Interrogation or Conversation?

First UMC of Pocatello

November 24, 2024

John 18:33-40

This is Christ the King Sunday, the final Sunday of the Church’s worship calendar. The story spirals back around to its beginning next week when we enter the season of Avent and again await the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. The Feast of Christ the King is by far the newest of the Church’s holy days. It was created in the Roman Catholic context in 1925 by Pope Pious XI, who sought to resist the rise of Bento Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy. In response to Mussolini’s nationalist ideology, the Pope reminded Italian Catholics – and by extension Catholics and other Christians around the world – that their allegiance ought to be to Jesus and their citizenship in the kingdom of God. The theme of Christ as king is as old as the scriptures themselves. But the feast day is a modern creation, and it’s a good reminder that the Church can change and adapt something even as important as its worship life to meet the needs of the present moment.

Ideologies are systems of interlocking ideas. The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann defines ideology as “closed, managed, useful truth.” When he says “closed,” he means that there’s no room to breathe in an ideology, no room to question the artificial boundaries or point out the blind spots of its claims. By managed, Brueggemann means that ideologies are actively protected and enforced. And then they’re useful; ideologies help those in power to achieve and maintain certain results. Ideologies protect an old status quo, or they want to overthrow the current one and impose a new one.

And so we have Pilate interrogating Jesus on the morning of his crucifixion. “Are you the King of the Jews?” Pilate asked him. It was an important question, one that could’ve been asked sincerely, but Pilate was only vetting the threat level that Jesus presented to the prevailing ideological order. The Apostles’ Creed, which is an ancient and distilled statement of belief shared by many Christians, says that Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate.” Of all the details of Jesus’ life, the creed chooses to remind us of Pilate’s role in Jesus’ death. So we should know something about him.

Pontius Pilate was a Roman governor installed to maintain law and order in the Roman-occupied territory of Judea, which included the city of Jerusalem. In the Roman Empire, there was only one ultimate authority: the Emperor. At that time it was Emperor Tiberius. As long as obedience to the Emperor was expressed materially, through paying taxes and keeping the peace, people in occupied territories were generally allowed to continue with their own religious and cultural practices. But any suggestion of revolt against Roman rule was quickly and violently suppressed. Natives who were able to survive in positions of relative power – like tax collectors or religious elites – were often as loath to rock the political boat as their Roman occupiers. The Jewish prophetic hope for a coming Messiah, an anointed ruler who would set the people free, was a particular threat to the prevailing ideology, so much so that even the Jewish Pharisees refused to see Jesus for who he was. Instead, they handed him over to Pilate and told him, “If you release this man, you are no friend of Caesar. Everyone who claims to be a king sets himself against Caesar” (19:12). They get Pilate to comply with their desire to kill Jesus by playing on his fears and duties as a Roman governor.

So, early in the morning, inside his headquarters, Pilate asks this exhausted, captive man, “Are you the King of the Jews?” And Jesus responds to his question with another question: “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” In other words, Jesus is asking Pilate, Is this a conversation or an interrogation? Are we encountering one another face to face, heart to heart? Or are you standing above me asking an ideological question, assessing whether I fit within your system or threaten its authority? Conversation or interrogation. Are you asking for yourself or on behalf of others?

Jesus tells Pilate that he came into the world to witness to the truth, and that those who are from the truth listen to his voice. He did not come to set up an ideology alongside other ideologies, some close system of ideas that would compete with others. If Jesus came to impose his own regime, he would’ve had soldiers fighting on his behalf right then and there! He tells Pilate: “If my kingdom belonged to this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over.” Several hours earlier, an armed mob came to arrest Jesus while he was with his disciples in a garden. Violence did almost erupt. John 18:10-11: “Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear. The slave’s name was Malchus. Jesus said to Peter, ‘Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me’”?

Jesus did not permit Peter to defend him violently. Jesus rebukes him for drawing the sword. Only in John’s Gospel are we told the name of the person who drew the sword and the name of the person who was struck, Malchus. Ideology clouds over personal responsibility; it allows people to take refuge in the closed, managed system. The choice to do violence is a personal choice with personal consequences.

