Sermon: The Voice of Truth and the Pilate Syndrome

John 18 33b-37

Our gospel readings often incorporate a dialogue with Jesus. But few can match today's for tension and drama. It is as if all eyes and ears in the city are trained on the Roman governor and the rough-tongued rabbi from the country. Pilate starts with a question: ‘are you the king of the Jews' and Jesus answers back, responding to the question with a question. ‘Do you ask this on your own or did others tell you about me?' Pilate must wonder. ‘Is he so imperious because he is the king or for some other reason.'  Then Pilate starts to distance himself. ‘This is a squabble among you Jews.' Then Jesus speaks of his kingdom. ‘My kingdom is not from this world.'  Notice that he does not talk of his kingship but his kingdom.  I am not yet convinced that he owns the title king.  And nor is Pilate, so he asks him direct: ‘So you are a king?' ‘But Jesus is having none of it.  ‘You say that I am a king'. 

Today is marked in the church's year as the feast of Christ the King, which is an addition to the calendar that we adopted in recent years following the example of the Roman Catholic Church in 1925.  It is therefore fitting that we read this exchange between Pilate and Jesus. But I fear that that if we are not careful the grand title of the day might encourage us to take the position of Pontius Pilate. For Jesus' emphasis in this passage is never on kingship. His concern is altogether different:  ‘for this I was born, and for this I came into the world,' he says', 'to testify to the truth.'  When faced with the question of whether he is a ruler, Jesus turns the tables and says, ‘not at all. I am interested in truth far more than power. My mission is not to control or to sit in high places but to testify to truth, to be a witness to truth, to be a martyr to truth.'

This, it seems to me, is entirely of a piece with his bold statement that his kingdom is not from this world. It means that his truthfulness is not constrained by earthly considerations. It is a pure, simple, disinterested, pursuit of truth and witness to truth. This is why he is so blunt and rude to Pilate. Jesus simply does not care about the kingship stuff. He is no ‘respecter of persons'.

So I am not sure how well today's reading is chosen. And I am certainly not sure that it has ended in the right place, for it comes to a close immediately before we hear what is probably the most famous question in the Bible; a question whose utterance by Pilate seals my point that Jesus and Pilate are on completely different wavelengths here and that they are talking past each other. Because in response to all this talk about truth Pilate nonchalantly and rhetorically asks, ‘what is truth?'

Jesus does not reply. And there is nothing in John's gospel to tell us how he reacted.   But he must have done something.  So what do you think? Did he begin to give an answer but then give up when he realised that Pilate was not listening?  Did he simply stare at the ground, or stop down to write in the dust as he did on another occasion? Or did he simply stare at Pilate with wide-eyed disbelief and think to himself, ‘you really don't get it, do you?'

In our strange, post-modern world, Pilate's question is often in the background. Surrounded by so much information, so many facts, so many opinions, so many theories and voices the smart thing might seem to be dodge the big questions, to shrug you shoulders and say, ‘I'm sure I don't know.  But then what is truth anyway? It is all relative.'   It is meant to come across as a kind of intellectual diffidence, modesty perhaps. But the philosopher John Gray, (himself I recently discovered a South Shields lad) is having none of this in his trenchant book Straw Dogs.

Post-Modernists parade their relativism as a superior kind of humility - the modest acceptance that we cannot claim to have the truth. In fact, the Post-Modern denial of truth is the worst kind of arrogance. In denying that the natural world exists independently of our beliefs about it, Post-Modernists are implicitly rejecting any limit on human ambitions...

The idea that there is no such thing as truth may be fashionable, but it is hardly new. Post-Modernism is just the latest fad in anthropocentrism.

That's a big word, even for this pulpit, but it is important because there is a lot of it about. Anthropocentrism: putting ourselves at the centre of everything. It goes back to Pythagoras and indeed Pilate.  Man is the measure of all things... so what is truth?  This is not the true humility of pilgrim soul or enquiring mind but the folly of the one who says in his heart not only that there is no God but that there is no truth.

Our gospel passage today offers a dramatic dialogue where the two voices in tension speak from a deep concern with either truth or with power. Jesus is the witness to truth who has no interest in power. Pilate is the person of power who has no handle on truth.  Let us focus for a moment on what we might call the Pilate Syndrome, in which the claims of power are seen to trump the importance of truth.

There is a kind of inevitability about the Pilate Syndrome and so the denial of truth and the accumulation and jealous guarding of power often go together.   For if there is no truth, what else have we got?  Power (of course), wealth (itself a form of power) status (the impression of power) and in today's world, fame and celebrity (status conferred for a brief season by the all powerful media). 

Call me a grumpy old canon but it seems to me that you can trace a pretty straight line between Pontius Pilate and the more cynical elements of the media today.  ‘What is truth? Truth is money and power and I,' so says the media giant,' I am so powerful that I can control the truth.'  This is the pernicious dynamic at work when we allow ourselves to believe that power trumps truth: the Pilate Syndrome.

All too often we go along with it. Unlike Jesus we do respect people for their rank, power and influence. Unlike Jesus we take those who speak from power and for power on their own terms.  Unlike Jesus we give up in our attempts to witness to truth before life starts getting difficult.  For one thing you can be sure about if you seek to witness to the truth is that your words and attitudes will begin to annoy the powerful and those who hope someday to become powerful. Indeed the ambition for power, the desire for power, is probably more allergic to truth than raw power itself.

The exchange between Pilate and Jesus reveals precisely this tension between power and truth and so leads me to the conclusion that Jesus is precisely not a king.  Or if he is a king he is a king in very large inverted commas. He is the king of truth, the king of glory, the king of mercy, the king of peace, the king of love.  All this is true but the words qualify the concept of kingship almost beyond recognition because of the absence of interest in power, wealth or status.   The lack of interest which lies behind the inability of Pilate to understand what Jesus is all about and to deny the importance of truth.

I have nearly done but I want to say one last thing. Look at the last line of today's reading. And look especially at the last word. (The last sentence reads: Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice'.  John 8.37) It is a very surprising because we might very reasonably expect it to be the word ‘words'. But Jesus does not say ‘Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my words'.  Rather he says that those who belong to the truth listen to my voice.

So as the church celebrates Christ the ‘king' I invite you to not to be distracted by words like ‘king' into thinking that it has anything to do with the pursuit of power, wealth or status.  The trappings of kingship, the tokens of power, are precisely not what this is all about. Rather to try to pay attention not to the voice of Jesus. As you listen out for that voice, a passionate yet humble, poor yet making many rich voice. And as you hear it as the unaffected voice of love which comes in many accents and languages, you will find yourself being drawn into Jesus' profound truthfulness. 

And once drawn in you will seek nothing more than the coming of a time where justice, mercy, truth and peace will characterise the life of the whole world.  And in this seeking you too will become, like Jesus, a witness to the truth: the truth that sets people free. For the voice of truth will, at last, be speaking through you.