Audio
John 19:5-8
The Trouble With Jesus
With the possible exception of the Doobie Brothers and a
handful of other musical acts that have recorded a song by this title, the one
thing that no one in the history of the world has ever been able to say about
Jesus is that He is “just alright with me.” If you could travel the world in a
weekend, only stopping in at Christian churches on every continent, you may
come away from the experience with the conclusion that Jesus is the most
popular and beloved Person in history. Songs of praise and adoration are sung
to Him and about Him; prayers are prayed to Him and to the Father in His name;
sermons are preached about Him and the words that He said, and people are
called to follow Him in faith and obedience. But if we were to look outside
those churches, in the ivory towers of secular academia, in the corridors of
political power, in temples of other faiths, and in the places where people
gather and talk about the important issues of the day, we have reach a far
different conclusion. We may conclude that Jesus is the most hated Person in
history.
One place where we can find this sentiment expressed is in
the Gospels themselves. In contrast with disciples who left all they had behind
to follow Him, multitudes with faith enough to believe that He could heal them,
and throngs who held to His every word, we find a group of people whose hatred
for Jesus led them to conspire for His murder. Who were these people?
Throughout all four Gospels we find them to be the religious leaders of Israel . The
moral standards of Jewish religion were higher than those of any culture that
had ever existed in the history of the world until that time. And yet, human
history is filled with examples of the evil that results when religion turns
bad. As J. C. Ryle wrote, “In every age, none have been such hard, cruel,
unfeeling, and bloody-minded persecutors of God’s saints, as the “ministers of
religion.”[1] It
was certainly true of these elite Jewish officials, who are described in verse
6 of our text as the chief priests and their officers.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The
name of Jesus today can still evoke just as much ire. If you’ve ever tried to
speak up for Him in public, you know this. It is hard to understand sometimes,
but Jesus and His follower have a long history of getting in trouble. So, what
is the trouble with Jesus? The brief passage we have read presents us with
several answers to that question.
I. The trouble with Jesus is that He just won’t go away
(v6).
Jesus had gotten under the skin of the religious
establishment in Jerusalem .
His teachings challenged their traditions and their authority. He had called
them out as hypocrites, a brood of vipers, whitewashed tombs, sons of the
devil, and blind guides because of their corruption, greed, and spiritual
ignorance. When multitudes began to follow Him because of His teachings and His
miracles, they felt threatened by Him, and they determined to do away with Him.
On several occasions, they had tried to seize Him and stone
Him to death on the spot but they were unable to (Jn 8:58-59; 10:39). At long
last they had gotten a foothold through an insider – Judas Iscariot – who would
betray Jesus over to them. Finally, they had Him before Pontius Pilate, who
alone could issue an official death order. When Pilate took Jesus away, they
must have thought that they had at last secured a victory over Jesus. But in
verse 5, Jesus reappears, bloody and beaten, but still alive. Pilate called out
to them: “Behold the Man!” And verse 6 says that they saw Him. But He wasn’t
dead, so they cried out all the more, “Crucify! Crucify!” Weymouth translates the phrase, “To the
cross! To the cross!”
Here for the second time, Pilate announces that he has found
no guilt worthy of death in Jesus. He will not crucify Him, so he says, “Take
Him yourselves and crucify Him.” Now, this is a loaded statement. The Jews had
no power to execute criminals. That power belonged only to Rome . So Pilate is saying essentially, “I
won’t put Him to death, so if you want Him dead, you will have to do it
yourselves, if you dare.” For them to
do this would bring the wrath of Rome
upon their own heads. So Pilate won’t crucify Jesus, and the Jews can’t crucify
Jesus. They will have to revise their tactics if they want Him dead.
As the text goes on, we will see that they do, and finally
they will persuade Pilate to issue the order to crucify Jesus. Jesus would go
to the cross and die. The Jewish officials will see His lifeless body hanging
on the cross and think that at long last they have finally made Him go away.
That was Friday. But on Sunday morning they would find out that even death
could not make Jesus go away, because He would rise from the dead! That’s the
trouble with Jesus: He just won’t go away!
