An Ironic Trial

How many of you are familiar with Alanis Morrissette’s song, Ironic?

If you aren’t, you are not missing much.

However, if remember when it came out, let me make you feel old: the song debuted in 1995, which was 27 years ago.

In the song, she lays out all kinds of situations that are painful, perhaps tragic— rain on your wedding day, ten thousand spoons when you need a knife, and the like.

However, the irony with the song Ironic is that not a single line in the song actually talks about an irony.

Sure, she talks about negative, frustrating experiences, but they are not ironic.

Irony may be defined as, “an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.”[1]

What does that have to do with our message this morning?

As we turn back to John 18-19 this morning, we are going to find that the Jewish leaders handing Jesus over to Pilate to be tried is dripping with irony.

We are going to cover a lot of ground this morning, so we want to divide the text into four sections.

Each of these sections is going to highlight an irony where things aren’t as they seem at first, or aren’t playing out like one would expect.

All of these ironies point us to the greatest irony of all: all the injustices and evil that we see in this passage were the means through which God would work to save the world.

Start with me in 18:28-32...

Here’s where we find the first irony in this passage. Ironically, the Jewish leaders were...

1) Avoiding defilement while already defiled.

It is easy to miss this detail when you read through the passage, because at first it makes sense.

Because of how the leaders had interpreted the Jewish ceremonial laws, they could not go into the house of a Gentile or they would become ceremonially unclean. They could go into a courtyard, but they couldn’t enter a place where a Gentile was staying.

If they were unclean, they might have to push the Passover celebration back by a whole month, and they just couldn’t do that!

What’s wrong with this picture?

The irony is that they are already defiled!

They are attempting to put the only innocent person in history to death. This is the single greatest unjust act one could fathom.

They have actually struck God in the flesh, and now, they are willing to do whatever it takes to put him to death—we’ll see this more clearly by the end of the passage.

This gets to what Jesus has been condemning the Jewish leaders for throughout his ministry: They are more concerned with looking right than actually being right with God.

Matthew records Jesus’s harsh rebuke of this attitude:

Matthew 23:23–24 CSB

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You pay a tenth of mint, dill, and cumin, and yet you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness. These things should have been done without neglecting the others. Blind guides! You strain out a gnat, but gulp down a camel!

God commanded his people to give the first tenth of their income, crops, etc. to him. The Pharisees would do that, even down to a tenth of the herbs they grew. However, they didn’t care about justice, mercy, or faithfulness!

According to the dietary laws God had given his people, both insects and camels were unclean. Jesus uses a figure of speech to show that they focused on the most minor details, straining their soup so they wouldn’t accidentally eat an insect, all the while devouring an entire camel without blinking!

That’s what we see here. They are caring more about their interpretation of the external commands of the law that they miss the fact that their hearts are so twisted and blinded that they are ready to kill God himself.

While we may not be standing outside Pilate’s courtyard, we can make a similar mistake.

We have talked about this throughout John, but I don’t know that we can ever hear it enough.

It is so easy to reduce a relationship with Christ down to “do this” and “don’t do that,” and yes, there are patterns of behavior and standards that God gives us in the Bible.

However, true obedience to those standards comes out of hearts that have been made right with God through Jesus’s death and resurrection, not through trying hard and doing enough good stuff to earn God’s favor.

Like the Pharisees, we can reduce God’s standards to narrow areas that are easy to see—don’t cuss, don’t get drunk, don’t lie, go to church, give to the poor, pray, and read your Bible.

We should do all those things, but if we let our focus get too narrow, we might be crucifying the Son of God while worrying about whether or not we are going to be defiled by going into Pilate’s house.

Let me give you an illustration from a different area of life: I really enjoy going to the gym. It is something that I have picked up over the last few years, so I have tried to study up and learn all I can.

I have read articles, listened to podcast, read books, and all these things.

I have heard people tell you how to breathe better for maximum performance or take cold showers to condition yourself for difficult workouts.

You know what, though? I will listen to one of those podcasts, and then I will swing by Dairy Queen to get a Reese’s Blizzard after the kids go to bed.

I may be breathing better during my lifts, but I am still shoveling in ice cream, cookies, fried food, and the like.

I can get so focused on small things that I neglect the big ones.

