John 18:33-37 (NRSV)
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.”
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"Please note, [John] doesn’t say, as some translations have put it, ‘my kingdom is not of this world’; that would imply that his ‘kingdom’ was altogether other-worldly, a spiritual or heavenly reality that had nothing to do with the present world at all. That is not the point. Jesus, after all, taught his disciples to pray that God’s kingdom would come ‘on earth as in heaven.’
"No: the point is that Jesus’ kingdom does not come from ‘this world.’ Of course it doesn’t. ‘The world,’ as we’ve seen again and again, is in John the source of evil and rebellion against God. Jesus is denying that his kingdom has a this-worldly origin or quality. He is not denying that it has a this-worldly destination. That’s why he has come into the world himself (verse 37), and why he has sent, and will send, his followers into the world (17.18; 20.21). His kingdom doesn’t come from this world, but it is for this world. That is the crucial distinction."
- N. T. Wright, John for Everyone (pp. 114-15)
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"The scene in John 18-19 has the hallmarks of the kind of hearing we might expect in a Roman provincial court, and it is this confrontation that lies at the heart of both the political and the theological meaning of the kingdom of God. Jesus has announced God’s kingdom and has also embodied it in what he has been doing. But it is a different sort of kingdom from anything that Pilate has heard of or imagined: a kingdom without violence (18:36), a kingdom not from this world, but emphatically, through the work of Jesus, for this world."
- N. T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why It Matters, pg. 183
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"The title [“King of the Jews” that Pilate places above Jesus' head on the cross] is, of course, heavily ironic. Pilate knows that Jesus doesn’t conform to any meaning of the word “king” with which he is familiar. Jesus himself, as we saw, had redefined “kingship” in his conversation with the governor, insisting that his kind of kingship meant bearing witness to the truth (18:37). But now readers are invited to join together the two points, which Pilate was never going to do - the two points that, ironically, much Christian interpretation has also found very hard to combine.
"Readers are invited to join together not simply a Johannine “incarnational” theology with a Johannine “redemption” theology. Both of those are there, but the middle term between them is once again the evangelist’s kingdom theology. As Paul saw, the rulers of this age didn’t understand what they were doing when they crucified the Lord of glory (1 Cor. 2:8). As the Irish-American New Testament scholar Dominic Crossan commented on Matthew’s story of Pilate’s wife having bad dreams about Jesus (Matt. 27:19), it was time for the Roman Empire to start having nightmares. Sending Jesus to his death was assisting in the enthronement of the one whose bringing of justice to the nations flowed out of his sovereign, healing love (John 13:1).
"The point for our present purpose is that, in all four gospels, readers are strongly urged to see Jesus’s death as explicitly “royal,” explicitly “messianic” - in other words, explicitly to do with the coming of the “kingdom.” Jesus has, all along, been announcing that God’s kingdom was coming. His followers might well have expected that this announcement would lead to a march on Jerusalem, where Jesus would do whatever it took to complete what he had begun. And they were right - but not at all in the sense they expected or wanted. That is what the evangelists are saying through this particular moment in the story. This is how the kingdom is to come, the kingdom of God, which Jesus has been announcing and, as Messiah, inaugurating.
"This point needs little elaboration in relation to the synoptic gospels, but we may continue to stress it in relation to John, who is not so often seen as a theologian of the “kingdom.” In fact, however, as we have already seen, John 18-19 offers an explosion of dense and detailed kingdom theology, so that when we meet the titulus in John 19:19, we read it with a special and heightened irony, coming as it does at the conclusion of Pilate’s debate with Jesus, on the one hand, and with the Jewish leaders, on the other, about kingdom, truth, power, and Caesar. Jesus, John is saying, is the true king whose kingdom comes in a totally unexpected fashion, folly to the Roman governor and a scandal to the Jewish leaders.
"In all four gospels, then, there is no drawing back. This is the coming of the kingdom, the sovereign rule of Israel’s God arriving on earth as in heaven, exercised through David’s true son and heir. It comes through his death. The fact that the kingdom is redefined by the cross doesn’t mean that it isn’t still the kingdom. The fact that the cross is the kingdom-bringing event doesn’t mean that it isn’t still an act of horrible and brutal injustice, on the one hand, and powerful, rescuing divine love, on the other. The two meanings are brought into dramatic and shocking but permanent relation."
- N. T. Wright, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, pp. 219-20
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"So, we are brought to the end of the Church's year with this extraordinary, dynamic picture of how Jesus occupied the space of shepherd and of king, of scapegoat and of voice that speaks the truth, revealing not merely a different system of power but that underneath all our apparently solid but in fact incredibly fake systems of power there is an entirely different understanding of power, one that is immensely friendly to us, likes us, wants to hold us in being, wants to invite us in, wants to speak us out of our worlds of idolatry and confusion. And that that is how the kingship of Christ is exercised in our midst, and that we are invited each year to find our way into occupying that same space and spreading that voice, listening to it, occupying its space and making it more alive for all of those around us."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King 2021" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5-fWn6baKo)
[Source of N.T. Wright quotes, and for analysis and discussion on all this week's lectionary texts: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-b/xrstkingb/]
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