The Gospels writers somehow plumb the depths of meaning with simple phrases and stories, such as Pontius Pilate’s response to Jesus: “What is truth?” These words coming from a Roman governor to the arrested carpenter could not be more loaded with meaning. These are like Easter eggs dropped into the text without any fanfare. They don’t even appear suspicious on first pass. There’s no exposition or discussion. In this case, it’s a simple question, but it speaks volumes. The writer just moves on. It’s like a James Joyce kind of move, except James Joyce did it on purpose, while the Gospel writers don’t seem to craft these intricate, concise jaw-droppers intentionally. The lines are just there. The lines are there because they are writing what happened, as as the saying goes, “The truth needs no rehearsal.” That’s the strange thing about reading these events and teachings and parables, because the words never stop revealing further depth. You skip over these lines and come back ten years later and see something new. You read them the third or fourth time, and your eyes pop out of your head, as a new angle on a phrase appears lit up, under a glow that you somehow never noticed before.

Those three words from Pilate sum up the question that the entire Bible is answering, because Pilate speaks to the truth, whose name is Jesus, and tells him that there is no such thing as truth. The statement reads like a confession, or maybe a statement of faith, as Pilate is looking at the truth and doesn’t recognize it. Pilate does recognize that there is no sin or crime in Jesus, but he’s not interested in justice or mercy, he’s interested in keeping the peace. He’s in the dilemma of a position of power, where doing the right thing must be sacrificed for the proverbial “greater good.” But he is nervous and unsure. The whole situation has both his wife and him rattled. They know something is different about this man, and it seems that the ones in power are slowly becoming aware that the return of the king is near. The Roman foundation of life is for the first time feeling shaky. The false gods are being put on notice.

In his position of power, Pilate stands face to face with Jesus and seems for a brief moment drawn to the truth, before his worldly power yanks him back. Nicodemus, the Pharisee, had a similar interaction, where he was drawn in to the truth, but his status in the community pulled him back in, like Michael Corleone in the Godfather. Neither Pilate nor Nicodemus can reach escape velocity from the orbits their lives have settled into. For Nicodemus the situation is even harder because he wants to believe, but can’t let go of his pride of position and his legalist vision of God. The transactional version of God is a false god just like Zeus, so Pilate and Nicodemus both live under a false god. The one who seems to fully recognize Jesus as the savior is Caiaphas, the high priest, because he knows that Jesus must be killed in order to preserve his worldly power.

Caiaphas tattles on himself, about his worldview, and about his love of power, even more that Pilate does. Pilate is kind of a stooge here, representing the fallen world after the Tower of Babel. He is one of these “scattered” kings, a symbol of the nations who scratch and claw for worldly power. But Caiaphas is meant to be the high priest of the temple in Jerusalem, the leader of those who are set apart for the one God. As the high priest of the Jewish temple, Caiaphas has been appointed to his position of power by Pilate’s predecessor. In other words there is a major problem here.

Do you see the problem? I know this gets weird with the old names, and who is in charge of what, and who or what is a Sadducee or a Pharisee or a Roman, and all of that. But here’s the diamond in the rough. Caiaphas is in bed with Rome.

Just like Solomon, just like Ahab, just like Lot, just like Jeroboam, so is Caiaphas. What has he done? He has rejected the one true God. Of course, he thinks he has not, but he most certainly has, since his job was given to him by the pagan rulers, the Romans. The reason Jesus flips out in the temple and chases out the money lenders and the cattle, is because Caiaphas is a stooge of a stooge. He claims to represent God, the one God, but he’s turned the temple into a Roman beer hall, Texas pit barbecue restaurant, and outlet mall. In other words, he has let the culture in and by doing so rejected the one true God. We all know that Pilate is in bed with false gods; he’s a Roman, so of course he is. But Caiaphas, of all people, cannot be playing around with Uranus! (I’m sorry…I had to go there. I had to. It needed to be said.)

Caiaphas might as well put a statue of Uranus’s grandchild, Zeus, right in the middle of the temple, on a pedestal, because that is what he’s done in spirit. He has allowed the many gods to take over, making the Jews no different from the world. The temple is no longer treated as sacred for the one God. Instead, it’s a place of transactions, just like the any other false slot-machine god of the pagan world. Caiaphas and the high priests have corrupted the temple. Abraham’s steps toward restoring faith in the one god has been steered off course, right into the arms of the many gods. Caiaphas has led the people to stop swimming against the current, and he has turned them around to flow with the mainstream. This ruins the whole project of the chosen people, because the word chosen means choosing the one true God. The moment they stop choosing God, there is no specialness about them. They are just another tribe or nation who prop up objects as gods and project their own desires onto that god.

