Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome

September 16, 2007

The Apolitical Jesus

John 18:33-40

The passage of scripture today is a little bit like a holiday ornament, packed up and put away, brought out and dusted for its one time of the year. It is a little out of season, typically associated with Holy Week leading up to Easter, but the passage is an important one for reasons not only associated with that time of year.

You know the scene very well. Jesus has been abused verbally and physically all night long. He is now brought before Pilate because the Jewish leaders don’t have the authority to do to him what they really want to do.

Pilate takes on the role of something like prosecuting attorney. He bores home the questions. There is no cross-examination. There is only one side to the questioning, and he is trying to decide what to do with Jesus. And the exchange is familiar to us. In the course of the exchange, Pilate asks him:

Prosecuting Question: Are you the King of the Jews?

Jesus, it seems to me, has been committed to silence. He stands there rather stoically, simply enduring what must take place, but this question seems to arouse his interest. Are you the King of the Jews? I, in my mind, envision Jesus turning to Pilate now, cocking his head, and saying, “Did you come up with that or is it because of what they said to you?”

For the first time, he really engages Pilate and Pilate says, “Well, you are a king then,” after a few of the things that Jesus says. In those famous words, Jesus says, “My kingdom is not of this world.” Of course, the words lead up to what most of us remember about the passage when Jesus talks about “for this I was born and came into the world to bear witness to the truth,” and Pilate asks the famous question, “What is truth?”

Too many times, we skip over the verses that lead up to that and that’s what I want to attend to today because the issue is about Jesus and politics. Jesus was born into a very political world. We think we are the only ones who know about politics, but this whole exchange here is about politics for everybody except Jesus. It’s about politics for the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem; it’s about politics for Pilate; it’s about local politics because the Jewish leaders are threatened by Jesus; and it’s about global politics because if Jesus asserts to be a king then he is challenging Caesar far away in Rome and something needs to be done. We really shouldn’t be surprised that here surrounding his death that politics are mentioned because politics have been a part of his life since he was born.

Do you remember how the Wise Men come from the East and they think, “We’ll get directions from Herod.” They go to Jerusalem and they say, “We have come from afar because we have seen a star from the East and we have come to worship the one that is born King of the Jews.”

If you know your history, Herod wasn’t a Jew. He was King of the Jews but not a Jew himself and he was always threatened by other people. While the Wise Men are asking this question that has a spiritual quest for them, Herod hears all this as politics. “There is somebody out there challenging me. I have a new threat. I have an opponent.” So Herod’s solution is the solution of all ancient politics, “Kill your opponents. Kill anybody who is a threat to you.” So he sends the troops to Bethlehem and slays the innocent. It is about politics.

Many of us in Sunday school lessons and sermons throughout our lives have heard about how everybody expected an earthly Messiah. They expected a Messiah to come on a white horse and to lead an army to establish a kingdom. What is that if that’s not about politics?

James and John, remember that encounter where they come to Jesus and it’s like two children. They say, “Jesus, we want to ask you a question but we want you to promise to give us whatever we ask before we ask it.”

So Jesus says, “Ask away.”

And they say, “When you come into your kingdom, we would like to sit at your right and left hand.”

These are two campaign executives asking for political payoff after the votes in the election have been counted.

“I would like to be minister of the x-checker and he would like to be the prime minister. Would you please grant to us the political favors that we ask?”

Even after Jesus has been raised from the dead on the Mount of Ascension, still there are people who don’t quite understand. “Lord, now will you restore the kingdom to Israel?” This is about a political timetable. “When is everything going to fit together? When are we going to get to throw out the Romans?” This was a very political time and we shouldn’t be surprise that Jesus is surrounded by politics, but the amazing thing about Jesus in all of these situations—and these are just a few; there are many others—is Jesus consistently does not answer the questions asked of him. People are trying to put him into a position to say, “Yes,” to this.

“Do we pay taxes to Caesar or not?”

“What do we do over here, Jesus?”

Jesus doesn’t avoid the politics, but what Jesus consistently does is go deeper. When someone tries to push Jesus into a corner on the politics of the day, Jesus consistently goes to the heart of the person. Jesus consistently goes to the human heart and says, “Let’s talk about what’s deeper here. Instead of talking about who’s going to win an election or who will have a particular political office, let’s talk about the darkness of your heart and what God wants from you.” Jesus was a-political without politics.

