Have you ever gotten into a fight as a kid—maybe with a sibling—where, once you were already in trouble, you just kept going?
“Well, I’m already going to get grounded... might as well say the thing, slam the door, throw the final punch.”
It’s not exactly a clean parallel to what’s happening in John 19, but I can’t help but wonder if there’s something like that in the minds of the religious leaders. They’re already in deep. Their hatred of Jesus has already taken them further than they might have imagined at first. But instead of pulling back, they double down.
And then they say it: “We have no king but Caesar.”
It’s hard to imagine a more tragic sentence coming from the mouths of the religious leaders of Israel. They who had the Psalms. The Prophets. The covenant. The hope. The commandments. They who knew exactly what a statement like that meant.
But that’s what hate does. That’s what fear does. That’s what self-preservation does when it takes the wheel. It blinds. It distorts. And when a scapegoat presents himself, everything ugly we’ve hidden away gets hurled at him.
It’s easy to shake our heads from a distance. But history has shown that this dynamic repeats itself—again and again. Entire groups of people have been scapegoated, demonized, cast aside in moments of cultural pressure and fear. Often even by the religious.
This moment in John 19 is more than just the next step toward the cross. It’s the full display of human distortion. A moment when power speaks louder than truth, when hate feels safer than surrender, and when people who should know better say the quiet part out loud.
And Jesus stands silent.
John 19:12-16
From that moment on, Pilate wanted to release Jesus.
However, the Jewish leaders cried out, saying, “If you release this man, you aren’t a friend of the emperor! Anyone who makes himself out to be a king opposes the emperor!”
When Pilate heard these words, he led Jesus out and seated him on the judge’s bench at the place called Stone Pavement (in Aramaic, Gabbatha). It was about noon on the Preparation Day for the Passover. Pilate said to the Jewish leaders, “Here’s your king.”
The Jewish leaders cried out, “Take him away! Take him away! Crucify him!”
Pilate responded, “What? Do you want me to crucify your king?”
“We have no king except the emperor,” the chief priests answered. Then Pilate handed Jesus over to be crucified.
The soldiers took Jesus prisoner.
Psalm 146:3-5
Don’t trust leaders; don’t trust any human beings—there’s no saving help with them! Their breath leaves them, then they go back to the ground. On that very same day, their plans die too. The person whose help is the God of Jacob—the person whose hope rests on the Lord their God—is truly happy!
Prayer
God,
We confess how easily fear distorts us. How quickly we retreat into blame and how quietly we justify our anger when we feel threatened. We don’t want to believe we could ever say something like “We have no king but Caesar,” but in our silence, our compromises, and our self-preservation, maybe we already have. Forgive us. Teach us to see clearly, even when the crowd is loud. Help us follow Christ, who stood silent in the face of hate, who refused to return evil for evil, and who took the weight of our distortions into his own flesh.
By your Spirit and in Christ,
Amen.