrill Tenney explains some of the differences as well.
The trial before Pilate is given more space in John than in any one of the Synoptics, in spite of certain omissions from John’s narrative. He does not mention the initial accusation presented to Pilate (Luke 23:2), nor the repeated accusations by the priests (Matt 27:12; Mark 15:3), nor the hearing before Herod (Luke 23:4-12), nor the priests’ agitation for Barabbas (Matt. 27:20, Mark 15:11). …John’s portrayal of this incident is designed to bring the personalities of Pilate and Jesus into sharp relief. …It was a trial of Pilate before Christ instead of Christ before Pilate.[iv]
Tenney’s assessment is insightful. It is more than just Pilate on trial, but speaks to the condition of our society when we question the validity of truth or place expediency ahead of truth. In questioning Jesus, Pilate asked, “What is truth?” Pilate’s final judgment is a denial of justice and the promotion of relativism, expediency, and self-interest at the expense of truth. In the end we see the failure of human social values in the face of God’s tribunal. Though Pilate knew what the right thing to do was according to law, he failed because of his own political self-interest to do what was right and therefore allowed an innocent man to be executed.
In the trial of Jesus before Pilate we find three elements in the rejection of truth. We need to remember that truth is not just a set of propositions but a person who, when received, now defines for us what has always been right and wrong according to our Creator and designer. It is God that sets the eternal and moral boundaries in our lives, rather than the shifting sands of societies in rebellion against God.
The question then is, how do we get there? How do we come to a place where we are tempted to reject the truth? In this interchange between Jesus and Pilate we will discover how we can come to a place where we will also be tempted to reject the truth.
THE FIRST ELEMENT IN REJECTING TRUTH IS THE LACK OF GROUNDS OR SUBSTANCE TO DO SO
So often people dismiss the person and work of Christ, not on the basis of truth but because of their own selfish interests that conflict with God’s purposes for their lives. We need to remind ourselves that Jesus’ trial was really a trial about what is truth, or who is truth. What was this really all about? Was there any substance to the charges that were being made against Jesus?
Right from the very beginning we find the Jewish religious leaders accusing Jesus of ‘blasphemy’, but this was not the charge they brought to Pilate because they knew that this would not be grounds upon which Roman law would execute a person.
Then the Jewish leaders took Jesus from Caiaphas to the palace of the Roman governor. By now it was early morning, and to avoid ceremonial uncleanness they did not enter the palace, because they wanted to be able to eat the Passover.[v]
A. The irony of the Jewish leaders’ behavior.
There are a number of things we need to understand that is ironic about these leaders’ behavior. They were not willing to enter the palace of the Roman governor in order not to be ceremonially defiled and thereby unable to celebrate the Passover, so they remained outside and waited for Pilate to come to them, but they were there to commit a vile moral sin.
There is, of course, characteristic Johannine irony in this reference to the chief priests’ scrupulousness in the matter of ceremonial defilement, when all the time they were incurring incomparably greater moral defilement by their proceedings against Jesus.[vi]
They were plotting to kill an innocent person who was their own Messiah. They could not get beyond their own prejudices and narrow-mindedness to clearly see the evidence pointing to who Jesus was.
John doesn’t give the specific charges that the Jewish religious leaders were bringing to him, but in Luke’s gospel we see their accusations as treasonous behavior against the state.
Then the whole assembly rose and led him off to Pilate. And they began to accuse him, saying, ‘We have found this man subverting our nation. He opposes payment of taxes to Caesar and claims to be the Messiah, a king.’[vii]
These were false and twisted claims in order to present Jesus as an insurrectionist against Rome.
B. Pilate’s response to their desire to have Jesus executed.
So Pilate came out to them and asked, ‘What charges are you bringing against this man?’[viii]
The fact that a Roman detachment of soldiers had gone with the Temple police to arrest Jesus suggests that Pilate had been approached earlier and was somewhat aware of what was happening. The Jewish leadership assumed that bringing Jesus before Pilate was a done deal and all they needed was Roman assent to secure Jesus’ execution. However, Pilate would not be coerced into that action apart from his own judicial inquiry.
Then he opened the judicial proceedings, as was his duty, by asking them to state their charges against the man whom they had brought before him. But they, instead of playing their part straightforwardly as delatores [accusers in a court of law], demurred at the terms of Pilate’s question, regular though it was according to Roman practice. It was evident that Pilate was in effect opening a new trial, instead of simply confirming the death penalty which, as they had maintained, Jesus had incurred in terms of Jewish law.[ix]
The Jewish leaders’ reaction was one of defensiveness and frustration.
