King of the Jews

Intro

“Behold your King!”— Is this your king??

All the scorn and the sarcasm of which Pilate is capable is put into the exclamation. If he must yield he will sting and lash them while he is yielding.

“King, king,” they have shouted to the last—well, let them look, this is their king.

Is this your King?

To get into the mind of the Jews:

Leviticus 24:15–16 ESV

And speak to the people of Israel, saying, Whoever curses his God shall bear his sin. Whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death. All the congregation shall stone him. The sojourner as well as the native, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death.

1 Samuel 8:4–9 ESV

Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah and said to him, “Behold, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations.” But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to judge us.” And Samuel prayed to the Lord. And the Lord said to Samuel, “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. According to all the deeds that they have done, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you. Now then, obey their voice; only you shall solemnly warn them and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.”

Trial & Error 1-7

The trial of Jesus is underway

The chief priests have been orchestrating the whole thing. They have been nagging on Pilate to do their bidding.

Pilate simply wants to give Jesus a good whipping and call it good, despite the fact that he finds no grounds for accusation.

(Note: Pilate could have ended the trial at any time, and yet lets it continue and it gets away from him. Also note that he has no issue with flogging an innocent man, much more to kill him in the most gruesome way possible)

The accusers could not keep their stories straight. He was going to destroy the temple, he was saying he was god, he was a king..

Jesus was not who either of them would have expected. The Jews wanted a conqueror to throw of the Roman chains (and ironically threw off Jesus for those Roman chains “no king but Caesar”)

Pilate scourged and mocked the man to prove that he was a lousy excuse for a king, or at least a Roman king. Which in his mind was a fitting kind of king for these Jews.

“king,” indeed, “the king of the Jews,” a joke of a king! let them see for themselves! Crucify him? act as though this dreamer about the truth amounted to anything? The very idea was ridiculous.

This scourging served two purposes: to make this king ridiculous and to do it with cruelty. Every king needs his crown, and what a bloody crown it was!

“Hail, King of the Jews!” Jesus is “formally” acclaimed king of the Jews.

Despite all this, Pilate still insists Jesus is innocent.

Reality Check 7-11

the Jews were trying to appeal to Roman law by setting up Jesus as a king. Pilate doesn’t buy it.

Now they appeal to their own laws, He was a blasphemer. He claimed to be the Son of God. This rattles Pilate. Until this moment the Jews have kept hidden from Pilate the real crime on which they sentenced Jesus. This was a crime that was strictly religious, which they knew Pilate would disregard as being no crime at all.

They instead trumped up everything possible in the way of crime that they imagined would impress Pilate but now saw that they had not at all impressed him. So at last the truth comes out.

It was false that Jesus had gone about in the land proclaiming himself a secular king; what he had done was to declare himself “God’s son.”

Here we meet a most remarkable fact: God so controlled and so guided everything at the Jewish and now also at the Gentile trial of Jesus that he was condemned to death, not on some false, trumped-up charge, but on the true fact, on the actual reality, on his divine Sonship, and hence Kingship, which was turned into a charge. The Jews say, “he made himself” God’s Son; but he was God’s Son, the Only-begotten from the Father, and had manifested and proved his divine Sonship to the Jews in countless ways. The Jews condemned God’s Son because he was God’s Son.

Pilate was genuinely afraid, though maybe for more pagan superstitious reasons, but afraid nonetheless.

All Pilate’s fears are concentrated in the one question, “Where are you from?”

Jesus returns no answer. Calmly his eyes look into those of Pilate, but his lips remain sealed.

He had already given Pilate the answer in Jn 18:37 :

John 18:37 ESV

Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.”

To which Pilate replied mockingly, “what is truth?” It was standing right in front of him

The silence of Jesus means that His former answer stands. He is a king, though not of this world.

Why repeat that testimony? Silence now was also an answer, and it spoke louder and more effectively than words.

Pilate talks as though he could bestow life or death at will with the turn of the hand, exactly as he pleases. He really does himself injustice—he is not a man who is as bad as that.

Pilate tells Jesus that he has Jesus entirely in his hand.

Yet in a certain sense he has power: it has been given to him from above.

Pilate is to know that it is not he who holds Jesus in his hand; a higher hand holds Pilate. Even Caiaphas has greater guilt than Pilate. He was not the prime actor in this drama.

King, King! 12-22

But the Jews finally find a tactic that lands, despite Pilate being more determined than ever to release Jesus; “This fellow, he is not a friend of Caesar.”

Pilate is finally faced with a judge who holds him in his hand, dreaded more than any god, namely Caesar.

Pilate and the Jews were fully aware of the suspiciousness of the emperor who never hesitated to sacrifice an official concerning whose loyalty he had the least doubt.

