Things They Said to Jesus
John 18:38
David R. Collins
August 18, 2024
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it must be like to be a new parent in 2024.
Megan and I became parents before social media even existed. We had two kids before we had MySpace. So we made our decisions to vaccinate our boys with the help of our doctors, including Dr. Sears. There was no algorithm steering us towards advice that we were more likely to watch and like. The now widely de-bunked paper by that one doctor who has been dis-barred that linked vaccines to autism had come out, but Jenny McCarthy talking to Katie Couric about it was not very convincing. It was easy for us to make the right choice.
But it’s not so easy any more. Young people today become parents in a world where everything is political and disinformation sounds just as valid, if not more so, than the real thing. There is something deep in us all that trusts the members of our own tribes implicitly, until it’s too late, and sometimes beyond that point.
Many young parents bring their kids into a world where it’s hard to know how to interpret the validity of information and its sources. They are trying to do their best for their kids and so often choose no action over taking an action they aren’t sure of. And when they raise their questions to doctors who don’t have the time or training to explain how science works to those with less education than them, they are often belittled, or even fired as patients, which might change some peoples’ minds but most go where they’re valued instead.
One mom wrote this, “We stopped because we were scared and didn’t know who to trust. Was the medical community just paid off puppets of a Big Pharma-Government-Media conspiracy? Were these vaccines even necessary in this day and age? Were we unwittingly doing greater harm than help to our beloved children? So much smoke must mean a fire, so we defaulted to the ‘do nothing and hope nothing bad happens’ position.”
But then that mom’s seven kids got whooping cough. Ironically, they got it after she and her husband changed their position because of a local measles outbreak, and started getting their children caught up on their vaccinations. Then she made another brave choice, to publicly talk about how and why they had come to the wrong decisions in the first place, how they changed their mind, the consequences they suffered as a result, and asking other parents to please vaccinate their kids. Now she's an activist for stopping the misinformation about vaccines, and reaching out to anti-vaxxers because she understands their fears but knows that all kids deserve better.
Her name is Tara Hill, and she could have just gotten everything done quietly and not subjected herself to gloating from “the other side” and accusations of betrayal from her own. But instead she told her story.
“For years relatives tried to persuade us to reconsider, but this only irritated us and made us defensive….[Then] a friend suggested I write out my questions so we could tackle them one by one. Just getting it out on paper helped so much. I only ended up with a handful of questions. But more potent than my questions were my biases. I just didn’t trust civic government, the medical community, the pharmaceutical industry, and people in general. By default, I had excluded all research available from any major, reputable organization. Could all the in-house, independent, peer-reviewed clinical trials, research papers and studies across the globe ALL be flawed, corrupt and untrustworthy?”
I love that friend she had. Rather than telling her the right answers and getting mad at her for not believing her, this friend loved her like Jesus, who asked questions far more than he ever gave answers.
Today, we’re looking at a thing that Pontius Pilate said to Jesus,
John 18:38 Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”
We don't particularly care for truth, do we? Well, we think we do! Until we see something that we’d rather not. No, we love the idea of truth, it’s just that we want the truth to be thing that we already believe, the things that make us comfortable.
We are experts at avoiding difficult, uncomfortable truths that challenge our assumptions or demand change. We prefer narratives that soothe our anxieties or sometimes that confirm our anxieties or our other biases. We look for evidence that we’re already right, and we’ve always been right.
But when we do that, we risk living in a bubble. We risk missing out on the truths that could actually free us, help us grow and heal and live a more genuine life.
So let’s look at Jesus’ conversation with Pilate that night that led to Pilate’s most famous question. For context, this conversation comes from the night of Jesus’ arrest, the day before he was crucified. John tells us that Jesus was taken from the local Jewish authorities to the Roman occupier authority. Pilate didn’t seem too keen on convicting Jesus, and he even ended up washing his hands of the whole ordeal, but he still didn’t actually stand up for the right thing. He’s a lot like us.
His question, “What is truth?” isn’t necessarily a genuine one, and throughout their interaction, Pilate doesn’t seem to be arguing in good faith, but even so, Jesus treats him with respect. Jesus never tries to “win” the conversation. He is our model for how to have difficult conversations about truth claims with people who don’t share our beliefs. Let’s look together.
John 18:33-38
33 Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ 34 Jesus answered, ‘Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?’
Jesus asks Pilate, “What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?” Jesus asks Pilate for his sources. How did you come to ask this question, Pilate?
Usually with truth claims, we start out with what we’ve heard from others. Which is the best place to start. The world didn’t begin when we were born, and especially not when we first started paying attention. So we start with what we’ve heard.
Our opinions on social issues, our understanding of history, our everyday choices, all start with what we’ve heard from people we trust. Or with what we’ve heard from people we don’t trust, and we just go with the opposite of whatever they say.