Two millennia later, people are still trying to make Jesus
just go away. They try to avoid, ignore, and disregard Him. They refuse to
believe in Him. But this is just the thing: disbelief, ignorance, and avoidance
of Him will not make Him go away! C. S. Lewis tried when he was an atheist. As
he was laying in a hospital ward recovering from an illness he acquired in the
trenches of World War I, he began to read. He had never heard of G. K.
Chesterton, but he began reading a volume of Chesterton’s essays. He said, “I
did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain
a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps
everywhere – ‘Bibles laid open, millions of surprises … fine nets and
strategems.’ God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”[2]
Suddenly, every book he read, every friend he made, every conversation he had,
was seemingly thrusting God-in-Christ before him. After several years of this,
he said,
Really, a young atheist cannot
guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side. …
Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God.’ To me, as
I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the
cat. … I had always wanted, above all things, not to be ‘interfered with.’ …
That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. … I gave in, and admitted
that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected
and reluctant convert in all England .[3]
As Hebrews 4:13 says, “there is no creature hidden from His
sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with Whom we
have to do.” You will deal with Him here and now, or you will deal with Him
before the judgment seat of eternity, but you will deal with Him. He just won’t
go away. And for many people, that’s the trouble with Jesus.
For some, they would say …
II. The trouble with Jesus is that He makes such radical
claims. (v7)
As Christmas approaches, many popular magazine covers switch
from their usual fare of celebrities and world affairs and feature instead
full-color portraits of nativity scenes. The check-out lanes of the local
grocery store become virtual art galleries with more glossy images of the baby
Jesus than are found in many churches. Television documentaries follow suit,
with features on the birth of the baby at Bethlehem .
These scenes, meaningful as they are to us as Christians, are very palatable
and non-threatening to the world because the infant Jesus is somewhat different
from the full-grown Jesus we read about in the Gospels in one very important
way: He is not speaking. Just like in the first century, so today, people don’t
seem to mind a silent Jesus. It’s when He starts talking that things get
uncomfortable. This Jesus makes radical claims that demand a response from all
who hear His words.
The Apostle John says in the closing verse of this Gospel
that the whole world could not contain the books that could be written of all
that Jesus said and did. But none of those things are in focus here as He is
brought to trial before Pilate. There is a singular claim that is the center of
attention: “He made Himself out to be the Son of God” (v7).
The religious officials of Jerusalem had been very crafty in seeking to
secure a death sentence from Pilate. Knowing that Pilate would not care to
meddle in a Jewish theological debate, they presented Jesus as an
insurrectionist, a rabble-rouser who posed a threat to national security and
Roman authority. The charges were set forth in Luke’s account: “We found this
man misleading our nation and forbidding to pay taxes to Caesar, and saying
that He Himself is Christ, a King. … He stirs up the people” (Lk 23:2, 5). It
was on the basis of these charges that Pilate had interrogated Jesus, and
concluded that He was not guilty of any serious threat. Twice at this point, he
had announced the verdict (18:38; 19:6). They had been unsuccessful in
persuading him to convict Jesus on political charges. Their only remaining
resort was to appeal to the religious charges on the basis of their own laws.
As the Roman prefect of Judea ,
Pilate’s primary responsibility was enforcing Roman authority in the land. But,
in the interests of preserving the Pax
Romana (the “peace” of Rome), he also had the responsibility of enforcing
local laws as well, so long as they did not contradict Rome’s interests.
Knowing this, the Jewish officials make an appeal to their own religious law as
a last ditch effort to gain Pilate’s cooperation in putting Jesus to death.
They say in verse 7, “We have a law.” In other words, “Though you do not find
Jesus in violation of any of your Roman laws, He is in violation of one of our
laws!” The law that they have in mind is the law concerning blasphemy, stated
in Leviticus 24:16. The Law of God states there, “[T]he one who blasphemes the
name of the Lord shall surely be
put to death.” To blaspheme is, in the words of Calvin, “to assume any honor
which belonged to God,” or to claim for oneself “what belongs only to God.”[4] This,
they say, Jesus has done by “making Himself out to be the Son of God.”
