Luke
23:1-12 * March 12, 2008 *
Midweek Lent 6 * Dr. Mark Braun
CLOSE
ENCOUNTERS OF THE DIVINE KIND
The series you have been following
this Lent is called “Crossroads,” and the play on words is obvious. You have
been making stops along the road that leads, ultimately, to Jesus’ cross.
But let’s look at that word crossroads, with no play on words. The
crossroads is where two roadways meet; we are more likely to call them
“intersections.” Civil engineers design our busiest intersections today so that
drivers do not have an actual encounter but that each line of traffic can keep
moving. Crossroads became places where people from different lands and nations
met one another, where cities grew, were goods were exchanged and products
sold. Crossroads were guarded by soldiers, and battles were fought to control
them. One of the most significant crossroads in
The crossroads you have heard about this Lenten season were almost
always deliberate and planned encounters: Jesus with His disciples, explaining
the future of His ministry; a hastily convened but carefully orchestrated
“trial” before the religious leadership of the Sanhedrin; an agreed-upon locale
in an olive orchard where Judas had arranged to meet Jesus and where soldiers
could seize Him. Even the most unusual story of the season—where Jesus came
upon and cursed a fig tree along the road—occurred because Jesus made a
deliberate, though unsettling, decision to use that tree as a teaching tool.
Tonight’s crossroads is different.
Luke tells us about two men who had no intention of having an encounter with
Jesus, who met Him almost by accident, and who wanted to be done with that encounter as soon as possible.
That is in fact the theme of this message tonight; it is about
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE
DIVINE KIND
I.
Two
judges who wanted only to be rid of Him; meet
II.
One
defendant whose case can never be dismissed
I
The story of Jesus’ appearance
before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor—more accurately, procurator—is told by all four writers of the Gospels, and more is
told by the other three than by Luke. Matthew tells how Pilate received the
troubled message of his wife, “Don’t
have anything to do with that innocent man.” Pilate presented the mob with
the choice of having any one criminal released—Jesus or, the worst he could
find, Barabbas. When the mob chose Barabbas to be freed and Jesus crucified,
Pilate called for water and a towel publicly to wash his hands of any
responsibility for what happened to Jesus (Matthew
27:11-24).
John, who relates the most about the
encounter between Pilate and Jesus, pictures Jesus showing unbending courage
before Pilate, engaging him in strong conversation, as Pilate grows
increasingly fearful: who—or what—was he dealing with here? Pilate loses
control of his courtroom and gives in to the mob when they threaten him, “If you let this man go, you are no friend
of Caesar” (John 19:12).
Luke gives us a more condensed
version but gets to the heart of why Pilate felt obligated to hear this
case—and why he wanted to be rid of it: “We have found this man subverting our nation. He opposes payment of taxes
to Caesar and claims to be Christ, a king.” So Pilate asked Jesus, “Are you the
king of the Jews?” “Yes, it is as you say,” Jesus replied. Then Pilate
announced to the chief priests and the crowd, “I find no basis for a charge
against this man.” Pilate, according to Luke, then grasped at a convenient
dodge to be rid of Him: Jesus’ accusers mentioned, almost incidentally, that
Jesus had been stirring up trouble all the way to
You would think that this case,
“Jewish Sanhedrin vs. Jesus of Nazareth, case number whatever,” would have been
relatively unimportant to a man like Pontius Pilate. With all the authority of
the Empire behind him, he should have ruled on it easily. Why was Pilate so
eager to be rid of Him?
Christian author Philip Yancey, in
his book The Jesus I Never Knew,
wrote:
In
a span of less than twenty four hours, Jesus faced as many as six
interrogations. . . . In the end an exasperated governor pronounced the
harshest verdict permitted under Roman law. As I read the trial transcripts,
Jesus’ defenselessness stands out. Not a single witness rose to his
defense. No leader had the nerve to speak out against injustice. Not even Jesus
tried to defend himself. . . . The trial sequence has a “pass-the-buck”
quality. No one seems willing to accept full responsibility for executing
Jesus, yet everyone wants him disposed of. . . . Focusing on all the
irregularities in the trials risks missing the main point: Jesus posed a
genuine threat to the establishment in
Only Luke tells about the encounter
with Herod. There was, of course, an entire family of Herods who remained on
the scene of local Palestinian politics for more than a century; most of them
are never mentioned in the Bible. Whenever we hear Herod, we tend to think of the first one, Herod the Great, the builder, administrator, political opportunist,
and murderous genius, who would kill his favorite wife and some of his children
and who must have thought nothing of murdering the baby boys in
The Herod here is Herod Antipas, one of his sons. Antipas
apparently inherited few of the gifts of his father. Luke says, When Herod saw Jesus, he was greatly
pleased, because for a long time he had been wanting to see him. From what he
had heard about him, he hoped to see him perform some miracle. Popular
portrayals of this Herod depict him buffoonish and cartoonish. In Jesus Christ Superstar, this Herod was played by a young Josh
Mostel, son of the more famous actor Zero Mostel, and at least one critic at
the time suggested that Josh had inherited more “Zero” than “Mostel.” He
strutted across the screen overfed,
shirtless but not manly, presiding over a pool party of freaks, bursting
into Vaudevillian-sounding, ragtime song, “So, you are the Christ, the Great
Jesus Christ! Prove to me that You’re no fool—walk across my swimming pool!” In The
Passion of the Christ, this Herod
was creepier: still a drunken party boy with still drunker party boy friends
around him, with a dark, Belushi-esque quality. “Is it true that you restore
sight to the blind?” he asked. “Raise men from the dead?” After a moment:
“Where do you get your power? Are you the one whose birth was foretold?”
