The passage: Pilate asked, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say I am a king. For this I was born and came into the world: to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice’ (John xviii. 37).
Pilate asks whether Jesus is a king, after hearing that his kingdom is not of this world. Jesus answers that he is indeed a king, but not as the world understands it. He could have had its rank and rule: with his disciples and twelve legions of angels he could have thrown the Romans into the abyss after the nations they had already tumbled in. He could easily have been the just king the Jews dreamed of—never seen anywhere, yet always haunting the hopes of the poor and their helpers—ruling the nations under Rome from Jerusalem, and not only handing out what people call justice but forcing atonement. But he did not care for government; it would not serve his Father’s aims or satisfy his own heart. What was perfect empire to the Son of God, compared with helping one person love his neighbour and be good like his Father, for that person’s joy and the Father’s glory? That was where true kingship began. He would rather wash his tired brothers’ feet than be the one perfect monarch the world ever had. It was empire he rejected when he told Satan to get behind him like a dog to heel.
What then is the kingdom he cares to reign over, since he says he came to be a king? A kingdom of kings and no other: only where every person is a king does he care to reign, in his Father’s name. As no European king would want to rule cannibals, savages or animals, he has no wish to rule anything this world calls a nation: a king must rule his own kind. He is king not by conquest, inheritance or election but by what he essentially is, and his subjects must be kings in the same way, by nature. In his kingdom no one tries to be above another; ambition is the dirt of the world’s kingdoms. He says: ‘I am a king, born to bear witness to the truth. Everyone of my kind, who is of the truth, hears my voice; he is a king like me, and one of my subjects.’ Pilate, like most Christians today, asks for a definition of truth, in set terms for his intellect, instead of setting about being true. But at once, whether sure the inquiry is useless or planning to resume it once Jesus is freed, he goes out and tells the people he finds no fault in him. Whatever we make of that, he is far less to blame than ‘Christians’ who, instead of working to be pure ‘even as he is pure,’ to look after their brothers and sisters, and to serve God by being honest at work, ‘serve’ him by going to church or chapel, condemning their neighbours’ opinions, or teaching others what they ignore themselves. Neither Pilate nor they ask the one true question: how am I to become a true man, a man worth being? The Lord is a king because his whole life—thought, imagination, will and every smallest act—is true: true to God, because he is altogether his; true to himself, because he forgets himself altogether; true to others, because he will bear whatever they do to him and never stop declaring himself the son, messenger and likeness of God. They will kill him, but it doesn’t matter: the truth is as he says!
Jesus is a king because his business is to bear witness to the truth: all of it, every true relation in the universe, first that his Father is perfectly good, and that the crown and joy of life is to want and do the will of the source of all will and life. That deals hell’s power its death-blow. For hell has one principle: ‘I am my own, my own king and subject, the centre my thoughts go out from and return to. My glory and pleasure are my chief concern; my ambition, to draw all eyes to myself. My kingdom is all I can make acknowledge my greatness; my judgment is the faultless rule of things; my right is what I want. The more I am everything to myself, the greater I am: the less I admit I owe anyone, the more I forget I did not make myself, the more self-sufficient I feel, the greater I am. I will be free to do whatever I feel inclined to do, wherever the inclination comes from. To do my own will, as long as I feel anything to be my will, is to be free, is to live.’ To this principle of hell and of the world, whether preached or only lived, the king gives the flat lie. It is as if he said: ‘I ought to know: I have been from all eternity the son of the one you come from, whom you call your father but will not have as one. I know all he thinks and is, and my perfect freedom, my pure individuality, rests on my having no will but his, because his will is right. He is righteousness itself, love, fairness and self-giving, and he wants his children to be like him. I was born to bear witness to the truth by being it in my own person, the likeness and visible form of the God who is true. My very being is his witness: he is the truth, and I am the truth. Kill me, but while I live I say: as I am, he is. If I said I did not know him I would be a liar, and should a king who has come to say what is true turn his back for fear of people? I say my Father is like me, and you hate to hear it because you are not like him. I look low to you because you judge by show, so you call it blasphemy; but it would be blasphemy to say he is what you imagine, since you love show, power and people’s praise. I do not, and God is like me. Kill me and I will rise again; you cannot keep me dead. Death is my servant; you are its slaves, because you will not be true and let the truth make you free. Bound and in your hands, I am as free as God, because God is my father. I know I will suffer to the death, and if you knew my Father you would be ready for it too. He is my strength. My Father is greater than I.’
Remember, friends, I said ‘It is as if he said.’ I am daring to offer a shadow of the Lord’s witness, surely cast by his deeds and words; if I am wrong, he will forgive me. I fear only that, seeing and writing these things, I may fail to witness and prove a castaway: a talker, not a king; an arguer about the truth, not a disciple ready to die with him; a hater of lies about God who is himself a liar, speaking the truth but not doing it.
So the Lord witnessed to the one God, the Truth, by standing as he was before the eyes and lies of men. The true king stands up true, speaks the truth, and will die rather than lie. His robes may be rags or purple; it makes no difference, though rags are likelier. The Lord was most royally dressed when his robes were a mockery. Of those who witnessed before Christ, some were sawn apart and some conquered kingdoms; it made no difference which.
The truth is God; the witness to it is Jesus. Its kingdom is human hearts. Human happiness is the true God. God’s thought is the truth of everything, and all well-being lies in true relation to him. Whoever answers this with his whole being is of the truth. Whoever knows these things and sees them to be true, but does not run his life, actions, judgments and love by them, is the worst kind of liar: hand, foot and face scorn what his tongue confesses.
The sons of Zebedee and their ambitious mother little knew what the throne of Christ’s glory was, which they begged to share. The king crowned by his witness witnessed most fully when he hung on the cross like a sin, as Paul boldly says: treated as a liar, he still gave his witness. High on the cross, the throne of his witness, he holds to it: ‘I and the Father are one.’ Every mockery endured is a fresh witness. He witnessed far more when Pilate brought him out for the last time, perhaps seated on the judgment seat in mock royal robes, saying ‘Behold your king!’, than if he had sat on the throne of the whole earth. Because of that robe, crown, sceptre and throne of ridicule, he was the only real king who ever sat on any throne.
Is every Christian expected to bear witness? Anyone content to bear none is not in the kingdom of heaven: whoever believes, whoever sees the truth, must live as its witness. Is our life, in bank, farm, home, shop and study, a witness to the truth, or are we petty, self-serving, world-flattering, fawning slaves, who smile when contempt is poured on the truth and say nothing when it is wronged in front of us? We needn’t argue and defend it with logic, but we must show we are on its side. By truth I do not mean opinion: treating opinion as truth wrongs the truth. A soul that loves the truth and tries to be true will know when to speak and when to be silent, but will never look as if it does not care. We need not say all we think, but we must not even look as if we thought what we do not. The girl who said before a company of mocking companions, ‘I believe in Jesus,’ witnessed truly to her Master, the Truth. David witnessed to God, the Truth, when he said that mercy belongs to the Lord, who repays everyone according to his work.