Is it possible that you have become so laser focused on a particular area of sin that you are blind to other areas you need to grow in?

Perhaps this afternoon, you need to sit down and ask God to show you if there are areas you are neglecting?

Don’t let other people be the standard, because you might look like a righteous Pharisee who won’t even go into Pilate’s house, all the while seeking to kill the King of Kings.

That leads us to our second irony. Throughout this entire passage, the Jewish leaders and Pilate are...

2) Rejecting the true king.

Pick back up in verse 33-19:5...

At some point, the Jewish leaders had told Pilate that Jesus was claiming to be their king.

Here, Pilate begins to interrogate Jesus.

You need to understand some things about Pilate to see just how ironic this is.

No one liked Pilate. He was a Roman leader, but he wasn’t very good at his job. The Jews had tried to rebel against him a couple times already and reject Roman rule. The Romans didn’t like him because he hadn’t done a good job of keeping peace in his area, so he wasn’t that great.

So here, this not-so-great Roman governor is questioning the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

He isn’t just a governor over some Roman province. He is the King of the Kingdom of Heaven, and as we have seen over the last few weeks, he is absolutely in charge. That’s clear in verse 36.

We will come back to verse 37-38a in a minute, but skip down to the second part of verse 38 with me.

Jesus hadn’t given Pilate any reason to put him to death, so Pilate tries to release him.

He offers Barabbas as a prisoner exchange. Barabbas is a “revolutionary.” He had likely participated in one of those revolts we mentioned, had probably killed someone, and was certainly guilty.

This is a no-brainer: do you want me to release the guy who seems pretty good and I can’t find anything wrong with, or do you want me to release the treasonous murderer to you?

To his surprise, they reject Jesus and choose Barabbas.

From there, Jesus is beaten and mocked.

To ridicule him, they place a crown of thorns on his head and a purple robe on him, as if he were a king.

Do you see the irony, they are mocking him, saying “Hail, King of the Jews,” when he really is the King?

Pilate presents him in this mock-royal getup, now covered in blood and spit from the soldiers who hated him.

What is the leaders’ response when they see Jesus? Look at verse 6....

Those who should have bowed at the feet of the Anointed One who came to save them and be their king instead call for his execution.

There may be some of you listening to me this morning, and to be honest, this fits more of where you are.

You don’t think you are right with God—you actually don’t even care if there is one.

You have heard the stories, you have been around enough Christians to be turned off to the whole Jesus thing, so you don’t care what he says, you aren’t going to follow him.

Listen: as Christians, we fail all the time. We are often terrible reflections of Jesus to the world around us.

Instead of looking at us, look at this King—the one whose Kingdom isn’t of this world and doesn’t look like other kings.

The one who, despite having all the power in the universe, literally, he allows himself to be mocked and beaten so he could rescue us from our sin.

Don’t reject this king who would go to such great lengths to rescue you.

For you to reject this king, you are also going have to fall into this next irony...

3) Overlooking truth.

Go back to verse 37-38.

Jesus doesn’t deny that he is the king; he is being wise in his response.

After hearing what Jesus has to say, Pilate asks an interesting question: “What is truth?”

Do you see the painful irony here? Jesus just said he came into the world to testify to the truth because, as he explained back in chapter 14, Jesus is the actual embodiment of truth.

He has been teaching in the area Pilate oversaw, and if he really cared, he could have found out what Jesus had been teaching.

Instead, he looks truth itself in the eyes and says, “What is truth?”

Truth is God, in the flesh, pushing back against the effects of the curse of sin and showing he is victorious over death itself by dying on the cross and being raised from the dead.

The truth that Jesus proclaimed is that the only way to find life and hope and true meaning and purpose is to surrender to the one who has been testifying of the truth through his entire earthly ministry.

Why doesn’t Pilate see it?

Because he is not of the truth.

Although truth is literally looking him in the eye, he is so caught up in the world’s systems of political power and intrigue and self-preservation that he can’t even see it.

Our world is confused about what is real and what is right and what can we actually believe.

Don’t make the same mistake Pilate made and overlook truth when it is staring right at you.

The God who made you loved you enough to do all of this for you, and not only that, he made sure it was written down so you could go back later and read it all.