They understood that the title “Son of God,” as used by
Jesus was a claim of equating Himself with God. It was to say that He was of
the same nature as God, and possessed the same authority and power as God. Now,
to be sure, if anyone ever made himself out to be something of this order, that
person would most definitely be guilty of blasphemy. That is, unless it were
true. So the question that Pilate must now consider, and which each of us must
consider, is that: Did Jesus make Himself out to be the Son of God? Or was He
truly the Son of God?
Make no mistake about it, Jesus clearly claimed to be the
Son of God on multiple occasions. He spoke of God as His Father, and referred
to Himself as the Son (e.g., John 10:36). On that very evening, when He was
interrogated by the high priest, He was commanded: “Tell us whether You are the
Christ, the Son of God.” His answer was, “You have said it yourself” (Mt
26:63-64). It was fresh in their ears. Others had called Him the Son of God,
and He never once corrected them. Even the demons whom He cast out of possessed
people had called Him the Son of God (Mt 8:29), as did the angels who had
announced His birth (Lk 1:32, 35). At least twice, God had spoken from heaven
with an audible voice to declare that Jesus was His beloved Son with whom He
was well pleased (Mt 3:17; 17:5). He was known in heaven, on earth, and in hell
as the Son of God. But Jesus also demonstrated His unique power as the Son of
God through His words and deeds. When He taught, He amazed the people because
of the divine authority of His words (Mk 1:27; Lk 4:32). In one of the most
telling of His miracles, He told a paralytic man that his sins were forgiven.
When the religious scribes protested that He was blaspheming, for only God can
forgive sins, Jesus said, “Which is easier to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins
are forgiven’; or to say, ‘Get up, and pick up your pallet and walk’? But so
that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins,”
He said to the paralytic, “I say to you, get up, pick up your pallet and go
home.” And the Bible says that he got up and immediately picked up the pallet and went out (Mk 2:5-12).
He was not making Himself out to be the Son of God. He had
existed from the beginning as the Son of God, or God the Son as we may say, and
proved His radical claims over and over. Ultimately, on the Sunday after His
crucifixion, He would provide the ultimate proof by rising from the dead. In
Romans 1:4, Paul says that He “was declared the Son of God with power by the
resurrection from the dead.”
Yes, Jesus made radical claims – like the claim to be the
unique Son of God – and those claims created a lot of trouble. But you and I
must do what the religious leaders of Israel were never willing to do. We
must consider whether or not these claims, no matter how radical they were,
might be true. When Jesus ascended into heaven, He commanded His followers to
continue to spread His message to all nations. He did not commission them to
draw pictures, but to write and to proclaim His Word, because in His Word we
come face to face with His radical claims. That is something many people refuse
to do. And they would say that this is the trouble with Jesus. He was always
making these sorts of radical claims about Himself.
But our text shows us yet one more thing some would say is
the trouble with Jesus.
III. The trouble with Jesus is that He strikes dread in the
hearts of those who don’t know Him. (v8)
In the first chapter of his book, The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis asks us to suppose
…. you were told there was a tiger
in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably
feel fear. But if you were told “There is a ghost in the next room,” and
believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a
different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is
primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is
a ghost.[5]
Lewis says that this is a special kind of fear that may be
called “Dread.” He says, “Now suppose that you were told simply ‘There is a
mighty spirit in the room,’ and believed it. … [T]he disturbance would be
profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking.” Lewis says, “This
feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous.”[6] It
is like that feeling you get when you are all alone, and suddenly feel as
though you are not alone. It is akin to the sensation you have when, in the
middle of the night, you hear a noise, and do not know what caused it. Maybe it
is nothing, or maybe it is something – something that could be wonderful or
terrible for all you know. In his most well-known book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lewis says that when Mr.
Beaver said that Aslan was on the move, “None of the children knew who Aslan
was … but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite
different. … At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump
in its inside.”[7] It was
an encounter with the Numinous.
I suggest to you that this is exactly what came over Pontius
Pilate upon hearing the officials say that Jesus had claimed to be the Son of
God. Verse 8 says that “when Pilate heard this statement, he was even more
afraid.” There was already a spark of fear within him as he dealt with Jesus.