‘If he were not a criminal,’ they replied, ‘we would not have handed him over to you.’[x]
This gave Pilate an opportunity to provoke them further by showing their inability to really lead their nation as they saw fit. Pilate now mockingly states that they should address Jesus on their own terms, within the scope of their limited authority.
Pilate said, ‘take him yourselves and judge him by your own law.’ ‘But we have no right to execute anyone,’ they objected.[xi]
Their acknowledgment that they had no authority to execute Jesus both reveals their impotency to accomplish their will and also their deep animosity and bias against Jesus as they are determined to have Him executed.
C. The Plan of God being providentially carried out.
John, however, wants us to realize that God is ultimately in control of what is transpiring. Jesus had foretold by what means he would die, despite the wrangling between Pilate and the Jewish religious leadership. This drama was all part of God’s greater plan to bring about humanity’s redemption. Jesus would die by being crucified on a cross, which was seen as being cursed by God under the Law.
This took place to fulfill what Jesus had said about the kind of death he was going to die.[xii]
One of the great stumbling blocks for a person of Jewish faith to believe that Jesus is the Messiah is that he was cursed by God. In the Jewish mind, how can anyone who is accused by God be the Messiah? Paul explains the significance of Jesus being accursed by God in his letter to the Galatians.
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole.’[xiii]
In other words, Jesus became accursed for us. His death was substitutionary in nature. All of us are guilty of transgressing or breaking God’s moral law, and therefore merit the sentence of death. He died in our place.
THE SECOND ELEMENT IN REJECTING THE TRUTH IS THE WILFUL REJECTION OF CHRIST’S KINGSHIP
It is all about authority. We will either be servants of Christ or sin. We will either obey Jesus or go our own way and do our own thing. Roland Tasker relates the significance of the dialogue between Pilate and Jesus.
The reader is now presented with a dramatic scene, in which two types of kingship are contrasted; the kingship backed by the authority and might of imperial Rome represented by Pilate, a kingship of this world and upheld by this world’s weapons, and the kingship of Jesus, not of this world, in which the monarch is to reign by being lifted up on a cross. The narrative clearly presupposes that it had been intimated to Pilate that Jesus, by claiming kingship over Jewry, was in effect a political revolutionary and therefore a potential danger to Rome; but it lays the guilt for supposing Him to be such upon the Jews rather than upon Pilate. In reality, Jesus had come into the world for no political purpose whatever, but solely to witness to the truth, the truth about God, to testify by word and deed to His justice and at the same time to demonstrate His love.[xiv]
A. The Question of Ultimate Authority and the basis for it.
Pilate then went back inside the palace, summoned Jesus and asked him, ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’[xv]
When we speak of kingship, we are speaking of the ultimate authority in a realm. Here Jesus is about to explain that His authority is not earthly but transcendent, it is Divine and the ultimate authority over all creation.
B. Jesus is seeking to clarify the issue.
‘Is that your own idea,’ Jesus asked, ‘or did others talk to you about me?’ ‘Am I a Jew?’ Pilate replied. ‘Your own people and chief priests handed you over to me. What is it you have done?’[xvi]
What is Jesus asking?
But then Jesus added a question of His own: ‘Are you saying this on your own initiative, or did others tell you about Me?’ What was our Lord really asking? ‘What kind of a king do you have in mind? A Roman king or a Jewish king? A political king or a spiritual king?’ Jesus was not evading the issue; He was forcing Pilate to clarify the matter for his own sake. After all, it was not Jesus that was on trial; it was Pilate!
If Pilate had a Roman king in mind, then Jesus could be considered a rebel. If the governor was thinking about a Jewish kind of king, then political matters could be set aside. It is interesting that Pilate called Jesus ‘king’ at least four times during the trial, and even used that title for the placard he hung on the cross.[xvii]
Don Carson adds that Jesus’ response helps us as readers understand both where Jesus and Pilate are coming from.
Pilate’s answer is indignant, perhaps contemptuous: literally ‘Am I a Jew?’- expecting a strong negative answer. He is saying in effect, that the royal pretensions of any Jew can mean nothing to him personally; he has no stake in their outcome, and could not possibly be seriously contemplating the claims of the man before him.[xviii]
C. Jesus explains His kingship.
Jesus said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.’ ‘You are a king, then!’ said Pilate. Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.’[xix]
Jesus clarifies the nature of His kingdom, its authority, and affects upon humanity. Though Pilate is dismissive of Jesus and sees no personal element at stake in his life regarding Jesus’ claim that His kingdom is not of this world, the reality is that Jesus is about to expose Pilate’s soul for all the world to see, which ultimately will affect his eternal wellbeing. Jesus’s kingship is of greater authority and Pilate is now standing before the King of the Universe. The issue is one of the ultimate realities. It is the issue of the truth, and those who hear the truth will listen to Jesus. Not only is this true for Pilate, but for all of us. Jesus challenges us with the truth. How will we respond? Do we accept His authority in our lives, or are we making ourselves the moral arbitrators in our lives?