Another moment: “Are you a king? How about me? Will you work a little miracle
for me?” Then, bursting into laughter: “Take this stupid fool out of my sight.
He’s not guilty of a crime; he’s just crazy.” When Jesus would not do tricks
for him, would not answer him at all, this Herod made his own fun, dressing
Jesus up as a king and mocking Him, then got rid of him too, sending him back
to Pilate.
Luke adds an intriguing final
detail: That day Herod and Pilate became
friends—before this they had been enemies. One is tempted to remark that
with a new friend like the other, each needed no more new enemies.
Why did this close encounter of the
divine kind turn out as it did for Pilate and Herod? Why could they hardly wait
to be rid of Him? Surely, because it was not the kind of divine encounter they
may have expected. Would they have imagined a grand display of splendor and
power, a Messiah who would dazzle with shock and awe, then storm them into
submission? Jesus was surely not that—yet there was something unnerving about
Him, enough that Pilate scrambled to be rid of Him. Jesus made Pilate
uncomfortable. Herod—probably had a pretty short attention span, spiritual or
otherwise. “Next time send me someone who’s fun!”
Could Jesus, if He came today,
provoke enough response from people to have Him crucified? “If Jesus Christ
were to come today,” Thomas Carlyle once said, “people would not crucify him.
They would ask him to dinner, hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.”
II
So when Herod and Pilate got home
that night, kicked off their sandals, loosened their togas and fell into bed,
do you think they had any lasting recollection that they had had an encounter
that day with the divine?
Who is to say? But the haunting
comments Jesus made to Pilate, particularly those recorded by John, may not
have evaporated so easily. “My kingdom
is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest.
. . . My kingdom is from another place. . . . You are right in saying that I am
a king. . . . Everyone on the side of truth listens to me. . . . You would have
no power over me if it were not given you from above” (John 18:36-37; 19:11). Christ
Jesus,
Just as telling is the utter silence
Jesus gave Herod. But what can one learn from silence? Jesus said once, “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not
throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet,
and then turn and tear you to pieces” (Matthew 7:6). There is something
refreshing in those words. Jesus went to extraordinary lengths, and paid a
great personal cost, to restore us to His Father’s family. He seeks us, woos
us, to be His. Yet Jesus is no spiritual-Sally-Field-at-the-Oscars, “Now you like me, you really like me.” What He
comes to bring, He brings freely, but if we despise the treasure He brings, He
will take it to others who will embrace it.
This is the second truth about every
Close Encounter of the Spiritual Kind, for Herod or Pilate and all of us: Jesus
is the one Defendant whose case can never be dismissed.
He came because He and His Father so loved the world (John 3:16). He came
to seek and to save what was lost (Luke
19:10). He came to give his life as a ransom for many (Matthew
20:28). He came to reconcile not just Herod to Pilate but the world to His
heavenly Father (2 Corinthians 5:19). He
came to redeem us, not with gold or silver but with His holy precious blood,
and with His innocent suffering and death (1
Peter 1:18-19). For the joy set before him, He endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right h and
of the throne of God (Hebrews 12:2). Part of all He endured was the
spinelessness of Pilate and the uselessness of Herod, but He cannot be
dismissed. They crucified Him, He rose and ascended to heaven, but none of us
can dismiss Him.
C.S. Lewis said that on the great
day of the King’s final triumph, there will only be two kinds of people: those
who say to God, “You will be done,” and those to whom God will say, “All right—your will be done.” Since every one of
is destined for a final encounter with the divine, the small and apparently
incidental encounters in this life taken on greater significance. The words we
offer or we hear, explaining the meaning of Jesus; the moments spent in contact
with His Word; remembering the unimpressive looking handfuls of water poured on
us in our Baptisms; the equally unimpressive-looking swallow of bread and wine
in the Sacrament; words of warning over sinful actions; words of comfort as
someone we love faces the final hours of this life—these are preparations for
the ultimate encounter that is coming for each of us.
We have the words and promises of
God to assure us that our Close Encounter of the Divine Kind will have a happy
ending. Amen.