“The Kingdom of Truth in a Time of Fake News”
John 18:33–38
November 24, 2024
Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ Jesus answered, ‘Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?’ Pilate replied, ‘I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?’ Jesus answered, ‘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 to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.’ Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’ Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’
Across the world, millions of mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic Christians recognize today as “Christ the King Sunday” when the idea of calling Jesus our king is juxtaposed alongside images of political power in the world.
Globally, the focus on political leaders has been enormous this year. 64 countries (and the EU) have voted or will vote in national elections. In many, the results will prove consequential for years to come.
National election thrust issues of political power into our consciousness. Across the world people are seeing political upheaval as aggressive muscular politicians with nationalist agenda upend accepted orthodoxies of how politics works.
Christ the King Sunday and this passage from John 18 present a challenge to make sense of what this means
and what the good news of Jesus has to say in the face of it. Bear with me, you may be challenged during this read.
Two things emerge as I reflect on this passage. The first is the question of the relationship of Jesus’s kingdom to nationalist agendas. When Jesus says that his kingdom is not from this world, he is responding to Governor Pilate saying, “Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me.” Jesus answered, ‘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 to the Jews.” If Jesus responds to a question of his relationship to the nation, does this bear upon our relationship to this nation?
My second thought comes in what Jesus says about truth. “I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate’s response leaves me troubled, “What is truth?” He sems to dismiss Jesus’ statement as fake news. Perhaps the idea of fake news as a political tool is not so new. So what is Jesus saying to us in another era of fake news?
As politics around the world becomes more bizarre and extreme, this scene between Jesus and Pilate has some things to say to us.
When Governor Pilate interrogated Jesus, questions of national interest were at the heart of his interrogation. He starts with “Are you the King of the Jewish nation?” Pilate was the Roman governor with responsibility for making sure that the Jewish nation did not try to reassert its national independence and break out from under the rule of Rome. This meant that anyone who started to emerge as a new Jewish nationalist leader would be kept under control. Such a person had to pledge their allegiance to the status quo of Roman rule, or they were eliminated.
As Pilate points out, the Jesus case is unusual. In an era when it was common for zealots to pop up trying to rally an armed revolution against the Roman occupation forces, Jesus had not proclaimed himself king. He did not look like any kind of threat to law and order.
Oddly, the people sounding the alarm about Jesus and accusing him of setting himself up as a rival king were not the Roman secret service, but his fellow Jews.
So Pilate gets straight to the point, “Are you the King of the Jewish nation?” How Jesus replies is telling. “My kingdom is not from this world.” Notice he says it is not in this world or that it is not for this world. He says it is not from this world, illustrating the distinction that his followers are not taking up arms to fight for him.
Pilate understands perfectly. He recognizes that Jesus has said that his kingdom is not the Jewish nation, but that he has not actually said he is not a king. “So you are a king then?” Pilate asks. To which Jesus replies, “That’s your language, not mine.” Or in other words, “That might be the only way you can understand things, but it’s not how I’m thinking.”
In light of so much of modern political controversy, Jesus helps those who are concerned about the dangerous rise of leaders advancing nationalism. His help extends to Christians and others who are concerned about the increasing prevalence of Christian Nationalism.
In the Idaho Capital Sun this week, Heath Druzin writes about Christ Church, a controversial Christian nationalist church aiming to turn America into a theocracy and the city of Moscow into an explicitly Christian city, governed by Biblical principles. Led by Pastor Doug Wilson, he founded the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) which has congregations in nearly 50 states and foreign countries. Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth is a member of a CREC church in Tennessee. Wilson and his allies have a rigid patriarchal belief system and do not believe in the separation of church and state. They support taking away the right to vote from most women, barring non-Christians from holding office and criminalizing the LGBTQ+ community.
Jesus explicitly rejects both political and Christian nationalist agendas when he speaks of his own kingdom.
Emma Goldman (1869- 1940) a Lithuanian-born political activist and writer described nationalism as being grounded in “conceit, arrogance and egotism.” She said that it “assumes that our globe is divided into little spots and that those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves nobler, better, grander, more intelligent than those living beings inhabiting any other spot.” (Emma Goldman, What is Patriotism? Speech given in San Francisco in 1908)
Most scholars agree, says Paul Miller in “Christianity Today” 2/3/21, that “nationalism starts with the belief that humanity is divisible into mutually distinct, internally coherent cultural groups defined by shared traits like language, religion, ethnicity, or culture. From there, nationalists believe that these groups should each have their own governments; that governments should promote and protect a nation’s cultural identity; and that sovereign national groups provide meaning and purpose for human beings.”