D. Pilate’s condemnation of himself.
‘What is truth?’ retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, ‘I find no basis for a charge against him.’[xx]
Pilate mocks the idea of truth, which reveals his rejection of Christ’s authority which is a judgment against himself while he condemns himself because he realizes that Jesus is not guilty of the charges being brought before him, but he will allow this innocent man to be executed to placate the crowd. Pilate does not see Jesus as an insurrectionist and a threat to Rome’s authority, but because of the pressure of the crowd, Pilate persists in perverting justice.
THE FINAL ELEMENT IN REJECTING THE TRUTH IS THE INCONSISTENCY IN REJECTING THE TRUTH THAT IS BEFORE US
In one sense, Pilate is representative of each of us as truth is brought before us and we must decide what to do with Jesus. We can see the turmoil within Pilate as he is trying to do the right thing in releasing Jesus, but not if it is at his own expense. Pilate is more concerned about what the crowd thinks and wants than what is right.
But it is your custom for me to release to you one prisoner at the time of the Passover. Do you want me to release “the king of the Jews”?’ They shouted back, ‘No, not him! Give us Barabbas!’ Now Barabbas had taken part in an uprising.[xxi]
Rather than releasing Jesus on the merit of the case, Pilate proposes an alternative solution. He suggests releasing a prisoner during the Passover feast, which had become customary. The irony again is seen in the crowd’s choice of Barabbas, who was a known insurrectionist and had used violence and murder to try and accomplish his aims. The contrast and irony is that Jesus, the prince of peace, is about to be crucified in the place of this insurrectionist. Here is the picture of what the cross is all about. Like Barabbas, we who are guilty are being set free because of the sacrificial death of Jesus.
Jesus came to testify to the truth, because He is the truth. In speaking to the Jews who had believed, Jesus told them:
To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, ‘If you hold to my teaching you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’[xxii]
We can frame this another way. When given the opportunity to choose between sin and the Savior, which shall we choose? Paul makes it very clear in the book of Romans that we become what we choose. Satan, the father of lies, and those who choose to believe a lie remain in captivity.
Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey–whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or obedience, which leads to righteousness?[xxiii]
Truth is a mirror into our inner world. It reveals what is at the core of our being. It is generally only revealed to us in the crucible of challenges to our faith. We all stand at moments where the values of society are screaming at us, while the authority of Jesus and the truth are on the other side. How we respond reveals, like Pilate, whether we will do what is right or what we deem expedient for that moment.
Pilate’s judgment against Jesus is, in reality, a judgment against himself. What is true for Pilate is equally true for us. Will we choose Jesus, who is the truth; or will we succumb to the pressures of this world and do what we think is in our own best interest at the expense of truth?
What are we going to do with Jesus?
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[i] Ibid, 27.
[ii] Matthew 26:59-60, 63b-66, The New International Version of the Bible, Zondervan, 2011.
[iii] Warren Wiersbe, The Bible Expository Commentary, Vol. 1, (Victor Books, 1996), 377.
[iv] Merrill Tenney, John the Gospel of Belief: An Analytic Study of The Text, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1975), 258-59.
[v] John 18:28.
[vi] F. F. Bruce, The Gospel of John, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1984), 349.
[vii] Luke 23:1-2.
[viii] John 18:29.
[ix] F. F. Bruce, The Gospel of John, 350.
[x] John 18:30.
[xi] John 18:31.
[xii] John 18:32.
[xiii] Galatians 3:13.
[xiv] R. V. G. Tasker, John, TNTC, (Grand Rapids, Mi: William Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1960), 201-02.
[xv] John 18:33.
[xvi] John 18:34-35.
[xvii] Warren Wiersbe, The Bible Expository Commentary, Vol. 1, 378.
[xviii] D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, The Pillar New Testament Commentary, (Grand Rapids, Mi: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991), 593.
[xix] John 18:36-37.
[xx] John 18:38.
[xxi] John 18:39-40.
[xxii] John 8:31-32
[xxiii] Romans 6:16.