His wife had warned him of an ominous dream she had about Him the night before
(Mt 27:19), and he had surely detected that there was something unusual about
Jesus as he had interviewed him. Now that spark of fear was fanned into full
flame as he heard these words, “Son of God.” It was the awestruck dread of the
Numinous.
Though Pilate was a well-educated man, and a seemingly
hardened cynic, like any other Roman, he was a deeply superstitious man. The
Roman universe was haunted by the stories of a pantheon of deities and their
half-divine offpring who sojourned among men from time to time. Though he’d
never personally experienced it, he’d heard enough stories to believe it was
just barely possible. And if possible, then perhaps this was just such an
encounter. Perhaps here one of those stories that he had written off as
mythology was becoming a fact before his very eyes. If this Jesus is who He
says He is, then Pilate has just had a divine Person scourged and beaten to a
bloody pulp. Surely, there would be a literal hell to pay.
So far as we know from Scripture and secular history, Pilate
never acted on the dread that he experienced at the sound of Jesus’ claim to be
the Son of God. His life ended in a shame, being deposed from his position and
later taking his own life. How different it might have been for him if he had
turned that moment in faith and repentance to the Son of God who had struck
such dread in his heart.
Jesus is still doing this. That’s the trouble with him, some
would say. He strikes such a sense of dread in the hearts of those who refuse
to believe in Him. You don’t believe me? Here’s a little experiment you can
try. In a few weeks, when you gather with your family and loved ones for
Thanksgiving, and the conversation lulls as everyone fills their mouths with
food, simply say, “I thought it would be good for us to talk about Jesus
together.” Watch the looks on their faces. The room may clear, or a food fight
might erupt. No one wants to do business with this dreadful deity, for to do so
will mean confronting one’s own sins.
I remember the day well. It was a sunny summer day, and I
found myself on a bench on the back side of Oak Island
C. S. Lewis says that when he began to read the Gospels, he
found them to be very unique. They were not like the myths he had grown up
reading. They presented a Person, Jesus Christ, who was so “numinous, lit by a
light from beyond the world.” He confessed, “if ever a myth had become fact,
had been incarnated, it would be just like this. … Here and here only in all
time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man.”[8]
Here before Pilate stood this One – the numinous
Word-made-flesh, God-become-Man, more real than all the mythology of his
culture and tradition. He struck dread in Pilate’s heart. Maybe you have
experienced the same. That’s the trouble with Jesus. He has a way of doing
that. He isn’t going to just go away. He’s going to keep thrusting those
radical claims that He made upon your conscience. And there will be this
gnawing sense of dread at even the mention of His name. That’s the trouble with
Jesus. Deny Him, avoid Him, ignore Him, or as these in our text found out, even
kill Him. But He isn’t going away, He isn’t shutting up, and He isn’t leaving
you alone. It is only as you turn to Him in repentance of your sin and faith
that He is Lord and He is the Savior who can deliver us from sin, that dread
becomes joy, and life becomes abundant and eternal in Him, and with Him. The
Son of God has become a man, and lived among us in the Person of Jesus Christ.
He died for our sins, and conquered sin and death by His resurrection, and thus
He was declared with power to be the Son of God.
What’s the trouble with Jesus? Well, as it turns out,
there’s really not any trouble with Jesus. There’s only trouble with us, who keep
wanting Him to go away, to be quiet, and to leave us alone. He’s never going to
do that. There is no trouble with Him, but He has come to bear the trouble of
us all.
[1] Quoted
in Robert Mounce, “John” in The
Expositor’s Bible Commentary (rev. ed.; Vol. 10; Grand Rapids : Eerdmans, 2005), 614.
[2] C. S.
Lewis, Surprised by Joy in The Inspirational Writings of C. S. Lewis (New
York: Inspirational Press, 1994), 1:106.
[3] Ibid., 1:124-1:125.
[4] John
Calvin, John (Crossway Classic
Commentaries; Wheaton , Ill.
[5] C. S.
Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1996), 14-15.
[6] Ibid.,
15.
[7] C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (New
York: HarperCollins, 1994), 67-68.
[8] Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 1:129.
No comments:
Post a Comment