The meeting of Jesus and Pilate has to be one of the most compelling interactions in all of Western literature for the modern reader. In St. John’s Gospel, Pilate poses the relativist’s central query --- “What is truth?” --- nearly two thousand years before post-modernism transformed it into pop-culture existentialism.
Of course, for Christians, the text is not just literature, and from the believer’s perspective, Jesus’ response to the question of whether he is “the King of the Jews” can be discomfitingly cryptic. In John, He asks, “Do you say this on your own or have others told you about me?” In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, He says, “You say so.” When Pilate persists, in John, Jesus continues, “You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.”
A typical interpretation of Jesus’ meaning is that Pilate understands Him in terms that don’t apply. He isn’t a “king” in the civic sense, but people trapped in material ways and worldly considerations cannot come closer to articulating His actual role than the limited and limiting word. “You say so,” He says, because Pilate, lacking faith, can only see Jesus’ authority reflected in the inadequate mirror of royalty.
That reading is clearly supported by the broader Biblical text as well as the tradition that grew from it. But during personal and Mass readings, this Lent, I found myself following another path to essentially the same conclusion.
What, I wondered, if we take Jesus’ response to the king question not as wordplay that frustrates and “amazes” Pilate, given Christ’s predicament, but as an instruction? In other words, rather than taking the phrase, “you say so,” to mean, “you are saying that,” read it as, “you should say that.”
A subsequent passage from John that hadn’t previously registered, in my mind, might make a little more sense with that context. Pilate has his soldiers inscribe Jesus’ cross with the words, “Jesus the Nazorean, the King of the Jews” --- which we see represented on crucifixes with the acronym, “INRI” (“Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum”). Christ’s crucifixion at Golgotha takes place in such a visible position that the chief priest of the Jews becomes concerned about the message and asks Pilate to make it clearer that it was something that Jesus claimed of himself, not an honor that somebody official had bestowed on Him. Replies Pilate: “What I have written, I have written.”
Thus, Pilate is, in fact, declaring Jesus’ title, just as he had been told to do, and the Jewish priest’s worry is that his people will read the sign literally. The literal statement is that the Roman state has such dominance over the Jewish nation as to crucify its king. The political price that Pilate is extracting in exchange for compliance with the schemes of the Jewish leaders is to twist their accusations around. Rome will put down insurrections, whether it requires executing self-proclaimed messiahs or recognized royalty.
The striking thing, if Jesus told Pilate to label Him as he did, is that Caesar’s representatives clearly had the power to kill the corporeal King of the Jews. Moreover, the fact that Jesus did not, after His resurrection, take Jerusalem by storm and expunge the Romans suggests that secular power over the material is not a force that Christians should deny.
American writer H.L. Mencken once quipped that “the god in the sanctuary” was proven “a fraud” by “fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world.” They faced no Earthly repercussions for their sacrilege, the thinking goes, so clearly, a god who promises to punish such behavior has no real power over them or does not exist.
Christians must own up to the individual and collective error of repeatedly reverting to a before-Christ understanding of God as a guarantor of eventual success in this world. To such lapses, those others who are skeptical, or even hostile, have replied, “Well look how much power we have over your God and His people --- to deny Him, to ensnare them in dependency and corruption, to crucify the Risen Lord again and again with disproof of His existence.” On that particular cross, they inscribe “Faith, the Theory of Believers.”
Yet, Jesus’ answer to Pilate, and to everybody who has reprised his part in the exchange throughout history, is that they can go ahead and crucify Him under the banner of “king,” because in doing so, they only emphasize how little that form of power enables them to reach the message and purpose for which He came.
A carpenter by day, Justin Katz is administrator of AnchorRising.com, an independent media and conservative analysis blog, and a monthly contributor to the Rhode Island Catholic.
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