The feeling of liking or disliking someone is much more powerful than the feeling of knowing.
So we need to question not just what we think we know, but how we think we know it.
I heard a guy share his frustration with one of his family members recently. He wanted to talk about something with him that had just happened right that minute in the political sphere, but his family member wouldn’t talk about it. He said, “I’ll just wait until tomorrow when the email comes out and tells me what I’m supposed to think.”
At least he was honest!
When we talk abut truth claims, we’re not just talking about things in the abstract. We’re talking about history and group identity. Pilate personifies that.
35 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?’
In other words, he’s saying that what matters most is staying in the lines set by your community. If your people like you and agree with you, you must be okay. If they don’t, you must be wrong.
In that view, there is no truth. There is only power. Might makes right, even if it’s just the might of a strong personality.
Sometimes we act like Pilate even when we have the truth on our side. An appeal to authority feels like it should settle things, “Why? Because I said so, that’s why!” “Or because science says so, that’s why!” But all that does it show that we don’t really understand why we’re right. Which in the case of getting a vaccine for yourself or your kids will protect you just as much, but is not a very effective strategy to convince those who are already suspicious. This applies to so much more than vaccines, but let’s stick with it for brevity’s sake.
Look at how Pilate talks here. He points his finger at the one who he thinks is wrong and accuses him of being wrong, and his proof is that he is saying he’s wrong and others agree with him. But look at how Jesus responds.
36 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.’
Now, Jesus obviously isn’t talking about science or anything he can prove in a lab, but the way that he talks isn’t anxious or defensive at all. He doesn’t talk about Pilate. He doesn’t return fire. He just talks about his own thoughts and experiences.
Kind of like this college professor’s story that I want to share with you.
She writes,
“I’m teaching the lymphatic system and immunity right now. There is a particular student who is far right conservative and advertises this on clothing, with certain remarks, etc. No problem there, but I wondered if this unit might result in some dissent or debate from her, as I had heard her refer to the COVID vaccine derisively. So I am at the point in the lecture where we are talking about acquired immunity and going over antigen presentation, how viruses work, what antibodies are, etc.
So this student raises her hand and asks "ok so then why even vaccinate if we have all this already on board? and why did COVID require this "new" vaccine if the old ones are supposed to be so great (here she rolled her eyes)."
So we talked through all the steps from transmission of virus to new host, virus sneaking into cells, what viruses do in cells, and just carried the story the rest of the way through. This culminated in the time versus amount graph showing concentration of antibodies rising slowly and with a latency period on one line, and antibody titer exploding upon a second exposure to the same antigen.
So she says "it would be cool if we could just go straight to the steeper line and not have to do the flatter line first."
So I say, "that is actually how vaccines work. you make the immune system aware of the virus or whatever without getting you sick, so if you are exposed, the second line happens."
She counters with "but people are all talking about how bad they feel after getting the vaccine, that means it doesn't work right?"
So then we talked about inflammatory cytokines, pyrogens, and what they do. The symptoms post vaccine are evidence that your immune system is doing what it is supposed to be doing.
So here's the win: She sent me an email the next day with the subject line "about the jab" I braced myself. In the email, she said that anti vaccine attitudes in her family and social group informed her attitude to them, but she had never heard an explanation outside angry internet rhetoric and people calling anti-vax and vaccine hesitant people stupid, ignorant, etc. mocking them for being uneducated, etc. She hadn't had anyone answer her questions calmly, politely, and thoroughly, and without political spin on it. She said that she's still curious about other vaccine fears like thimerosal, lots of them close together etc. but that I had changed her mind about them, and that she was going to try to get her husband to come around on the issue as well. Would I mind recording my explanation so she could show her husband? she couldn't articulate it well yet because she just learned it. She was concerned about her kids now."
When I say I was stunned....... I was gobsmacked. I expected an angry diatribe and I got the above. This was a little "oh yeah I make a difference" moment in my teaching and also a really good reminder not to make assumptions about people. YAY SCIENCE!”
Isn’t that cool? She was a lot like Jesus in our scripture passage today. He doesn’t have some pathological need to win the argument with Pilate. He know who he is, and he shares that knowledge with those who disagree with him.
Some wonder what happened to Pilate later. If he ever changed his mind and came to believe in this Jesus that he met. There’s no way to know, but it’s possible, because of the way that Jesus treated him.
Our interactions with people create a context that we can come back to years later. Or that maybe they will revisit without us ever knowing. But in this moment, Pilate stays in argument mode.
37 Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ AHA! Gotcha! Score one for this debate!
Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king.
You can have your point, Pilate. Jesus knows that people seldom come to your side because you utterly defeat them. So he goes on with what he knows.
