_Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king!
To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that
I should bear witness unto the truth: every one that is of the truth
heareth my voice._--John xviii. 37.
Pilate asks Jesus if he is a king. The question is called forth by what
the Lord had just said concerning his kingdom, closing with the
statement that it was not of this world. He now answers Pilate that he
is a king indeed, but shows him that his kingdom is of a very different
kind from what is called kingdom in this world. The rank and rule of
this world are uninteresting to him. He might have had them. Calling
his disciples to follow him, and his twelve legions of angels to help
them, he might soon have driven the Romans into the abyss, piling them
on the heap of nations they had tumbled there before. What easier for
him than thus to have cleared the way, and over the tributary world
reigned the just monarch that was the dream of the Jews, never seen in
Israel or elsewhere, but haunting the hopes and longings of the poor
and their helpers! He might from Jerusalem have ruled the world, not
merely dispensing what men call justice, but compelling atonement. He
did not care for government. No such kingdom would serve the ends of
his father in heaven, or comfort his own soul. What was perfect empire
to the Son of God, while he might teach one human being to love his
neighbour, and be good like his father! To be love-helper to one heart,
for its joy, and the glory of his father, was the beginning of true
kingship! The Lord would rather wash the feet of his weary brothers,
than be the one only perfect monarch that ever ruled in the world. It
was empire he rejected when he ordered Satan behind him like a dog to
his heel. Government, I repeat, was to him flat, stale, unprofitable.
What then is the kingdom over which the Lord cares to reign, for he
says he came into the world to be a king? I answer, A kingdom of kings,
and no other. Where every man is a king, there and there only does the
Lord care to reign, in the name of his father. As no king in Europe
would care to reign over a cannibal, a savage, or an animal race, so
the Lord cares for no kingdom over anything this world calls a nation.
A king must rule over his own kind. Jesus is a king in virtue of no
conquest, inheritance, or election, but in right of essential being;
and he cares for no subjects but such as are his subjects in the same
right. His subjects must be of his own kind, in their very nature and
essence kings. To understand his answer to Pilate, see wherein consists
his kingship; what it is that makes him a king; what manifestation of
his essential being gives him a claim to be king. The Lord's is a
kingdom in which no man seeks to be above another: ambition is of the
dirt of this world's kingdoms. He says, 'I am a king, for I was born
for the purpose, I came into the world with the object of bearing
witness to the truth. Everyone that is of my kind, that is of the
truth, hears my voice. He is a king like me, and makes one of my
subjects.' Pilate thereupon--as would most Christians nowadays, instead
of setting about being true--requests a definition of truth, a
presentation to his intellect in set terms of what the word 'truth'
means; but instantly, whether confident of the uselessness of the
inquiry, or intending to resume it when he has set the Lord at liberty,
goes out to the people to tell them he finds no fault in him. Whatever
interpretation we put on his action here, he must be far less worthy of
blame than those 'Christians' who, instead of setting themselves to be
pure 'even as he is pure,' to be their brother and sister's keeper, and
to serve God by being honourable in shop and counting-house and
labour-market, proceed to 'serve' him, some by going to church or
chapel, some by condemning the opinions of their neighbours, some by
teaching others what they do not themselves heed. Neither Pilate nor
they ask the one true question, 'How am I to be a true man? How am I to
become a man worth being a man?' The Lord is a king because his life,
the life of his thoughts, of his imagination, of his will, of every
smallest action, is true--true first to God in that he is altogether
his, true to himself in that he forgets himself altogether, and true to
his fellows in that he will endure anything they do to him, nor cease
declaring himself the son and messenger and likeness of God. They will
kill him, but it matters not: the truth is as he says!
Jesus is a king because his business is to bear witness to the truth.
What truth? All truth; all verity of relation throughout the
universe--first of all, that his father is good, perfectly good; and
that the crown and joy of life is to desire and do the will of the
eternal source of will, and of all life. He deals thus the death-blow
to the power of hell. For the one principle of hell is--'I am my own. I
am my own king and my own subject. _I_ am the centre from which go out
my thoughts; _I_ am the object and end of my thoughts; back upon _me_
as the alpha and omega of life, my thoughts return. My own glory is,
and ought to be, my chief care; my ambition, to gather the regards of
men to the one centre, myself. My pleasure is _my_ pleasure. My kingdom
is--as many as I can bring to acknowledge my greatness over them. My
judgment is the faultless rule of things. My right is--what I desire.
