When Politics Leave Us Disillusioned
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
October 25, 2020
Scripture Reading
John 18:28-19:16
28 Then they led Jesus from the house of Caiaphas to the governor's headquarters. It was early morning. They themselves did not enter the governor's headquarters, so that they would not be defiled, but could eat the Passover. 29 So Pilate went outside to them and said, “What accusation do you bring against this man?” 30 They answered him, “If this man were not doing evil, we would not have delivered him over to you.” 31 Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and judge him by your own law.” The Jews said to him, “It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death.” 32 This was to fulfill the word that Jesus had spoken to show by what kind of death he was going to die.
33 So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” 34 Jesus answered, “Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?” 35 Pilate answered, “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me. What have you done?” 36 Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.” 37 Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” 38 Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”
After he had said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told them, “I find no guilt in him. 39 But you have a custom that I should release one man for you at the Passover. So do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?” 40 They cried out again, “Not this man, but Barabbas!” Now Barabbas was a robber.
19:1 Then Pilate took Jesus and flogged him. 2 And the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head and arrayed him in a purple robe. 3 They came up to him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and struck him with their hands. 4 Pilate went out again and said to them, “See, I am bringing him out to you that you may know that I find no guilt in him.” 5 So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Behold the man!” 6 When the chief priests and the officers saw him, they cried out, “Crucify him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and crucify him, for I find no guilt in him.” 7 The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has made himself the Son of God.” 8 When Pilate heard this statement, he was even more afraid. 9 He entered his headquarters again and said to Jesus, “Where are you from?” But Jesus gave him no answer. 10 So Pilate said to him, “You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?” 11 Jesus answered him, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin.”
12 From then on Pilate sought to release him, but the Jews cried out, “If you release this man, you are not Caesar's friend. Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar.”13 So when Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judgment seat at a place called The Stone Pavement, and in Aramaic Gabbatha. 14 Now it was the day of Preparation of the Passover. It was about the sixth hour. He said to the Jews, “Behold your King!” 15 They cried out, “Away with him, away with him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.” 16 So he delivered him over to them to be crucified.
Our church is in a sermon series called “All Who Are Weary: The Idols That Exhaust Us and the Savior Who Won’t.” We’re looking at the heart of Christ, which is gentle and lowly, as he tells us in Matthew 11, and how his burden is for sinners who feel weary and heavy-laden. But those warm sentiments exist in the foreground of a colder background. Why are we weary? Why are we heavy laden? Often there is a brokenness out there and in here that stems from idolatry, the shaping of a god we think we control. So we’ve talked about work, which can be a wonderful thing, but also an idol. We’ve talked about our dreams in life, which can be good things but also make terrible gods. We’ve talked about money, which is a good thing but makes a terrible god. This week we’ll speak about politics, which can be wonderful but also make a terrible god.
After the first draft of this series was crafted, we showed the other pastor-elders to get feedback. I had originally put the sermon on politics right before the election, so Sunday, November 1 before Tuesday, November 3. Their only suggestion was to move this sermon forward. They didn’t say why, but I presume it was so I could tell you how to vote (joking), in case you mail in your ballots early, as my wife and I did last week.
Well, I’m not going to tell you how to vote. Some of you do want pastors to tell congregations how to vote, and others of you don’t. And likely you feel strongly about it one way other another—a pastor should tell his congregation how to vote or a pastor should never tell his church how to vote. One Christian newsletter from a popular Christian leader told his subscribers that voting one way and not another comes down to voting for good, on the one hand, and evil, on the other.[1] That’s charged rhetoric. Too strong or just right? You probably have an opinion about that.
The Sunday after the 2016 presidential election, I led our church in a time of prayer for our nation and new President. Some of you might have been there. Among the other words I said, I pointed out that if every inch of the sanctuary, from one side to the other, represented such and such amount of votes, then if you stood in the exact center and then moved to one side three inches, that represented the number of popular votes for one candidate. And then if you moved back to the center and moved maybe a few feet the other way, that represents the electoral college vote for the other candidate. I pointed us to the question of who wants to lead that divided of a country? Not many. I wouldn’t want to pastor a church that divided, I said.
But it’s not just a national division, but a local one too. During the 2008 election, neighbors had signs in their yard showing who they would vote for, which is fine. The local election where I lived at the time had a hotly contested vote too. I believe it was for a fire chief of some kind. I’ll call him James. I remember walking my neighborhood seeing signs to vote for James in one yard and in the next yard a sign not to vote for him. The signs faced each other. And, oh by the way, the sign to vote for James was in that one yard because that’s where James lived. It was his yard, and his neighbor had a sign up that said don’t vote for him. It’s funny, and it’s not.