If you want to know more about how we know we can trust what the Bible says, I would love to connect you with several men in our church who can help you work through that. Paul Metzler, who sits right here, would be more than happy to walk through some of the historical and logical reasons God can be trusted.

You can know the truth, and that truth is found in the person of Jesus Christ.

Don’t make Pilate’s error here.

Ultimately, all of these come down to the final irony we see in this passage.

As the leaders defiled themselves while trying to stay undefiled, as they rejected their king and overlooked truth, it all comes back to the fact that they were...

4) Misplacing allegiance.

This follows with our second point about rejecting the true king. In fact, in some ways, it is almost the other side of the coin.

Here’s what you see, though: something has to have our allegiance. In other words, something has to have the most important place in our hearts.

There is something that we are devoted to—to borrow a Bible word, there is something we worship and give ourselves to.

Every single person on the planet does this.

When we reject Jesus as our king, we are invariably going to find something to fill that hole. That may mean we put our job there, or our family, or comfort, or status, or power.

You might say, “I don’t answer to anyone. I am my own person, and I don’t really care what anyone else thinks about it.” If that’s the case, then you are clearly showing that you are putting yourself in that top spot.

Really, that’s the only option: We either put Jesus as the one we serve, or we serve ourselves.

However, in serving ourselves, we find ourselves aligning with whatever it takes to get the job done.

It will look different from person to person, but without Jesus taking that place, we ultimately do what we do for ourselves.

That’s what we find Pilate and the Jewish leaders doing here with Jesus.

By verse 8, Pilate is beginning to get scared. We don’t know exactly why, but something about this spooks Pilate.

He may not have been very religious, but the Romans had stories about gods taking human form and visiting people.

When you add in Jesus’s composure and vague responses, Pilate may have been getting nervous that Jesus really was some kind of divine-man.

He questions him again, and we again see that God has not lost control of the situation!

Look at verse 8-11.

The power of that statement makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck.

Have you ever been around someone who carried themselves with a demeanor that told you they could back up what they said?

Can you imagine Jesus, having already been beaten up and spat upon, looking up at Pilate through matted hair and a torn beard and saying, “You would have no authority at all if it hadn’t been given to you from above.”

No wonder Pilate tries to release him. I think he believed him at some level.

However, look at verse 12-13...

Pilate may have been starting to believe that there was something with Jesus, but the crowd played on his greater fear: they could get him in trouble with Caesar, and that might mean the end of his career or even his life.

He sets down in his official seat of judgment and sentences Jesus to death.

Irony again drips from this passage, because elsewhere the Bible tells us that the one judged that day will one day sit in his own seat of judgment over the world, not just over this one man.

However, Pilate cared more about saving his own skin than he did about saving the Son of God.

He cared more about honoring himself than honoring the one who had true and lasting authority.

He isn’t the only one, though.

The Jewish leaders had completely lost sight of honoring God at this point.

We already saw that they care more about their interpretation of the Law than the very God who gave it to them.

Now, they completely and totally sell out.

These men hated Rome and everything it stood for.

They would gladly have rebelled against Rome given the chance, yet look at verse 16 again.

“We have no king but Caesar.”

In declaring that, they showed that they didn’t really care about God or the systems he set up—Caesar was a pagan king who had no concern at all for the God of the Jews.

They are rejecting the one who is the fulfillment of the promises God made to David, to give them a king who would rule over Israel and the world forever.

They are willing to do whatever it takes to get Jesus killed, even if it means incredible compromise on their part.

Let me call you one more time to look back at your life: Do you really demonstrate that Jesus holds first place in your life? Or, is your life more about making sure you don’t lose your status, your connections, your relationships, your money, or whatever success looks like to you?

Have you surrendered to your King? Does your life show that?

Where are you overlooking sins that you are committing?

Remember, all of these ironies point to the greatest one: these events are what God used to save the world.

Isn’t it ironic that Jesus, the one condemned to die, is the only one who actually did what was right?

Although the Jews stayed outside to stay clean, Jesus entered into our uncleanness, becoming sin for us so we could be made clean.

Although he was the true King, he allowed himself to be beaten and murdered for us.

Although others rejected the truth, he never wavered from declaring to us God’s truth.

Although that day, he allowed others to reject him, he never put himself above the Father’s will and plan.

Surrender to him today.

Endnote:

[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/irony. Accessed 6 April 2022.