I hope this makes sense. No one expects Pilate to worship the true God, but Caiaphas is supposed to do just that. The question of “What is truth?” could have come from Caiaphas just as easily as Pilate, because Caiaphas is only after earthly power as well. They are both painted into corners by their lust for power and glory, and neither can get out of it. But Caiaphas recognizes the danger much earlier and takes action to protect his power, to deny the true God, and goes all the way. Once he recognizes Jesus as the messiah, Caiaphas knows that he has to make sure that Jesus is killed.

The Pharisees have a meeting with Caiaphas, who is a Sadducee, and these two groups don’t much care for each other at all. The fact that they meet at all speaks loudly regarding their fear of what Jesus represents. It’s hard to imagine that a wandering carpenter who is healing people could generate such concern, but this is exactly what happens.

In this meeting, the holy men discuss the raising of Lazarus from the dead. For us today, we don’t know what to make of the idea of Jesus bringing Lazarus back to life. It’s a bizarre and almost unbelievable story. This would have been just as unbelievable to Caiaphas and Nicodemus and Pilate and everyone else in those days. Just because they lived in that time doesn’t mean they were stupid, it just means they didn’t have smart phones. If they thought Jesus raising Lazarus was a hoax or a lie, they would not have gathered. If he was just some nutjob wandering about, they would have ignored him. This is always the best way to handle a conspiracy theorist or crazy person: you let them make their own case, because discerning people will eventually see them as nutjobs. No intervention is required by government to convince people that the crazy uncle is crazy. Organizations and powerful people who despise one another don’t convene meetings to discuss how to handle a problem, unless they legitimately see a problem that will threaten their way of life.

The Pharisee and Sadducee meeting in John 11 is like the meetings of the five families in mafia movies, where they gather to set aside differences in order to devise a plan to take out a common enemy that presents an existential threat. Anyone who reads or watches mafia movies knows this is exactly what these meetings are for. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” (Another famous one is “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” which is a line that could almost make Nicodemus suspect in his clandestine meeting with Jesus, but that’s the kind of speculation that I need to leave alone, because I can invent my own conspiracy theory very easily if I go down that rabbit-hole.)

The meeting in John 11 is critical to understand in terms of the scope of the entire Bible, because that is the moment where the decision is made to pursue execution of Jesus. The leader of the meeting is Caiaphas, but they all clearly understand what is happening with Jesus. “If we leave him alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation.” (Jn 11:45-53)

Do you see what they are trying to protect? They don’t care if Jesus is actually the messiah, the savior. No, they are worried about “our land and our nation.” In other words, they want stuff. They want power. They are operating under the assumption that their role is not serving the one true God, but rather the land and the nation. This shows their cards. They give away their motives.

Why does this matter? It matters because the covenant of Abraham was not only about land and nationhood. If that’s all it was about, then the Bible could have been wrapped up in the book of Joshua. The promised land was to be the sign of the greater promise. The greater promise was to bring a blessing upon “all peoples on earth.” The promise to Abraham about the land and nation has already been completed long before the meeting between Caiaphas and the Pharisees, but they are still clinging to that, instead of the greater promise to bless all people of the planet earth. The land is the sign of the covenant, but not the main payload. It’s only the toy, not the Happy Meal. If the promise was only about land and nationhood, that’s already been done. The book of Joshua even states that the sign of this covenant is complete (Joshua 21:43-45). The cheese stands alone in Joshua. All is well. They have the land, the nation, and it even says, “Not a single word of the blessing that the LORD had promised to the house of Israel failed; it all came true.”

So what’s left? If it all came true in Joshua, what is the rest of the Bible about? Because Joshua is pretty early on, being the 6th book of the Bible. What are the rest of the books about, if the land and nation is the whole point?

To understand what the rest of the Old Testament is about, you have to read the actual terms of the Old Covenant, which Caiaphas and the Pharisees seem to have forgotten about. So it’s worth reading so that we can see there are parts to it, in order. The order matters.

The Lord said to Abram: Go forth from your land, your relatives, and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.

That’s part one. Abraham needs to get out of town. He needs to leave the pagan world of his family and become a nomad. He cannot live among the culture of his hometown where they all cheer for the false moon god on Friday nights. He must set his family apart from the culture of the world. Keep in mind, these lines directly follow the Tower of Babel story, which is the story of how the nations have been scattered and worship false gods. To worship the one God, he must not mingle with cultures who worship false gods.

I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

That’s part two. God makes Abraham a great nation which comes to fulfillment in Joshua. Also, Abraham is clearly famous because I’m sitting here thinking of him about 4,000 years after he lived, making him the greatest influencer of all time. TikTok and Instagram fame is pathetic in comparison, no matter how many followers they have. Abraham has literally had billions by now. The checkboxes for part two of the covenant have been checked. This part of the covenant marks the “sign” that God is serious and that he will do all that he says in the third part. This is how covenants seem to work, where there is a sign for us to see and know, and a greater promise, a spiritual promise that transcends our puny desires and goals.