Nationalism asserts the superiority and interests of a nation and its people over the interests of the rest of the world. Does “America First” ring a bell? It is an agenda Jesus wants nothing to do with. He makes it crystal clear in the Bible.
First, Jesus shows he has no time for nationalist views as he engages with a lawyer who asks him: “And who is my neighbor?” In response, Jesus tells the story of a Samaritan who helps a Jewish man who was attacked by robbers. Jews hated Samaritans and considered them “half-breeds.” Jesus makes clear that a neighbor is anyone in need, no matter what. (Luke 10).
Second, in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matthew 5:44) He goes further and refutes the teaching of some that we should hate our enemies.
Have you heard any professed Christian politician who embraces nationalism repeat Jesus’ call to love our enemies?
Jesus’ kingdom is not from this world. Rather, it is one that is grounded in loving others, even enemies. His kingdom and his follower do not fan the flames of fear against any group, race, religion, or ethnicity. Nationalist leaders do.
Jesus’ kingdom does not demonize people as a way of fueling nationalist sentiments in an attempt to unify people by inciting anger and then focusing that energy on a common enemy. This agenda, typical of Christian nationalists and political ones, too is not an agenda that receives any oxygen from Jesus.
Which brings me to the question of fake news, false information that is broadcast or published as news for fraudulent or politically motivated purposes. We hear a lot about fake news, but there are actually two different phenomena that attract this label. Related, but different. Political leaders dismiss inconvenient news as fake news. If climate change is fake news, then we do not need to come up with a solution to it.
But there is also genuinely fake news, about dog-eating immigrants, stolen ballots and vaccines which contain a microchip that allows corporations or governments to control or surveil those who have received it.
“What is truth?” asked Pilate. Jesus had already shared the answer. Apparently, Pilate ignored or forgot it: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6). Pilate’s question implies that truth is whatever he says it is.
When Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist was murdered in 2018 in a Turkish embassy the House of Saud put out four different explanations. They used a tactic of fake news which causes confusion so that, although no one really believes any of it, we lose track of what it is we are not believing and give up. “What is truth?” Pilate asked. The truth is that even murder will be overlooked if it is in national interests and maintains business with the perpetrators.
The tactics and practice of “fake news” are not new. Pilate knew all about them when he sneeringly dismissed Jesus’s claim to have come into the world to testify to the truth.
But Jesus’s words still sound a challenge as we consider where we stand as Christians and responsible citizens. “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Not the voice of Caesar, the President or those who stir up fear with spurious allegations about rigged elections, forced gender reassignment procedures or the government blocking aid to hurricane victims as a form of “voter suppression.” “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” The boundaries or interests of individual nations have nothing to do with it.
Christ the King Sunday calls us to pledge our allegiance to the self-giving, humble servant Jesus as our leader and the Truth that gives life. It is a call to faithful, Truth embracing Christians to work a little harder and move closer to living out Jesus’s kingdom of truth and inclusive love for all. The gospel makes clear, Jesus is no ally of nationalism or its politics.
Politics as we know it, and surely no politician, even a President is going to be our savior. Jesus alone comes to save us from our self-destructive hostilities, fears and chaos.
Once again in the story of humanity are we at a crucial time as fair-minded Christians to advocate and work for Jesus’ command to love all people and bring his salvific ways to life in these days. This means following him in his approach and like him, renouncing the ways of the kingdoms of this world that divide, embattle, diminish and belittle people.
Like Jesus, we renounce the forces who create and repeat fake news and instead witness to the truth of God’s all-inclusive love and care. We dismiss the wielders of power who believe only Christians should be in positions of government. We declare our allegiance to an entirely different kind of kingdom, a divine one that has no borders and no identity qualifiers.
This means we need to strengthen ourselves to the commitment to the Truth. This includes coming together often to be fed at the table with the Bread of Life and encouraged by the Word made flesh; to tend, encourage, and comfort one another for the journey through troubled times by unwavering allegiance to a very different kind of king who, rather than constantly asserting his own greatness, lays down his life for the love of all.