I wouldn’t say we’re normally a very political church. That’s by design, not accident. We want our “mostly non-political” services and sermons to be a gift to you. We want to give you week after week the supremacy of Jesus. We want to give you the reminder that his rule will outlast whatever controversy feels most electric at the moment. I wrote a long two-part essay about churches and politics and pastors and sermons, which was published in late August. In that essay, I wrote,
“No dichotomy exists between the superiority of Jesus and a discussion of current events. Paul writes of Christ’s preeminence as the head of the body and as the firstborn from the dead (Col. 1:18), so there must be a way of discipleship that can discuss current events while displaying the reign of King Jesus, not obscuring it.”[2]
In other words, if Jesus is Lord of everything, then we should be able—at times and in the right proportion and as it arises from the text of Scripture—to be able to speak about current events in a way that shows the beauty of Jesus’s rule an reign. When we do talk about politics or current events, my main concern is to help us think in a way that we might call “Christianly” about the world. And though we do it rarely, this is one of those weeks we do it overtly.
Our passage of Scripture this morning comes from John 18 and 19, which you just heard read. The passage takes place on the final day before Jesus was crucified. Jesus and the religious leaders had many heated exchanges. They would try to trap Jesus, to make him look stupid or sinful or both, but it was always they who would look stupid and sinful. After three years, those heated exchanged reached a boiling point, and Jesus had to die. So they seek to crucify him.
As we look at the passage, we’ll see some of our temptations to view authority wrongly, specifically political authority. [FCF] And we also see how Jesus our Savior stands in contradiction to those sinful ways. First, we’ll look at the way of the religious, then the way of the secular. By the religious, I mean the Jewish leaders in this passage, and by the secular, I mostly mean Pilate. Let’s start with the Jewish leaders.
1. The Way of the Religious
a. Fastidious scruples coupled with moral bankruptcy
I’m going to read 18:28–30 again.
28 Then they led Jesus from the house of Caiaphas to the governor’s headquarters. It was early morning. They themselves did not enter the governor’s headquarters, so that they would not be defiled, but could eat the Passover. 29 So Pilate went outside to them and said, “What accusation do you bring against this man?” 30 They answered him, “If this man were not doing evil, we would not have delivered him over to you.”
In these verses we see the first of two temptations related to politics from the religious. We see in the Jewish leaders what I’ll call “fastidious scruples coupled with moral bankruptcy.” That’s a mouth full, but basically, I’m talking about hypocrisy. I’ll say it again: fastidious scruples coupled with moral bankruptcy. They seem to care about the specs of dust in the eyes of others but can’t see the 2x4s in their own eyes.
The religious leaders tell Pilate that they want Jesus dead because he’s doing evil, while at the same time they are the ones committing great evil. And, to make this hypocrisy even more stark, they remain committed to ceremonial cleanness with their hands covered in blood. Going into Pilate’s headquarters would have made them unclean by their understanding of the law and thus would have not allowed them to participate in the Passover. The Passover was one of the cornerstones of Jewish religious life, the celebration of when God saved his people from Pharaoh’s hand. I’ll say more about that later in the sermon. But for now, just note that these leaders are saying, in effect, “Let’s kill our Jewish Messiah but eat the Passover lamb like good Jews.”
Hypocrisy might be easy to see in them, but let’s not merely make this passage a window to look at them but a mirror to examine us. In pastor Jonathan Leeman’s helpful book about faith and politics, he asks his readers a series of uncomfortable questions. Let me read them for you now.
Paul asked the Jews of his day, “You who preach against stealing, do you steal?” (Rom. 2:21). / I’ve got a few questions of my own. / You who call for immigration reform, do you practice hospitality with visitors to your church who are ethnically or nationally different from you? / You who vote for family values, do you honor your parents and love your spouse self-sacrificially? / You who speak against abortion, do you also embrace and assist the single mothers in your church? Do you encourage adoption? Do you prioritize your own children over financial comfort? / You who talk about welfare reform, do you give to the needy in your congregation? / You who proclaim that all lives matter, do all your friends look like you? . . . You who fight for traditional marriage, do you love your wife, cherishing her as you would your own body and washing her with the water of the Word? . . . Finally, as you share your opinions about all these issues on social media, do you gladly share the Lord’s Supper with the church member who disagrees? Do you pray for his or her spiritual good?[3]
I look at that list of uncomfortable questions and wonder if perhaps this passage in John’s gospel is not just about the Jewish leaders, but Christians today.
b. Unmitigated and exorbitant nationalism
Let’s keep going. I see another temptation politically. Again, it’s a mouthful. It goes like this: unmitigated and exorbitant nationalism. I’ll tell you what I mean in a minute, but I’ll show it to you in the passage first. Look with me at vv. 14–16.
