Jesus Has No Underlings (November 24, 2024)
Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14; Psalm 93; Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37
Jesus said to Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over.”
The story of the meeting of Jesus and Pilate, especially in the gospel of John which paints the most vivid picture of their confrontation, is one of the most revealing moments in the entire New Testament. It would seem that Pilate has all the power; after all, he literally has the power of life and death over Jesus. At this point in the story Jesus has already been beaten and mocked and crowned with thorns, you can almost hear the sarcasm in Pilate’s voice, “So, you’re the king of the Jews.”
And yet, as they speak with one another, it is clear that it is Jesus who is very much in command of the whole situation. Jesus is free and fearless, while Pilate is weak, vacillating, easily manipulated, fearful that the crowds asking for the release of Barabbas will cause a riot, worried that if he lets Jesus go he’ll be denounced to Rome as weak on treason. By all rights Pilate should be the powerful one – he’s the Roman governor of Palestine, one day he’ll get an obituary in the New York Times – while Jesus is a nobody, an unemployed carpenter from the provinces, someone who will be easily forgotten. And yet it turns out that Pilate is now remembered only for his connection to the story of Jesus.
That God will one day overturn our human ideas of power and kingship is a major theme of the Scriptures. The prophet Daniel, from whom we read today, had a dream, a vision, of the great empires of history as a succession of terrible and frightening beasts, Assyria and Babylon and Persia and Greece and Rome, each one more horrible and beastly than the last. In our reading today, in Daniel’s dream God takes his throne in heaven to judge these beastly empires, and then Daniel sees a human being coming with the clouds of heaven, a human being who is given a humane kingdom that will succeed the beastly empires. And then God’s kingdom will come, God’s will finally done on earth as it is in heaven.
When Jesus calls himself the “Son of Man,” which is the poetic Aramaic way of saying “human being” we find in the text of Daniel, he is referring to this prophecy and vision. Our second reading today from the book of Revelation, saying that Jesus is “coming with the clouds,” is using imagery from this same prophecy of Daniel. The kingdom of God is not the kingdom of Rome – and now, as Jesus stands before Pilate, the kingdom of God which is not from this world judges the kingdom of this world and finds it guilty.
There is so much in this story of Jesus and Pilate, in the story of God’s kingdom coming to a world still in the grip of one beastly empire or another, that we can always find new depths in these short verses from John’s gospel. And this week I learned something new about this passage that I had never seen before.
Jesus says to Pilate: “My kingdom is not from this world – if it were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over.” I had never noticed that the word “followers,” in the Greek, is not the usual word for “following” – it’s not the word Jesus used when he calls Peter to leave his nets and “follow me,” it’s not the word Jesus uses when he calls all his disciples to take up their cross and “follow me.” It’s not the word the gospels usually use for the “disciples” of Jesus – that word really means students.
When Jesus says that, if his kingdom were of this world, his “followers” would be fighting for him, the word in Greek is “hypérétés.” From “hypo,” meaning “under” (like a hypodermic needle is inserted “under” the skin) and “érétés,” which means a rower, someone who rows oars on a boat. Think a Roman ship with a whole team of rowers on the lower deck, manning the oars to make the ship go. These “hypérétés” are there for their muscle, not their brains. And, outside the naval context, the word generally refers the people who are muscle of the operation, not the brains. People not expected to think for themselves but who follow orders. Subordinates. Underlings.
So what Jesus is saying to Pilate is, if my kingdom were like any of the other kingdoms of this world, I’d have underlings fighting to protect me from you. But as you can see, I have no such underlings. That is not how my kingdom works.
But it is how Pilate’s kingdom works. Pilate has plenty of armed and dangerous subordinates – the same word, “hypérétés,” is used to designated the soldiers who have just beaten and mocked Jesus. And in fact, Pilate himself is a subordinate. He is the representative of the emperor in Rome, and he has many duties and responsibilities. As the story goes, personally Pilate doesn’t really want to crucify Jesus. He would prefer to wash his hands of the whole matter. But in the end he can’t, because he’s got a boss who believes in crushing all possible opposition with maximum force and he’s just a subordinate. And he can’t get on the wrong side of the boss. He’s just a cog in the machine. Pilate is just an underling of the latest beast. Just following orders. Nothing personal, that’s the way it is.
But Jesus is not an underling. He is a Son, true, but the beloved Son of his Father – sharing one mind, one Spirit, one intention to set humanity free from the beasts and bring to birth the humane kingdom of God. Where Pilate is constrained and afraid, Jesus is free and fearless. And therefore Pilate can crucify Jesus but cannot judge Jesus; it is Jesus who judges Pilate. It is Jesus who by his fearlessness reveals Pilate for who he is and the beast that has captured him.
And by the way, when Christ the King judges you and me, he will judge us (and is in fact judging us now) the same way he judged Pilate. Not the way Pilate judged Jesus, by holding the threat of punishment over him. But Jesus, in his freedom and fearlessness, judges us in his innocence and in his weakness by revealing how the beasts have captured us. How the beasts have taken advantage of our fear of insecurity, our fear of not having enough, our fear of being excluded or overlooked or insignificant. How we have become captive to the beasts, like Pilate, unable to free ourselves.
But in the kingdom of God, there are no underlings or subordinates. And that is why Jesus has no underlings to defend him from Pilate; Jesus doesn’t have underlings. We are created for the humane kingdom, we are created in the image and likeness of God, we are set free in baptism to be just as free and fearless as Jesus is. No, Jesus does not have underlings. Jesus has co-conspirators, people who share his Spirit, people who have the same hope in resurrection and so do not need to submit to the power of the beast, but people who have been set free to live fearlessly in the freedom of the kingdom of God. May this kingdom come, may God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.