But Jesus will not allow it. He does not compel by force. He compels by the truth of his words, by the genuineness of his presence, by the sincerity of his love. And those who hear his voice – his living, breathing voice; those who desire authentic life and relationship beyond all pretense and propaganda are the ones who respond to it.

“Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?”

Pilate deflects Jesus’ words with a cynical question, “What is truth?” It doesn’t matter what’s true! It matters what’s useful, what’s normal, what keeps things the way that they are now. What matters is that I don’t have to change, that I don’t feel threatened, that I keep benefitting from the way things currently are. Pilate goes out and tells the Pharisees that he finds no fault with Jesus; he even attempts to release him. Yet when Pilate realizes that releasing Jesus would cause more local unrest than condemning him to death, he makes the politically advantageous choice, the choice that ideology, not truth, demands. In his eyes, it is the responsible choice. But it’s always the violent choice.

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What does all this mean for you and me on Christ the King Sunday?

Here are three things we can consider for ourselves.

First, have we strayed from having a relationship with Jesus as a person to flattening him onto some closed system of ideas? Is Jesus a concept or a presence? Are the scriptures proof-texts or stories still crackling with the sacred? Are the creeds gates that we keep or doors that we pass through into deeper mysteries? I think Jesus wants us to assess whether our love for him has grown cold. We might think we are very zealous, very engaged, when in fact we’ve distanced ourselves, made ourselves safe.

Second, if our relationship with Jesus or our faith has strayed toward ideology, then we are probably protecting ourselves from the pain of change that we know that we need. Admitting we are struggling in some areas of our life is hard. Getting free from an addiction is hard. Dealing with loneliness, with old trauma, with fresh disappointment is hard. Sometimes, in response to our pain or our guilt, we harden rather than soften. We take up faith as ideology that we can hide behind. If we were to really talk to Jesus as life meeting life and personal truth meeting personal truth, we’d have to hear Jesus’ voice of truth in those dark, wild, murky spaces deep inside us. Love and truth are anything but safe. Easier, sometimes, to deflect and turn outward to defend Jesus with the sword – even if it’s the sword of our words or our Facebook posts. If you feel that your faith may be hardening into a kind of ideology, I wonder what you may be avoiding talking with Jesus about, where the possibility of change terrifies you? Underneath that terror is probably a desire for change, a desire to hear your inner voice speak, to really hear and know yourself. But when we interrogate ourselves to see if we are conforming to our ideology, or when we put off facing ourselves by focusing on interrogating others, that true self which belongs to Jesus and yearns for his voice of truth remains unheard.

Finally, if the mode of speech in ideology is interrogation, then we are likely not encountering our neighbors as full persons. Does being a Christian mean that we are right and everyone else is wrong? That others must see it the way we see it, or else? Do we sometimes think that being a Christian means that we are entitled to a kind of political power over others or economic security at the expense of others? Are we fighting for our turf among others fighting for their turf?

Treating faith as ideology will lead us to interrogating the people around us. Even if we act nicely in the moment, our questions will not be real expressions of curiosity and love, because we don’t intend to let the answers to our questions touch and change us. Instead, we are evaluating whether others are ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ We don’t encounter others name by name, face to face. We see the human family in categories, and categories applied to people are violent.

At the end of the day, are we practicing interrogation or conversation?

Toward God, toward ourselves, toward others?

Have we traded in a living relationship with the One who is truth and love and freedom for a set of ideas about truth that are closed, manageable, and useful to us?

If so, Jesus wants us to come to the Table and encounter him again in what can be heard, what can be seen, what can be looked at and touched with our hands (1 John 1:1). He calls us back to a life of prayer – of openness, curiosity, longing, and love. He wants you to digest him and become him, not systematize him and defend him. And he will meet you here. A living God who will put you in touch with your truest self and teach you to converse with others from a place of freedom, not interrogate them from a place of fear or pride.

On this Christ the King Sunday, Jesus wants us to ask about him from the depths of our own hearts. Only then can we know him as a King who sets us free from our self-imposed prisons, for a love that embraces all creation.

Amen.