14 Now it was the day of Preparation of the Passover. It was about the sixth hour. [Pilate] said to the Jews, “Behold your King!” 15 They cried out, “Away with him, away with him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.” 16 So he delivered him over to them to be crucified. . .
That last statement on the lips of pious Jews should take your breath away. “We have no king but Caesar.” Really? What about God—he’s not your king?
I’ll say the political temptation of the religious again: unmitigated and exorbitant nationalism. What to I mean by that? I mean a love for one’s country that is grotesquely imbalanced. It’s unmitigated, meaning there’s nothing holding it back. These religious leaders are so pro-Israel that they have entirely lost sight of God’s kingship.
Which leads me to say that we love America best when we love God more than America. In Jonathan Leeman’s book he mentioned that we should love America as a person loves his church. It’s not the only one, but it’s the one you know and love for all her greatness and weakness. But our love for the advancement of our church and the advancement of our country must be restrained and governed by a higher love, a love for God.
Maybe I’ll ask a few of my own uncomfortable questions: Can you articulate the weaknesses of your preferred political party? Can you see the strengths of the other political party? Here’s another question: Would Jesus have the exact same political views as you?
2. The Way of the Secular
The other main character in this passage is Pilate. Pilate was a Roman governor. He was, history tells us, both in some ways ruthless and in others fearful. We read in another gospel account of a time when Pilate slaughtered some Jewish worshipers while they were offering their sacrifices (Luke 13). He was ruthless. Here, in this account, we also see him as fearful. Pilate was an evil man, but I’ve grown more sympathetic to him over the years, if I can say that, as I’ve understood context. I was talking about Passover before, but let me mention how that detail affected Pilate.
We call the last week of Jesus’s life the Passion Week, which also coincided with the Jewish festival of Passover. Jerusalem typically had some 40,000 people, but during the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which culminates in the celebration of Passover, the city of Jerusalem swells to perhaps six times its normal size.[4] So, as Jesus comes into Jerusalem on a donkey during this festival—which is what a Jewish king would ride on and Zechariah 9:9 prophesied—he’s coming to a crowd of some 240,000 people, with 200,000 of them being Jewish worshipers who have traveled to Jerusalem. Again, why did they travel there? They traveled there to celebrate how God overthrew a foreign nation who was oppressing his people. And oh, by the way, right now Rome was oppressing God’s people. It would be like if Canada had taken over America, but a million people marched every July 4 across the Washington Mall while singing “God Bless America.”
And when you add to this the fact that the relationship between the Roman rulers and the Jewish religious leaders was tenuous at best, all of a sudden, the slow build of pressure throughout the system becomes apparent. In short, Jesus was coming into a house filled with gas: dangerous and delicate, and the wrong spark could make the whole city explode. And Pilate had to make sure nothing exploded on his watch.
a. Cynicism and ambivalence regarding truth
With that in mind, look at 18:37–39.
37 Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” 38 Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”
When I read v. 38 in the past, I heard what we might call postmodern sentiments. In other words, Pilate is saying, “Truth? There’s no such thing as capital T, Truth. There is your truth and my truth and their truth but no absolute truth. What is truth?”
I’m not sure that’s what he means. In his question I hear, instead, cynicism and ambivalence regarding truth. Pilate is not saying truth doesn’t exist, but rather that truth doesn’t even matter. Pilate has spent his life trafficking in expediency and power that is devoid of truth. He’s basically saying that what you and I are doing here, Jesus—in fact, what everyone everywhere does—has nothing to do with truth. Pilate is saying, “Truth or no truth, I’ve got to keep the peace, and in so doing keep my ruling power, and you’re in the way of that, Jesus, and that’s why truth doesn’t even matter.” He’s cynical. He’s ambivalent. It’s not that there isn’t truth, but what does truth matter?
I wonder if some of you feel like that regarding the gospel and our Christian witness in culture. What does truth matter? Just do what it takes to win. Why does character and integrity matter—just keep your power. But that is not the approach Jesus takes.
b. Fighting for power with the weapons of the world
Speaking of Christ’s approach, look at what Jesus says to Pilate about the kingdom.
Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.” (18:36)
When Jesus was arrested, Peter whacks off the ear of a soldier with his sword. You don’t swing a sword to cut off an ear. You swing for the head and catch an ear when someone ducts. Jesus told Peter to put his sword away, and Jesus healed the soldier’s ear (John 18:10). The kingdom of God doesn’t advance the way power traditionally advances. The servants of Jesus have a fight—pray and keep watch and witness to truth, Jesus told them—but our fight is not the same kind of fighting the world does. Pilate only knows force and brutality (the way of the secular). The Christ’s kingdom advances not through hostility but the compassionate and sacrificial witness to the truth.
There is this growing sentiment I hear from Christians and church leaders that troubles me. I hear a growing sentiment among Christians and church leaders that the world is so bad, and this cultural moment is so significant, that Christians must forgo love and compassion so that we can fight for God’s truth. In other words, to honor God, we must also disobey God; to build God’s kingdom, we must fight like the world fights. That’s not true. We don’t have to dishonor God in one area to honor him in another area of life.
3. The Way of Our Savior
I think it’s fair to say Jesus was odd to Pilate. Look at 19:10–11. Let’s end by talking about our Savior.
10 So Pilate said to him, “You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?” 11 Jesus answered him, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. . .
Jesus, throughout this conversation and certainly at this particular point, exemplifies another way, not the way of the religious leaders and not the way of the secular. This passage is not merely given to us to see their sin as through a window, nor is it mainly there to see our sin as from a mirror. This passage is given to God’s people to behold the beauty of Jesus. Some of you are so discouraged about politics. You are who I mainly want to speak to and encourage this morning.
Jesus displays moral integrity, over and against fastidious scruples coupled with moral bankruptcy. Christ will not bend his character to avoid suffering.
Jesus displays properly ordered loves, over and against unmitigated and exorbitant nationalism. Christ loves God his Father more than anything else.
Jesus displays allegiance to truth, over and against cynicism and ambivalence regarding truth. Christ was born to bear witness to the truth.
And Jesus is founding a kingdom that sovereignly grows when his people honor him, over and against fighting with the weapons of the world. It might not look like much, but the kingdom of God is real and growing, and it will not perish.
Conclusion
The theme verses for our series, which I alluded to at the beginning of the sermon, comes from Matthew 11.
“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28–30)
The reason we can come to Jesus, the reason we can celebrate his lowliness, his humility, his meekness, is because he is not only those things. He is Lord of lords and King of kings. And his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom. In the gospel of John, we read of Jesus turning water to wine, healing the lame, giving sight to the blind, raising the dead. Jesus can calm a storm with his words and feed 5,000 with a few scraps of food. Just a few verses before our passage in chapter 18, when the soldiers come to arrest him and as Jesus gives them a glimpse of his majesty, the soldiers fall down scared (18:5–6). That’s sovereign power. In v. 32 of our passage, we read that the way Jesus was dying was to fulfill his own word that he had spoken. Pilate thinks he has the authority to take the life of Jesus. Pilate does not have that authority, at least emanating from himself. Whatever authority Pilate had was given to him from above.
Jesus is not a martyr, in the classic sense. Our Lord tells his followers, “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again” (John 10:18). Pilate does not take his life. The Jews do not take his life. Jesus lays it down. And when he does—when sin is atoned for as the true Passover lamb is slaughtered and it is finished—he takes it up again on the third day.
Oh, church, we have a wonderful sovereign savior. His lowliness and his gentle heart are remarkable because he’s not merely lowly and gentle. Let this view of Jesus encourage you.
I’ll invite the music team to lead us in a few songs. Let’s pray. . .
[1] James Dobson, “Dr. Dobson’s Open Letter To Christians Regarding The Election,” Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, October 2020, https://www.drjamesdobson.org/newsletters/october-newsletter-2020.
[2] “Pastor, Why Are You Not Preaching about What’s Happening [Part 2],” Gospel-Centered Discipleship, September 2, 2020, https://gcdiscipleship.com/article-feed/pastor-why-arent-you-preaching-about-whats-happening-part-2.
[3] Jonathan Leeman, How the Nations Rage, 15–16.
[4] See the video series, “Walk with Jesus During His Last Week on Earth,” Crossway, March 30, 2015, https://www.crossway.org/articles/walk-with-jesus-during-his-last-days-on-earth/.