For this I was born, and for this I came into the world,
Even Jesus, who could authoritatively speak to others’ motivations and allegiances, to their logical fallacies and shortcomings…doesn’t. He talks about his own values, and his own purpose. He knows what he believes and why. He can speak about it with anyone. And his purpose is…
to testify to the truth.
The truth doesn’t need defense. But it often does need to have attention drawn to it. That’s what testimony is. It’s simply saying what you saw, or what you experienced.
Good testimony in court doesn’t seek to answer every possible question, just the ones that are asked. People speak from the own experience…what they have learned if they’re an expert witness, or just what they have seen if they were there.
That’s all that we have to do, too. We speak about our own experiences. If it’s with vaccines, we can just share that we have had all of them and so has everyone we know. If it’s about church, we can just say that first of all, it’s an hour…and second of all, almost everyone we’ve ever met there has been very nice and not at all crazy, and by the way, community is hard to come by and the book we read together is great.
No one else has to be wrong so that we can be right. They very well might be wrong, but that’s their business to figure out. All we need to do is testify to the truth, not prove it, and certainly not destroy anyone who doesn’t get it right away.
As Presbyterians, we don’t think people become Christians because they lost the argument. We think God calls people, and gives them the ability and insight to recognize the truth. And I think that’s the case with people who have a change of heart and mind about things like science that you actually can prove.
Knowledge is a miracle. Recognizing truth is providential. That’s what I think Jesus meant when he said what he said next.
Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’
Recognizing and listening to the truth isn’t a given, and it’s not just a rational process. People believe things for all kinds of reasons, especially social ones.
There’s an old saying that says you have to belong before you’ll believe. It’s mostly about religion, but it applies to to lots of beliefs. People can’t change their beliefs if they feel unsafe. As humans we will double down on being wrong to feel like we’re saving face, and especially if we think someone is trying to trick us, or hurt us.
There’s another saying that says you can’t reason someone out of a position that they didn’t reason themselves into. We’ve seen that you can’t insult them out of it, and many times you can’t even scare them out of it. But what if you could love them out of it?
What if belonging to the truth is about more than agreement? What if it’s about feeling heard and seen? What if it’s about feeling loved and respected?
I think Jesus touched a nerve with Pilate which is why he asked his famous question that we started out with today.
38 Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’
And sure, he probably meant it ironically at first. Because who wants to admit to the condemned man who seems to have all the power even though you’re the governor that he makes a good point.
People like Pilate will often question the nature of reality before considering that maybe they’re just wrong.
Those with something to protect will often claim that what people call truth is really just a narrative that justifies positions of power.
But it’s not. Truth liberates. It sets us free from the comforting lies we cling to in our quest for security or dominance.
Jesus could have engaged in a battle of wits or tried to prove Pilate wrong in front of everyone. But he didn’t. He wasn’t there to win an argument; he was there to testify to truth. Truth that wasn’t contingent on Pilate’s recognition or the crowd’s approval. It was a truth rooted in love, in God’s ultimate plan for redemption and reconciliation—a truth that would outlast the momentary victories of rhetoric.
That’s our calling too. We’re not tasked with winning debates or proving others wrong. Our job is to testify—to witness to the truth we’ve encountered in Christ. To live out that truth in ways that reflect love, grace, and justice.
That is also how we bear witness to the truth of science. It’s easy to get frustrated, especially when we feel like the truth is so clear, and yet others don’t see it the same way. But if we approach these conversations with the goal of winning or proving others wrong, we often end up alienating the very people we’re trying to reach.
When we let our anger or frustration take over—when we start thinking of them as “those people”—we create a barrier. We make it harder for them to hear us, let alone consider what we’re saying. It’s natural to feel that way, especially when the stakes are high. But if we truly want to advocate for something as important as vaccines, or any other issue where the truth matters, we need to do it in a way that invites rather than excludes.
Instead of scoring points or giving in to the temptation to shame others, we need to have these conversations with humility and empathy.
We can share our own experiences—how we’ve gotten vaccines and been fine. We can listen to their concerns, not to argue, but to understand. And in that understanding, we might find common ground.
Jesus said that those who belong to the truth would hear his voice. And in hearing, they would find themselves drawn into a new way of being, a way that doesn’t rely on the old power dynamics of winning and losing, but on the transforming power of love.
So, as we go out into the world, let’s remember that our role isn’t to win every argument or to force others into our way of thinking. Our role is to be faithful witnesses—testifying to the truth that has transformed us, and trusting that God will do the work of drawing others to himself.
And maybe, just maybe, years down the line, someone who seemed uninterested or even hostile might find themselves revisiting that moment of testimony. Not because we won, but because we witnessed. Because we spoke and lived the truth in love, trusting God to do the rest.
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