To tell you the truth, I can see where Pilate is coming from; after all, Jesus is talking about having a kingdom, yet it's not "from this world." And then he starts evading the simple question, "Are you a king?" by spouting all this "truth" nonsense. Doesn't the guy realize he's about to be killed? So Pilate does the logical thing that interrogators do: he gives him a reality check. He has Jesus flogged, dressed as a king, and mocked. Then he tries to let him go, because obviously this Jesus guy isn't in touch with reality.

But Pilate's got an enormous problem on his hands. The crowd. Behind that crowd stand the instigators of it all: the religious authorities. And it's important to note that the Sadducees and Pharisees were normally at theological loggerheads with each other, kind of like Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals have been in our own religious tradition. But getting rid of this man has joined the Sadducees and the Pharisees in common cause. All of their differences evaporate in their bloodlust, their blind desire to hold onto power by any means necessary, including lying, collaborating with the Romans, and murder.

As long as the religious authorities are riling up the mob, Pilate realizes that he can't just let Jesus go. So he tries to give Jesus a second reality check, saying, "Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?" To which Jesus replies, "You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin."

At that point, Pilate is convinced that Jesus is indeed the King of the Jews, not in the way that the term would normally be understood, but at a deeper level. In John's account, Pilate persists in trying to convince the crowd to release him, saying to them "Here is your King!" When they cry out "Crucify him!" he replies, "Shall I crucify your King?" In response to that question, the chief priests play their trump card. They reply, "We have no king but the emperor." Do you realize how shockingly hypocritical this statement is? For the chief priests to swear allegiance to the emperor is hardly believable. For you see, Herod had placed the Roman imperial emblem, the eagle, above the entrance to the temple porch, and as an unclean bird and a graven image, it was repugnant to them. The eagle stood for the emperor, and the emperor stood for everything the chief priests were not: pagans, unclean, and flouters of God's law, especially laws against idolatry. Yet here we have them swearing their undying loyalty to the emperor, whom the Romans claimed was a god in human form. By their own law, therefore, they aren't just making a political statement; they are committing idolatry: worshipping a pagan king who claims to be a god in order to kill a Jewish King who is God.

Why do the priests sink to idolatry? Because they know it paints Pilate into a corner. After they play the emperor card, John's narrative states simply "Then he handed him over to them to be crucified." Now, in another account, in Matthew's gospel, we find a piquant detail at this point in the narrative: "So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, 'I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves.'" In Matthew, Pilate literally washes his hands of the whole mess. He disassociates himself from the political and religious violence taking place all around him. In Matthew, this is done to put the blame squarely on the crowd, which replies "His blood be on us and on our children!"

But John doesn't let Pilate slip away after he hands Jesus over to be crucified. In fact, John places Pilate at the very foot of the cross, personally ordering that an inscription be put on the cross that reads "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews," in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek, so that everybody, no matter where they come from, can see exactly who this person is. When the chief priests object, quibbling "Do not write, 'The King of the Jews,' but, 'This man said, I am King of the Jews,'" Pilate's last line in the Gospel is "What I have written I have written."

Why does Pilate act the way he does, even after he recognizes that Jesus truly is the King of the Jews? Why does he still participate in Jesus' violent death, even after proclaiming Jesus' innocence? The political answer, of course, is that the priests forced his hand. But I think there's a deeper dynamic, one that John intentionally embeds in his narrative. For you see, John's gospel is full of wordplay, puns, and double entendres.

Just before Pilate hands Jesus over to be crucified, just before he proclaims, "Here is your King," Pilate does something highly symbolic. John writes that Pilate "went outside and sat on the judge's bench." This means he's about to pronounce formal sentence on Jesus. But if you've got a good translation, your Bible will most likely have a footnote that reads "Or seated him." This means that John is using a grammatical construction in Greek that could be read two ways-it's a double entendre. The verse could also read that Pilate "went outside and seated him on the judge's bench." John, I believe, is being intentionally unclear here: does Pilate seat himself on the bench, or does he seat Jesus on it? Well, both, grammatically speaking.

What would it mean that Pilate took Jesus, now scourged and dressed in kingly robes with a crown of thorns on his head, and sat him down on the judge's bench in front of the people, and then proclaimed, "Here is your King"? Is he further mocking Jesus? While that could be argued, it would be inconsistent with Pilate's tenor throughout the chapter. No, John portrays Pilate showing the people that while they are judging Jesus, he is judging them! While they are invoking mob rule, Jesus has been invested with the traditional symbols of legitimate authority, even if mockingly by others-a crown, a robe, a throne. What John shows us is an ikon of Christ Pantokrator-Christ the Judge of Everything, sitting on the throne, judging everyone, but sentencing no one.

In the moment when we are most culpable, most deserving of judgment, the King of kings is silent. He refuses to pronounce the sentence we are guilty of: death. Not that we aren't judged as sinful; after all, earlier on Jesus had said, "the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin." So Jesus does judge our guilt, but the penalty phase of this trial of the world is put on hold. Sitting on the judgment seat in front of the guilty mob, is Jesus hungry for their deaths? No. Does he declare: "God will smite you for what you're doing to me"? No, "like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth."