I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. All the families of the earth will find blessing in you.

That’s part three. That’s the big promise. And this promise extends way beyond land and nationhood into the spiritual realm. In fact, God implies that nationhood might not be so important in the end, because he’s talking about “all the families of the earth” finding a common blessing through Abraham. Somehow, someway, there is going to be a unifying blessing through Abraham.

So the blessing is what the prophets are all talking about. This blessing, this mysterious blessing is what everyone is pondering from the book of Judges onward. All the talk of the the messianic figure is about this blessing. The blessing in the last part of the covenant is not about land, or nationhood. This is about something spiritual and higher than the small cookies we want to eat here on earth.

Caiaphas may know all about the prophecies of the coming savior, but he doesn’t care. He knows his power will be lost if Jesus is allowed to live. In his external life he pretends to know and worship the one God, but he is actually in love with his power. He is just like Pilate and will do whatever it takes to keep that power. At the meeting, he admits what he is really after, and that is power for the nation, not the blessing for “all the families of the earth.”

Caiaphas…said to them, “You know nothing, nor do you consider that it is better for you that one man should die instead of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish.” (Jn 11:49-50)

Caiaphas clearly doesn’t think Jesus is crazy. If he did, there would be no motive to want him dead. This is powerful testimony by Caiaphas to show how serious people were taking these miracles and signs that Jesus was performing. If Jesus was an obvious charlatan, they would have left him alone. He would have been like any street-artist in Vegas who wows the tourists. The threat he presents goes way beyond someone who wows people for tips. If he was a political agitator, the words of this meeting would have been different. As it reads, there is zero concern about Jesus rallying an army or seeking glory as a political leader. Someone in the meeting says, “If we leave him alone, all will believe in him…”

This is a huge distinction to be aware of, because this threat is not physical or political. The speaker does not say, “all will take up arms” or, “all will fight for this man.” No, the voice says “all will believe in him.” What the attendees of this meeting are worried about is that Jesus is winning the hearts of people and completely changing their system of belief. And what is it exactly that this shift of belief is about? It’s about him. They will “believe in him.” Every word of this meeting is full of meaning. The people are not converting to some new kind of political ideology or national patriotism, they are converting to believe in him, only him. Why is that a concern? Because Jesus is not them. He is a sole, single person that stands outside of the Roman and Jewish world. What scares them all is that the belief in him means the rejection of the existing power structure, a turning away from that which currently holds sway in the world. And that is, of course, exactly what is happening, because this is the whole point of the story of the Bible, which is to turn people away from the false gods back to the one God.

The attendees of this meeting truly do see what’s happening, and Caiaphas does most certainly. The belief in him will turn the existing world upside down, which to them is right-side up. Pilate thinks the world of many gods is the right-side up. Caiaphas thinks his dabbling with Uranus is right-side up. Nicodemus thinks his legalistic punch-card version of God is right-side up. None of them can see that they live in the upside-down world. They are spiritually blind, like most of us today. They understand the threat, because at this meeting they admit, in fear, that belief in him is what is going to flip the entire world around. The shocking part is that two of these groups, Caiaphas and the Pharisees, think they are the ones that are keeping the flame alive, that they are the watchers who are looking for the one who will bring this blessing to “all the families of the world,” but when that blessing shows up they immediately want it to go away.

The threat comes from what they can see happening, as the converted make no sense. The people who believe in him no longer live like the mainstream. They have a kind of faith and hope in the person of Jesus, that neither the Romans nor the Jews could ever muster by force or through incentives. They can see people changing completely once they believe in Jesus. What is the change? People stop responding to fear and start living for love of Christ. The greatest threat of all here is that this cannot be explained, because Pilate, Caiaphas, and the Pharisees are all accustomed to living in a world that makes sense. They cannot explain it, which scares them, and the reason it scares them is because they haven’t actually thought about the one God in a long time, because no one can explain the one God. That’s how you can tell when someone is full of hot air about knowing God today, because they claim to be on his level. No one can overrule the one God. No one can fully grok the one God. We can sense his presence, through this strange mix of nearness and impossible distance, but we cannot fully know or explain it, because when we contemplate his glory it exceeds our imagination by infinity, yet somehow he reaches us. When you tune in to the one God, you experience a fear and love that result in utter humility before such power. What the powers of the world fear is uncertainty, the unknown, the void, the chaos, the infinite. That is also what we as individuals fear. They want control, total control, and because they see people surrendering their lives to Jesus, they see that control slipping away, that their false gods are powerless, meaningless. The conch shell has the same power as Pilate, which is none. The pig-head on a stick is as weak a god as whatever Caiaphas worships. That is why they know that Jesus must go. Just like Jack on the island in Lord of the Flies, this meeting is just like Jack saying, “I'm warning you. I'm going to get angry. D'you see? You're not wanted. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island!”