The more I am all in all to myself, the greater I am. The less I
acknowledge debt or obligation to another; the more I close my eyes to
the fact that I did not make myself; the more self-sufficing I feel or
imagine myself--the greater I am. I will be free with the freedom that
consists in doing whatever I am inclined to do, from whatever quarter
may come the inclination. To do my own will so long as I feel anything
to be my will, is to be free, is to live. To all these principles of
hell, or of this world--they are the same thing, and it matters nothing
whether they are asserted or defended so long as they are acted
upon--the Lord, the king, gives the direct lie. It is as if he
said:--'I ought to know what I say, for I have been from all eternity
the son of him from whom you issue, and whom you call your father, but
whom you will not have your father: I know all he thinks and is; and I
say this, that my perfect freedom, my pure individuality, rests on the
fact that I have not another will than his. My will is all for his
will, for his will is right. He is righteousness itself. His very being
is love and equity and self-devotion, and he will have his children
such as himself--creatures of love, of fairness, of self-devotion to
him and their fellows. I was born to bear witness to the truth--in my
own person to be the truth visible--the very likeness and manifestation
of the God who is true. My very being is his witness. Every fact of me
witnesses him. He is the truth, and I am the truth. Kill me, but while
I live I say, Such as I am he is. If I said I did not know him, I
should be a liar. I fear nothing you can do to me. Shall the king who
comes to say what is true, turn his back for fear of men? My Father is
like me; I know it, and I say it. You do not like to hear it because
you are not like him. I am low in your eyes which measure things by
their show; therefore you say I blaspheme. I should blaspheme if I said
he was such as anything you are capable of imagining him, for you love
show, and power, and the praise of men. I do not, and God is like me. I
came into the world to show him. I am a king because he sent me to bear
witness to his truth, and I bear it. Kill me, and I will rise again.
You can kill me, but you cannot hold me dead. Death is my servant; you
are the slaves of Death because you will not be true, and let the truth
make you free. Bound, and in your hands, I am free as God, for God is
my father. I know I shall suffer, suffer unto death, but if you knew my
father, you would not wonder that I am ready; you would be ready 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
present a shadow of the Lord's witnessing, a shadow surely cast by his
deeds and his very words! If I mistake, he will forgive me. I do not
fear him; I fear only lest, able to see and write these things, I
should fail of witnessing, and myself be, after all, a castaway--no
king, but a talker; no disciple of Jesus, ready to go with him to the
death, but an arguer about the truth; a hater of the lies men speak for
God, and myself a truth-speaking liar, not a doer of the word.
We see, then, that the Lord bore his witness to the Truth, to the one
God, by standing just what he was, before the eyes and the lies of men.
The true king is the man who stands up a true man and speaks the truth,
and will die but not lie. The robes of such a king may be rags or
purple; it matters neither way. The rags are the more likely, but
neither better nor worse than the robes. Then was the Lord dressed most
royally when his robes were a jest, a mockery, a laughter. Of the men
who before Christ bare witness to the truth, some were sawn asunder,
some subdued kingdoms; it mattered nothing which: they witnessed.
The truth is God; the witness to the truth is Jesus. The kingdom of the
truth is the hearts of men. The bliss of men is the true God. The
thought of God is the truth of everything. All well-being lies in true
relation to God. The man who responds to this with his whole being, is
of the truth. The man who knows these things, and but knows them; the
man who sees them to be true, and does not order life and action,
judgment and love by them, is of the worst of lying; with hand, and
foot, and face he casts scorn upon that which his tongue confesses.
Little thought the sons of Zebedee and their ambitious mother what the
earthly throne of Christ's glory was which they and she begged they
might share. For the king crowned by his witnessing, witnessed then to
the height of his uttermost argument, when he hung upon the cross--like
a sin, as Paul in his boldness expresses it. When his witness is
treated as a lie, then most he witnesses, for he gives it still. High
and lifted up on the throne of his witness, on the cross of his
torture, he holds to it: 'I and the Father are one.' Every mockery
borne in witnessing, is a witnessing afresh. Infinitely more than had
he sat on the throne of the whole earth, did Jesus witness to the truth
when Pilate brought him out for the last time, and perhaps made him sit
on the judgment-seat in his mockery of kingly garments and royal
insignia, saying, 'Behold your king!' Just because of those robes and
that crown, that sceptre and that throne of ridicule, he was the only
real king that ever sat on any throne.
Is every Christian expected to bear witness? A man content to bear no
witness to the truth is not in the kingdom of heaven. One who believes
must bear witness. One who sees the truth, must live witnessing to it.
Is our life, then, a witnessing to the truth? Do we carry ourselves in
bank, on farm, in house or shop, in study or chamber or workshop, as
the Lord would, or as the Lord would not? Are we careful to be true? Do
we endeavour to live to the height of our ideas? Or are we mean,
self-serving, world-flattering, fawning slaves? When contempt is cast
on the truth, do we smile? Wronged in our presence, do we make no sign
that we hold by it? I do not say we are called upon to dispute, and
defend with logic and argument, but we are called upon to show that we
are on the other side. But when I say _truth,_ I do not mean _opinion_:
to treat opinion as if that were truth, is grievously to wrong the
truth. The soul that loves the truth and tries to be true, will know
when to speak and when to be silent; but the true man will never look
as if he did not care. We are not bound to say all we think, but we are
bound not even to look what we do not think. The girl who said before a
company of mocking companions, 'I believe in Jesus,' bore true witness
to her Master, the Truth. David bore witness to God, the Truth, when he
said, '_Unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy, for thou renderest to every
man according to his work_.'