Behold Your King
Text: John 19:14-16
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Pontius Pilate had had enough of these rebellious Judeans. They’d forced him to get up and prepare for a trial, the verdict of which they already expected him to render as guilty, as they had determined ahead of time. They even screamed the punishment they wanted him to render, even though they had no authority to demand it: the death penalty—more than that, death by crucifixion, the form of execution reserved for the worst kinds of criminals. And now, to further push him toward their wishes, they tried to go over his head and threaten him with Ceasar himself. “If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend. Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar.”
Pilate would shut them up though. They wanted to play the “pretender to the throne” card; well, he would play it too. He had Jesus put on display again, this time at Gabbatha, where his judgment seat was placed for official and full proclamation. And with all the authority of the governorship bestowed upon him, he made the declaration to the raging Judeans: “Behold your King!”
Pilate was mocking the mob, of course. He was, in an official capacity, announcing that this Jesus was their King. But what a pathetic King He appeared to be. Beaten and bloodied. It seemed like every soldier in the battalion had gotten their punches in. A crown fashioned out of thorns was piercing His head, letting gore flow freely down over His face. He was bound and humiliated. And if this is what Pilate can do to your King, O Judeans, just imagine what he can do to anyone of you.
But the mob will have none of this embarrassment of a King. “Away with Him! Away with Him! Crucify Him! Get Him out of here and give us what we want. That’s why we hate this man—He wouldn’t give us what we wanted. He wouldn’t give us what we expected. He wouldn’t say what He should have. He wouldn’t do as we have done. Get Him out of here for good and execute Him!’
Pilate won’t let them off the hook quite yet though. He has one last barb for them. “Shall I crucify your King?” he sneered. “Shall I show you what real power is, the power of my rank, the power of my empire, the power of my Caesar, and what it can do to the greatest of you, to your King? Shall I kill Him right in front of your eyes? Shall you know how powerless and weak all of you really are?”
It was then that the chief priests took up the cry, “We have no king but Caesar!” They yelled out of rage, “Not my king!” They yelled out of fear, “Don’t lump us in with Him!” They screamed for security, to gain the favor of another master, “We have no king but Caesar!”
But the chief priests, those leaders of the spiritual life of Israel, should have known better. They were, in fact, supposed to have another King who was not Caesar. They, more than any others in Jerusalem and Judea, were supposed to know that all those generations ago, when the Lord brought the children of Abraham to the Promised Land, that their King was supposed to be God. They were to have no human king at all, let alone a corrupt unbeliever like Caesar. The Lord was to be their King, administering His judgments and justice through the prophets and the judges.
But in those ancient days, Israel had cried out about the Lord, “Away with Him! Away with Him! Give us a mortal king, like all the nations around us!” So after their petulant demands, the Lord gave them earthly, flesh and blood kings. And how very earthly they proved to be. Even though the Lord made the most of the situation and declared that the kings of Israel were supposed to be tokens and representatives of His justice and mercy, a promise of their true King, the Messiah to come, these kings often did the very opposite. And Israel suffered under their own self-chosen sentence: having a king who was not the Lord, having a ruler, a Caesar, who was not a picture of how the Lord ruled, but rather a living image of how deeply humanity had fallen into corruption. So once again, centuries later, the crowds that day at Pontius Pilate’s judgement seat were no different than their ancestors. They were no different than what humanity has always done—desiring and choosing someone else, something else, anything and anyone else to rule them instead of the Lord God.
Good Friday reminds us that we are in that crowd shouting for any king besides God. For how often do we trade our King for the Caesars of this world? How often do we take the decrees or rulings of earthly judges, pundits, politicians, or our own verdicts about what’s right and wrong, what’s good and bad, over and against what God has said about these things? How often do we put so much more hope and energy and focus into what some earthly leader promises us as opposed to what God has promised us in this life and the life to come? How often are we nervous of what others will think when they find out that the King of the Church is a bloodied and beaten man, dying on a cross, scorned by the world? One of the earliest examples of mockery of Christians by unbelievers was graffiti from a school uncovered at an archaeological dig, which depicted a man with a donkey’s head, dead on a cross, while a little boy knelt praying to it, as the caption read “Alexamenos worships his God.” And the same stinging mockery continues, whether it was the schoolboy who graffitied that wall, or Pilate smirking as he asked, “Shall I crucify your King?” or the smug self-declared intelligentsia who ridicule Christianity today. But the worst part of it is that we bow to it. We would rather have the world like and respect us. We would prefer the pomp and splendor of the many Caesars in this age. We want the power and strength of Roman legions. We desire the comfort and luxury of empire. We want the praise of the unbelieving world more than the commendations of our God. We have no king but Caesar.
But where does it all lead? All those little kings pass away. Philosophers perish, emperors die, kings and politicians and movements all pass away and turn to dust. And those who would be ruled by them, no matter who they are or where they are on any political or philosophical or ideological spectrum, they follow them into that death, that decay, that dust. We follow the failing, fading Ceasars. We chase those things they say are so important, those things that are used up and spent in this life alone, those things they claim will make us, or at least the memory of us, immortal. But even that fades away, as all things belonging to all those kings will inevitably do.
But our true King will not let us get away so easily. Our Lord has seen us gladly following those little kings to their little deaths, and so He chases us down. He even chases us into our own death. He defeats those worldly Ceasars. He exposes them for the nothing they are in the long run. He pulls back the shiny veneer from the idols we’ve been running after for so much of our lives and shows them to be hollow, corroded, unable to save—in this life or the next. Our true King, Jesus, even defeats those kings and overlords that we pretend we don’t have: sin, death, the devil, our fallen nature—all of which only want the worst for us, only want to take what they can get and then disappear without offering a scrap of solace in return.
Jesus is your King, even though you have rebelled. He has done everything to win you back, to make you His citizen again. More than that, to make you a co-heir with Him, a member of His royal household. What Caesar or worldly ruler, what pet sin or human judgment has ever offered that to you?
“Shall I crucify your King?” Pilate can go ahead and try. Jesus will die, but He will also rise again. The chief priests can think He’s not interfering anymore, but they’re about to learn that you can’t shut God out of His own creation. You can try to disagree with Jesus about what His Scripture says and seek approval from some other lord, but Jesus will be proven true time and time again. His Word will always be vindicated.
Behold your King. His is not luxury and a crown of gold; it is a crown of thorns. His is not legions of soldier fighting on His behalf; He and He alone does His fighting, and His winning. His is not a throne from which to rule the nameless and faceless crowd, but a cross from which to save you. Behold your King. Behold your Savior. Behold your God. In the name of Jesus, our King and our Redeemer, Amen.