What Jack, the Romans, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and every other nation and group fail to admit is that they are not having fun. They are all miserable.

They are trapped in a world of sin and see no escape. Seeing no exit, they know they must fight. They must fight because they must save themselves. For those following the mythology, the stories of the gods themselves express the reality of the world where god is an invention. They see only one choice in that definition of the world: fight or die. You band together for safety or you wander alone. The people at this meeting are the ones who have scratched and fought their way to the top of the dunghill.

They have spent a life squabbling for honor, to be mildly comfortable, and any threat to their position in society or the system that they sacrificed for to get that honor and status is terrifying because it exposes them. They have sacrificed so much for the promises of the world. If they are wrong, their entire way of life is a fraud, a waste of time. If the poor, the lepers, the insane, the criminals, and the outcasts are finding joy in their poverty, with no status whatsoever, just by believing in this man named Jesus, then everything that they hold sacred will be proved as powerless as the conch shell that shattered on the rocks. To consider this possibility is too much for them. This mirror is too difficult to peer into because the reflection will betray the truth.

What scares them the most, more than anything else, is witnessing people change and convert to worship a man, one man, named Jesus, and seeing these people suddenly find total joy and meaning. This rocks those in power because for the first time they become aware that their foundation for life is built on sand. They have no idea how it can be possible and don’t want to hear that it is possible. How could happiness possibly come without competition and victory and power and money and pleasure?

They are scared because the poor rejects of society suddenly have more joy and love than they do, and they believe that their choices have been right, that they have followed the rules. Seeing this other way points to the truth that their entire way of life is based on falsehoods, false gods, and identity lies.

This is as transparent today as it was then.

What we sacrifice our time, money, and life for is shown in our actions, not in our words. We act out what we believe will save us. It’s not what we post online or say out loud, it’s what we do. If you doubt this is true, just look at what we sacrifice for. We must punch our tickets with good grades and extracurricular activities, spend thousands of dollars on youth sports, take advanced placement classes, get high test scores, and perform volunteer work quotas in order to get into a good college. We do all these sacrifices so that we can get a good job, so that we can have a comfortable income, and in the job we live in a perpetual state of “what have you done for me lately?” to please a boss or manager, like little Pontius Pilates, who scrapped their way to their positions. To find a suitable mate to match our desired status, we exercise and create clever profiles in search of bedroom experiences. We desire to travel or own things that will fulfill our pursuit of the exotic and the luxurious. We do all of this so that we can eventually raise a family who must also make these same sacrifices, run this same gauntlet, with the idea in mind that someday, if we’re lucky, we can retire and rest. Then in the end, we can tell ourselves, “I did the right things. I followed the rules.” It’s the same problem as Pilate and Caiaphas. We must be our own savior.

The ultimate shock comes when you realize that you don’t have to be your own savior. The reason Jesus must be killed is that he is telling people that they no longer need to be their own savior. He is the savior. He is the one. He is the blessing promised to Abraham. He is the one God. And he is all they have ever wanted or needed and all they need to do is trust in him.

A career oriented person often seems the wise one today, because of his or her car, job, or even their hygiene. But they are so often the lost. They are polished and smooth and say the right words, but there is a gaping hole in their heart.

We think people are crazy who do not take the same path that we are on, because it’s so painful to look down and realize that it is the wrong path. What we sacrifice our time to is the god of our lives. If this seems doubtful to you, consider who you like to mock, to hate. Who is that person or group? That is the language of your own self-salvation. That is the language of the Pharisee praying, “Thank God I am not like that tax collector,” while the outcast tax collector prays, “Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.” If you don’t see this, you aren’t looking very hard, because everyone is guilty of it. Mothers who have many children are mocked by career women, and mothers with many children mock career women. This plays a thousands ways. Blue collar/White collar. Black/White. Asian/European. Rich/Poor. Urban/Suburban. City/Country. Educated/Uneducated. Democrat/Republican. Public school/Private school. Fit/Fat. Christian/Muslim. Believer/Unbeliever. Jew/Gentile. Single/Married. Extrovert/Introvert. Sales/Engineeering. Look close enough and you will find the god you actually worship. The path chosen defines your salvation, your god, as you must justify all that has been sacrificed or chosen. This is the constant hunt for meaning, which morphs in desire and changes its targets but always remains the same in its need to craft a story that explains your choices.

It is not what you say or post or proclaim, it is what you do. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. A cross around your neck can be as meaningless as the conch shell in Ralph’s hands. The cross cannot be just near your heart, the cross must become your heart. It is all about surrender. You can stop trying to save yourself. That’s the story, that’s the message. It’s not “be yourself” or “you deserve to be happy” or “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.” The message is: surrender to win.

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