We have no king but Caesar.
The Gospel of John is full of irony. Sometimes the irony is amusing; sometimes it’s profound; sometimes it’s depressing. One of the more depressing ironies is the cry of the chief priests when Pilate presents them with Jesus after finding Him not guilty. They say, “We have no king but Caesar.”
To grasp the depth of the irony, it is helpful to return to the Book of Judges and the First Book of Samuel, which form one narrative together, giving us the story of Israel a thousand years before Christ. The Book of Judges ends with this statement: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”
This is not a celebration of political freedom.
The people of Israel had reeled from one crisis to another, with God regularly intervening to save her. At the opening of the First Book of Samuel, the dangerous Philistines are becoming powerful. The people of Israel are growing increasingly fearful of this new political threat, and they demand that God give them a king, a strongman to fight their wars for them. The prophet Samuel warns the people that they will lose their freedom were they to submit to a king. A king would levy burdensome taxes, conscript their sons, build up a huge government bureaucracy. Perennial human problems!
In spite of Samuel’s warnings, God Himself agrees to appoint a king, eventually settling on David. Samuel’s predictions, however, quickly come true. On the whole, the kings of Israel found it impossible to avoid compromising entanglements with the gods of other nations. Israel was never the most powerful nation, and the world powers of the time dominated them, even exiling them. After God brought them back from exile, they became client states of the Persians, Greeks, and then the Romans, which is the background situation for the life and death of Jesus, Son of David.
The kingship in Judea had been suppressed for five hundred years at this point. But there were prophecies about a return of the King, the anointed one, who would free God’s people from domination by the Gentiles. And just last Sunday, Jesus allowed Himself to be identified as this Messiah, by riding into Jerusalem, the capital city founded by David himself, on a donkey, according to a prophecy of Zechariah the prophet.
And in fact, this is the closing of the circle.
When God agreed to appoint a king, He told Samuel that the people “have rejected me from being king over them.” In Jesus, we not only have a legitimate descendant of David, and therefore a legitimate heir to the throne, but we have God Himself, ready to take up His rightful place as the King of the people whom He had, time and again, delivered from her enemies.
Will they reject Him as king again?
The emotional background to this drama is fear. The chief priests fear the Romans. They also fear the mob and the consequences of a riot. Pilate is afraid of divine nemesis of some kind, which accounts for his reaction on hearing that Jesus claims to be the Son of God. He also fears the Emperor if things get out of hand. The disciples fear getting captured and punished by one authority or another, and so they run away.
When we are afraid, we are easily manipulated. This, by the way, is one reason the news is always negative. It serves a political purpose to keep large portions of the population anxious.
The choice that we all face at some point is here before Pilate, the authorities, and the mob. When we find ourselves anxious, will we choose God? Or will we demand a powerful man or ideology or movement to attack whatever is making us anxious? And what does it look like, exactly, to choose God?
Let’s admit that this can be a challenge. Because what God looks like on Good Friday is a condemned criminal humiliated by the powers of the world. Serving this God might not be quote-unquote “safe” in the normal sense of that term. But this is to limit ourselves to too narrow a field of vision. Jesus suggests this to Pilate when He says, “My kingdom is not of this world.”
Turning to God will not necessarily give us things that world deems desirable: fame, prosperity, power, comfort, safety. Still, trusting God will give us something much, much greater: victory over death itself. Fame, prosperity, and power will not deliver anyone from death, nor can any worldly power achieve it.
In conclusion, let’s close another circle.
For the chief priests to say, publicly, before Pilate, “We have no king but Caesar” is willingly to adopt the position of a slave—or at best a client serving the interests of a pagan power. My purpose here is not to assign blame, but to present frankly the temptation that we all face in this life.
I said that God will deliver us from death. What does this look like? Is this something that we wait around for, trying to build up credits with God in the time we have left? Where is this kingdom of God, and how do we get there to avoid slavery to the world?
Well, first of all, we have our Lord’s assurance that His kingdom is among us and within us. It is not far at all. On the Cross, He is showing us how to get there. He is opening the path through death to the Kingdom.
We follow, first of all, by being conformed to His death in baptism, by taking up our Crosses daily and following Him through death to life. This requires the eyes of faith, but it has palpable results. It gives us the freedom to live without fear, to accept whatever sufferings come our way, with peace and indeed joy, for they conform us to Christ and lead to His Kingdom.
As we celebrate the mysteries of Jesus’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection, let us ask God to open the eyes of our spirits to see anew the great love Jesus showed in becoming man for us and suffering for us. May it free us to let go of fear and find true joy in the Lord.