Let me take a parenthesis right here. I have always believed that most sermons are half sermons. Typically, you can only say half of what really needs to be said. If I were to preach a sermon on grace, then judgment is simply going to play a secondary role. You can’t really preach about grace and spend equal time on judgment. If I am going to preach about eternal life, then I am not going to give much time to the impact that Christ has on our lives on this side of the grave or flip them around and it is the same thing. Most sermons are half sermons. So I do not want anybody to hear me saying that Jesus and our faith do not have something to say about public policy because I believe that would be a mistake. Yes, he does. But the issue is that when people try to push Jesus into party politics, when people try to push Jesus into a corner and say, “God is on our side and Jesus has chosen this way,” Jesus always turns away from that and goes to the deeper issues of the heart.

When Pilate says, “Are you King of the Jews? Oh, you are? Then you are a king then?” he says, “I came for this reason and I was born to bear witness to the truth.” When John talks about the truth related to Jesus, he is talking about the way things really are spiritually, the way the world really operates. He says, “I have come to bear witness to the truth.”

There is a God and God reigns. There is sin and sin does separate us from God. God does extend an invitation to all, for everybody, to repent, and to turn, and to be healed. This is what he has come for, not to set up one political group against another, not to be claimed by one as opposed to another, and he will not be pigeon-holed that way. He refuses to get involved in that and instead turns in each circumstance and says, “Well, let’s talk about your heart. Let’s talk about what’s going on in you.”

James and John want their political offices and, basically, Jesus uses it as an opportunity to say, “Do you really understand the type of commitment it takes to follow me?” The disciples start to become incensed that James and John have asked this question and he turns and he says, “Do you really understand what it means to be a leader in the kingdom of God? It means to serve.” See, he takes it, and instead of responding on some political level like they want, he always turns and goes to something deeper.

Of all the people in the story, Pilate gets it because after this exchange with Jesus, “Are you a King?”

“Well, did you make this up or did somebody tell you about it?”

“Ah, you are a king.”

And Jesus says, “I have come to bear witness to the truth.”

Pilate goes back out and says, “I don’t find anything worthy of political charges against this man, and wouldn’t you have me set somebody free?”

They said, “Well, we don’t want him. We don’t want Jesus. We don’t want somebody who keeps pointing out our sin. We don’t want someone who keeps pointing out the callousness of our heart or the selfishness of our spirit. We would rather have somebody else who has led a rebellion. Give us Barabbas.”

In our own day, you don’t have to get too many e-mails to have people wonder whether Jesus is a Republican or a Democrat. And you can get e-mails that will swear that he couldn’t be one or the other. Would Jesus drive an SUV or would Jesus be green? Would Jesus be anti-Bush or anti-Hillary? Now, you are all probably making up your answers right now and saying, “I know exactly the answer to that question.” But the thing about Jesus is Jesus says, “A lot of times we want to do these things because it’s easier to deal with these questions, as difficult as they may be, than to deal with the hardness of our own heart or to deal with our own sense of pride that is so engrained in us that we are proud about being humble. It is a lot easier to deal with politics and try to decide which side Jesus would be on than it is to examine the dark corners of our heart.

Jesus does not avoid politics, but Jesus always, when confronted with what was truly a political question, goes deeper. Jesus always says, “Wait a minute.”

“Is it OK to pay taxes to Caesar or not.”

“Show me a coin. Whose inscription is on that?”

“Well, Caesar’s.”

He said, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesars and unto God that which is God’s.”

See that’s a deeper issue. What are the commitments in your life? What are the priorities in the ways that you would give honor and homage? Who is first in your life? He always goes deeper. He says that the most important questions are not about the politics of the day but about my heart, your heart.

So we are roughly a year away from an election, and sometime in the next year, I will try to work up the nerve to come back and preach the other half of this sermon. But I want to offer a challenge to you. Whenever you turn on the television and someone is yelling at another person about politics or whenever you get an e-mail in which someone is bashing one side or the other or lifting another side up, use it as a reminder that people were always trying to get Jesus involved in these things and Jesus always recognized that it was a lot easier to talk about these things than it was to talk about this right here [pointing to heart]. Use it as a reminder to just say, “Is my relationship with Christ everything it needs to be today? I’ll deal with politics later.”

Copyright 2007. P. Joel Snider. All rights reserved.

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