The Paradox of Power

Introduction

What does power look like to you? When you think of power, what kind images pop into your mind?

Chuck Norris

Does it look like this?

Donald trump/Kamala Harris - political power

Judge Judy - judicial power

Arnold - physical power

Wolf on wall street - financial power

These are the kinds of things we think of when we think of ‘power’.

And when we look at the passage today, we find that all these different forms of power are held by the Roman and Jewish authorities, while Jesus has nothing and appears powerless. But what I want to propose to you today is that this passage shows that although the Roman and Jewish leaders hold all the power in their hands, true power is find in Christ.

So let’s read the passage.

Read John 19:1-16.

Unexpected Power

So the main point today, I’ve titled ‘Unexpected Power’. And this is because this passage shows that true power is not always in the obvious places. Throughout this passage, we see this dramatic contrast between the power that Pilate and the Jewish authorities hold vs. the weakness of Jesus.

Read John 19:1–3 “1 Then Pilate took Jesus and flogged him. 2 And the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head and arrayed him in a purple robe. 3 They came up to him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and struck him with their hands.”

These verses show that Jesus is just a helpless victim. Pilate has Jesus flogged, which is where Jesus is brutally whipped.

The soliders make a crown of thorns and put it on his head. This crown was probably made from the thorns of the date palm, which are not the little thorns that you see when you see paintings or pictures of Jesus’ crucifixion. The thorns of the date palm are extremely sharp and long, and they were forced onto Jesus head which would have almost certainly pierced his scalp, causing him to bleed profusely. And they make him a purple robe, putting it on Jesus, mocking him and making fun of him because in their mind, there was no way that this frail, weak, beaten man in front of them, could be any kind of king. This was not the picture of power that they had in their minds.

And Pilate even says in verse 10, ‘do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you’?

In every way, Pilate and his soliders have every form of power in their arsenal: they have political power as part of the ruling Roman empire, they have the physical power with any number of soliders at the ready to fight if necessary, legal power because Pilate is ruling over this court, and of course Pilate has the ultimate power: the power over life and death.

And it’s not just the Romans that have power, but the Jews also have power.

Read John 19:7-8 & John 19:12

Although the Jews were a nation that were defeated and ruled by the Romans, they still have influence and power.

In verses 7-8, we saw that they are able to make Pilate ‘afraid’ by their words.

And in verse 12, they are threatening Pilate, saying that if Pilate does not do what the Jews want - which is having Jesus crucified - they are threatening to tell Caesar, the Emperor, that Pilate is opposing him. The Roman emperor during Pilate’s time was a guy named Tiberius, and he was quite a paranoid and cruel person, and he was quick to punish and execute those who he suspected as threats. So when the Jews threatened Pilate like this, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Pilate would have definitely felt like his life was on the line.

This is why even though Pilate didn’t see any guilt in Jesus, even though he wanted to let Jesus go, he eventually gave into the demands of the Jews and handed Jesus over for crucifixion.

But what about Jesus?

In John 19:5, Pilate says, ‘Behold the man’. In John 19:14, Pilate says, ‘Behold your king’.

Pilate is saying to the Jewish leaders, “Look at this man who you see as so threatening, who you say is claiming to be your king. Look at how weak he is, look at how pathetic he is, look at how powerless he is. He has been beaten, mocked, scorned, all his disciples have run away, and he is powerless to stop me or you”.

Pilate for one second, does not believe Jesus is the king at all; Pilate for one second, does not believe Jesus has any power at all. Even though he says, ‘Behold, the man!’ and ‘Behold your king!’, he doesn’t mean it but rather he is just saying it to mock Jesus.

But do you know what the great irony is?

Even though Pilate doesn’t mean what he says and he is just mocking Jesus when he says ‘Behold the man’ and ‘Behold your king’, the great irony is, what Pilate is saying is 100% true. He doesn’t even realise what he is saying is true. Jesus is the man, and Jesus is the king. Pilate just can’t recognise it because the power and kingship of Jesus is completely different to the standards of power in this world.

And that’s because the very power of Jesus is in his very weakness. Even though, he doesn’t show any of the power that the world considers power - like political power, fame, money, influence, physical power - the power of Christ, the power of the gospel, is different to any form of power in this world. It is unexpected.

True power is not found where we expect it. Those who seek and hunger power for themselves will not find true power. They may gain strength, influence, advantage over others, but they will not find the true power of the gospel. And that’s because the true power is not found in the building and gathering up something for yourself; true power is found in the very emptying of one self:

It is found in humility

It is found in meekness

It is found in turning the other cheek when someone strikes you

It is found in forgiveness

It is found love

And as we will see next week, it is ultimately found on the cross.

Power for the Christian is unexpected, counterintuitive, paradoxical, and impossible to find for those who hunger for it.

True power for the Christian, is Christ - ‘Behold the man’, ‘Behold the king’ - the humiliated, suffering, self-emptying, sacrificial king.

And this power, although it doesn’t seem like it, is the greatest power of all. It’s greater than physical, political, financial power.

And you might ask, how is that possible, it doesn’t make any sense at all. How is that powerful?