What we are presented with this morning is Christ the King as Jesus the Scapegoat. Jesus' own actions show us the truth for which he came into the world, and to which he testifies. He demonstrates by his action, and his inaction, that a true king does not resist violence with violence, but overcomes evil with forgiveness and love. This is why he tells Pilate "If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over." As Paul Nuechterlein has written, "He's not saying, 'Oh, well, when I was back in Galilee and we were having those great crowds, I was witnessing to the truth.' No, he is saying to Pilate, 'Right here, right now, Buddy, right in front of you with your finger pointed toward me, I'm revealing the truth.' Pilate's response, 'How could that be the truth? What are you talking about? Say something philosophical, will you?'"

But the "truth" that Jesus is talking about isn't merely philosophical. It's not a concept or a system. It's a person-specifically, Christ the King, who puts up no resistance to the violence of scapegoating, thus taking away the power of that violence and offering forgiveness in its place. When we recognize that truth, we are freed to reject the violence of scapegoating that's all around us, that pervades our own culture, our politics, and even the church itself.

Pilate, for his part, almost rejects scapegoating. He gets halfway there, in that he recognizes that Jesus is innocent and thus shouldn't be the scapegoat. But instead of refusing to participate in scapegoating altogether, Pilate tries to substitute a guilty goat for an innocent lamb. This is where Barabbas comes into the picture. Pilate thinks that if he can get the crowd to free Jesus and have Barabbas executed in Jesus' place, he'll have done a good deed-the crowd gets its scapegoat, the good guy gets out alive. Everyone's happy. Well, not everyone.

Who was this Barabbas, anyway? John notes simply that Barabbas was "a bandit," while Luke (copying Mark, the earliest of the gospels) tells us that Barabbas "was a man who had been put in prison for an insurrection that had taken place in the city, and for murder." In Matthew, Barabbas is called "Jesus Barabbas," which literally means "Jesus Son of the Father." So Pilate asks, essentially, "Do you want me to release for you Jesus the Son of the Father or Jesus the Son of the Father?" He's hoping the crowd won't care which "son" gets killed, but he's wrong. Instead of choosing Jesus the Messiah, an innocent man who stands against the violence of the past by refusing to participate in the violence of the present, they choose to free Jesus Barabbas, whom Gil Bailie, a commentator on John's gospel, has described as "a zealot whose commitment is to avenge the wrongs of the past by committing acts that are indistinguishable from them in the future,"¹ in other words, a terrorist.

In scapegoating Jesus, the religious authorities have chosen emperor worship over Christ the King, and the crowd has chosen a terrorist over the Prince of Peace. Again, in the words of Bailie, the authorities' "own determination to enforce Jewish orthodoxy has turned into its opposite. In the face of Jesus' crucifixion, all existing systems for reinforcing and ordering the world now produce the opposite results. The philosophical tradition becomes openly agnostic, bankrupt. And the religious system becomes openly unfaithful."²

Sound familiar? "Orthodoxy" in this sense comes in many flavors, whether that's conservative traditionalism or liberal political correctness. We still live in a very violent world, and the more "orthodox" or "right" people try to be, whether that's by being politically correct or traditional, the more they end up behaving like Jesus Barabbas, not Jesus Christ. Barabbas was a zealot, whose insistence that he was right led to murder, insurrection, and terrorism. Barabbas was, from one perspective, on the "right" side-he was a Jew who wanted to see the Roman oppressors leave his land-a laudable goal. But he went about his cause using the same methods as the Romans, which only perpetuated the violence.

In a way, we are given the same choice between Jesus Barabbas and Jesus Christ today. In fact, today, we don't even insist on innocent scapegoats; guilty ones, we've found, will do just as well-even better, perhaps, because our consciences can be clear that we've done the "right" thing in casting out or killing the scapegoat. And if we can't cast out or kill the scapegoat (whether literally or metaphorically), we can wash our hands of the whole mess and go off someplace where we can be right and righteous in peace. And that, my friends, is the temptation in our present conflict in the Episcopal Church, not to mention in our national life right now.

As I reflected upon this text, I became convinced that our church today is being sorely tempted to embrace legalism of one kind or another: either a liberal legalism that enforces a false inclusivity without accountability, or a conservative legalism that fosters a judgmental attitude that is self-righteous and excuses persecution of people because they are not "right." Each side has participated in what theologian James Alison calls "the sinful human world of mutual judgment and recrimination," and I'm sick of it. This mutual judgment and recrimination has got to stop if we want to follow Jesus Christ rather than Jesus Barabbas. But how can we stop this sort of scapegoating?

There is an alternative to scapegoating, to which Jesus testified as he stood before Pilate. That alternative is to cultivate a humility that refuses to sentence people for their crimes, that recognizes that we are not each others' judges, that refuses to participate in violence, that insists that there is only one righteous human: Jesus Christ. As Alison also points out, "Being wrong can be forgiven: it is insisting on being right that confirms our being bound in original murderous sin…[T]hose who insist on their own righteousness are the ones who suffer wrath, but it is not a divine wrath; it is the wrath of their own sacrificial machinery, bolstered by their own insistence on being righteous."³

We stand today on the brink of Advent, preparing for the coming of Christ as a babe in the manger and looking for the coming of Christ as the King who will judge the living and the dead at the end of all the ages. So it's appropriate that today, on this day of all days, we remember what Jesus himself said about why he came to be with us in the first place: "For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth."

"What is truth?" The answer to that question may be found in the image of a mocked and bloodied Jew, dressed in kingly raiment, sitting on the judgment seat in silence.