The Jews count on their own insistence, false though it is, that Jesus claims to be a [secular] king. Any man who in any way can be charged with calling himself a king thereby “speaks against Caesar.”

He faces the alternative: either he sacrifices Jesus or he sacrifices himself

Jesus, who bids the Jews give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, is made an enemy of Caesar’s by those who know the contrary and is allowed to stand as such an enemy by the judge who also knows the contrary.

Pilate, loyal enough to Caesar, is made to face the charge of disloyalty by the Jews who, disloyal to the core, play the role of loyalty;

and this while both Pilate and the Jews know that he is loyal and that they are traitorously disloyal. The scene was a devil’s masterpiece in lying.

“King, king,” they have shouted to the last—well, let them look, this is their king.

“Behold your King!”

Pilate insulted the Jews by pointing to Jesus as their king, and as Jews, John wants us to understand, they REJECT this their king.

Pilate gives them another vicious thrust. He will sentence Jesus but he will take his time in doing so, aggravating the Jews to the utmost.

What, do they mean to say that they want their own king, their supreme hope, to be crucified by a Roman like a slave.

The high priests answered, We have no king except Caesar.

Driven to the limit, this fatal word escapes the high priests.

These heads of the nation are not content to disown Jesus alone. They do not cry, “This is not our king!”

They disown any and every king of their own and pledge themselves only and wholly to the pagan Caesar. A king like all the nations.

These high priests, to whom the highest spiritual hopes of Israel were committed, here reveal themselves as traitors to those hopes and to the nation that should cherish them. They stand as apostates to the entire Old Testament faith. Only pagan Caesar is the king they acknowledge.

They lie worse than pagans, for they hate Caesar. They demonstrate that they deserve no other king.

Their word was another thrust at Pilate on the subject of loyalty to Caesar, a thrust to drive him to crucify this man whom they lyingly charged with making himself a secular king. John does not say so, but here again we have a word like that of the high priest Caiaphas in 11:50, a word of unconscious prophecy.

V. 16

Then, therefore, he delivered him up to them that he be crucified.

Pilate’s own words are not recorded, the fact as such suffices for John. Yet he states the substance of Pilate’s verdict. It must have been given in briefest form and without specifying any crime.

After three times saying in so many words that he finds no indictment against Jesus, Pilate cannot now allow an indictment and base his verdict on that.

God saw to it that his Son was sent to the cross not merely in innocence but even without a false charge against him.

God’s purposes were being carried out in the present trial, and not a weak man’s whims and fancies.

Pilate washed his hands in water but he could not remove the stain of guilt. His name is covered with infamy to this day. In the year 36 he was deposed, sent to Rome to face charges, and then seems to have been banished and to have committed suicide.

The Crucifixion

Pilate, probably seething with anger at this point, wrote that title, placed it on the cross, with a firmness which would have stood him in good stead a few hours before, absolutely declined to make any change.

Inscriptions stating why a man was crucified were common.

V. 20

in the Aramaic vernacular, in the Latin of the Roman government, showing that the inscription was official, coming from Pilate himself, and in the Greek as the great world language of the time, thus offering the greatest possible publicity.

V. 21

It is John who calls it a τίτλος or “title,” and, in fact, it merely gave Jesus a title.

That is the remarkable thing about Pilate’s superscription: it names no crime whatever, it only records a most significant title. In three languages and thus to all the world it shouts out the great title of Jesus.

To the very last these high priests have hurled at Pilate the charge, “King, king!” which he knew was false and which he knew they knew was false.

They had forced Pilate to crucify Jesus as a king. Very well then, they should have him on the cross but only as a king, their King! Let all the world read, “The King of the Jews”!

By simply giving Jesus this title without an added allegation Pilate proclaims the innocence of Jesus, of which he was completely certain.

Thus Christ for His own person is innocent, but being in our stead, He is guilty, for He has taken our part to pay our guilt.

The Jews rejected him, instead left with a king like the other nations.

V. 22

Pilate answered, What I have written I have written.

He wrote, and what he wrote remained written, and what thus remained stands as final.

But in all these things the hand of God must be discerned.

It was God’s dispensation to have this very title placed over the head of Jesus. This Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified by the Jews is in truth the King of the Jews in the best sense of the word, the Messiah of Israel.

This Messiah was to bring salvation to all the people of the entire world, whose chief languages were here used.

By the torture of His cross and by His bitter death Jesus has atoned fully for the transgressions of the world.

And this fact should be made known to all nations on earth, that they might place their trust in their Substitute that died on Calvary.

And back of all this clash of human passions was the serene hand of God. Jesus was, indeed, the true spiritual King of the Jews. What was written was written.

“Behold your King!” —Is this your King?