Well this power is not without evidence. It’s not something we have to blindly believe. One of the characteristics, of this unexpected power of Christ, of the gospel, of our faith, is that it is subversive. That means it’s disruptive and revolutionary, not in a violent or destructive way, but in a completely transformative way. So the gospel, even though it looks weak on the outside, has the power to completely transform your life and turn it upside down. It has the power to completely transform your friends, your entire school, our entire country, this entire world.

It might start like humble weak seed that no one takes notice of, but over time without even people realising, it grows into the greatest tree of them all.

And I’m not talking about power in the abstract; this is not just theory. Here are some real life examples:

In Roman society, Christians were harshly persecuted and murdered, and yet the church continued to grow, not in a violent way or fighting back, but by faith, hope, and love.

The power of Christ can completely a change a society. Roman society at the time didn’t consider children as human beings, and killing babies was common and was legal; women were also treated very poorly. It was Christian values that the image of God and value of every single human, and opposed and stood up to infanticide, abortion, and it was Christian households that gave women a higher status. And within 200-300 years, the Roman empire became a Christian empire, not by tyrannical military power, but by the transformative power of the gospel.

It’s the power of the gospel that influences the very society we live. People don’t even realise that the very air we breathe, this very culture we live in, whether they like it or not has been shaped by the gospel and Christian values.

For example, charity and social welfare were first established by early Christians, setting up things like hospitals, orphanges, soup kitchens.

It was Christian influence that stressed the importance of education because of the importance of reading the Word - monasteries set up schools, and those schools eventually became the university system that we know today.

And so much of international law and politics is shaped by Christian values. The principle of loving your neighbour has influenced so much of ethics and international law, such as how we should treat refugees, prisoners of war, criminals.

It was Christian principles and beliefs of human equality and dignity that inspired people to oppose slavery.

And there are so many other things.

The power of the gospel, although on the outside looks weak, insignificant, irrelevant, abstract, there actually is no other greater power, and it’s power is not theoretical, but it is real and tangible. We can see it in history, and we can see it in our lives. The power of the gospel, when it enters a person, family, a church, a country, it has the power to completely change it, turn it upside down, and transform it. What looks weak and pathetic when compared to the powers of the world, is actually the power that changed Paul from an enemy of Christ to one of the great apostles, it’s the power that changed the Roman Empire from the inside out into a Christian empire, it’s the power that has shaped history and society as we know it today.

Conclusion

If we read verse 13, we see Pilate sitting down on the judgement seat, to pronounce his judgement on Jesus. But you know what the great irony is? Although Pilate is one sitting on the judge’s seat, the true judge is Jesus Christ, the one beaten and bruised in front of Pilate. Because depending on what Pilate believes about who Jesus is, determines his eternal fate.

True power is held by our king Jesus Christ. And this power is unexpected, it wears different clothing to the powers of this world, and that’s why it’s easy to miss. And that’s why so many of us, so often don’t really think about the power of Christ, because our minds don’t immediately recognise its potential. We seek and rely on other sources of power in our lives, which are much more obvious and seem more accessible. Rather than truly seeing, grasping, and enjoying the power of Christ, we just come to church every Sunday and every week we are completely blind to it, we don’t feel or appreciate the infinite power of Christ at all. But we need to return to the true power, because the power of Christ is so much infinitely greater than anything else, that there is nothing like the gospel that can transform our lives, our families, our communities. And to know and experience the power of the gospel, we need faith, because on the surface it doesn’t seem powerful, just like Jesus bruised and beaten in front of Pilate - but with faith, just like how faith helps us see the true identity of the crucified & weak Jesus as king and our very God, faith allows us to see the true transforming power of the gospel even though on the outside it may not seem powerful at all.

Ending song: Power of your love

Study questions

The Jews reject Jesus and have him crucified. In the process, the Jews say in verse 15, ‘we have no king but Caesar’. The Jews are pretending to be friendly and loyal to Caesar just so that they can get Jesus crucified. But by saying ‘we have no king but Caesar’, is actually to blaspheme God, because they are disowning the kingship of God himself. The degree to which the Jews reject Jesus is so vehement and deep, that they are willing to even disown their own God.

The rejection of God is fundamental to the nature of sin. As sinful beings, that is our instinct - to reject God. It runs deep in the very fibres of our being, we do not want the true God to rule over us. The Jews rejected Jesus because even though he was truly king, he was not the kind of king they wanted - we want the kind of god that we want rule over us, not the God that is prescribed for us. And any god that we want, will ultimately just be made in our own image and desires, an idol of our own very self - we become our own god.

Learning this from this passage, what important things can we take away for our lives?

Some possible answers:

Appreciating and being grateful for the great work of salvation God has done in us, transforming our idolatrous and rebellious hearts, into actually desiring the true God and His rule. This would have otherwise been completely impossible for us. See Deut 30:6 & Jeremiah 31:31-34.

When we evangelise, we should not be surprised if some people reject our message. We should not even be surprised if they reject it with a lot of passion and hatred - this is how deeply the Jews rejected Christ, even to the point of blasphemy.

Realising some of the ways we reject God in our lives. There may be some aspects of our lives that we don’t let God rule over, because we want to live according to our own sinful desires. That is ultimately idolatry: rejecting God’s kingship, and accepting our own kingship and rule over our own lives to live according to the ways we want.