Jesus Worldview: One Good Treason

Jesus Worldview: One Good Treason
John 18:33-38
Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins
July 5, 2026

Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” 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?”  Jesus answered, “My kingdom does not belong to this world. If my kingdom belonged to 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.” Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”

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What a gift our own Brent Douglas just gave us!

Brent wrote both the music and the lyrics to the choral anthem you just heard—a musical gift, for sure, but some beautiful lyrics as well — a prayer for a special weekend in our country. Notice it wasn’t a prayer for dominance or victory or national supremacy. It was a prayer that we might be a people of compassion. For welcome for the stranger. For mercy for the weary. For leaders who choose peace and people who grow strong by listening to one another.

Teach us love beyond our difference / guide our hearts past our fear /
help us build a land of mercy / where each soul is valued here.

I want you to hold those words. Because in a few minutes, we’re going to encounter a man standing in a Roman courtroom who said something — quietly, calmly, under enormous duress — that amounts to almost exactly the same thing.

And it got him killed.

We are in week six of our summer series, Jesus Worldview — ten weeks of asking what it might look like to see the world the way Jesus saw it. To wear his lens instead of the one our culture hands us.

We’ve established the center: love God, love neighbor. We’ve walked the map of the Beatitudes — where Jesus suggests we can find him among the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers. We’ve watched Jesus choose the edges over the center, sitting down with a Samaritan woman at noontime at a well and handing her the clearest statement of his identity in the entire Gospel. Last week my friend, Rev. Dr. Jeff Guild, reminded us of the story of the Good Samaritan—that upside-down tale Jesus told of finding kingdom values in someone society hates.

Today we watch Jesus do it again — this time in a Roman courtroom, this time with his life explicitly on the line.

And the word he uses — the word that gets him killed — is kingdom.

Let me tell you how we got here, because the legal drama matters.

Jesus has already been through one trial. The Jewish authorities — the chief priests, the scribes, the Sanhedrin — have interrogated him through the night. Their charge is blasphemy. He claimed to be the Son of God. Under Jewish law, that is a capital offense.

But here is the problem: Rome had stripped the Jewish authorities of the right to carry out capital punishment. If they want Jesus dead, they need Roman cooperation. And Rome doesn’t care about blasphemy. Theological disputes between Jewish factions are beneath Rome’s jurisdiction and interest. Pilate has neither the time nor the inclination to referee a religious argument.

So the charge has to change.

When Jesus is handed from the Jewish authorities to Pontius Pilate — when he crosses from one legal jurisdiction to another — the charge shifts. From blasphemy to treason. Specifically: claiming to be a king in Caesar’s empire without Caesar’s authorization.

That is a charge Rome will act on.

So Pilate asks the question he is required to ask. The security question. The empire-protection question:

Are you the King of the Jews?

And I want you to picture the scene for a moment. Jesus has been awake all night. He has been arrested, bound, marched across Jerusalem in the dark. He has been struck, mocked, and handed from one authority to another like a problem nobody quite wants to own. By the time he stands before Pilate, he already knows where this is going.

And he doesn’t deflect. Doesn’t deny. Doesn’t ask for a lawyer.

He starts talking about the nature of his kingdom.

That, right there, is either the most foolish thing anyone has ever done in a Roman court — or the bravest.

I vote brave.

My kingdom is not from this world.

Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say: I have no kingdom. He does not say: I am not a king. He doesn’t deny the charge. He redefines it.

If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be

fighting to keep me from being handed over.

Look around, he says. Are my people fighting? They are not. Because that is not how this kingdom works.

And this is where the Jesus Worldview gets genuinely radical — genuinely, in the truest sense of that word, which means going to the root.

Every kingdom Rome had ever encountered operated the same way. You fought for power, held it by force, defended it with weapons, expanded it by conquest. That was simply how the world worked. The strong dominated the weak. The empire absorbed everything it could and destroyed what it couldn’t. Borders were drawn in blood and maintained the same way.

Jesus says: that is not my kingdom.

So what does his kingdom look like?

Well, we already know the answer to this question. We spent a Sunday with the Beatitudes — Jesus’ own inaugural address, his opening statement of what his kingdom is about and who belongs to it. The citizens of the Jesus kingdom are the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the ones who got in trouble for doing the right thing.

That is not a description of an empire. That is a description of a community organized around something Rome couldn’t recognize and couldn’t fight — because you cannot put a sword through mercy. You cannot conquer truth with a regiment. You cannot bomb your way to the kingdom of God.

This morning the choir sang about a land where the stranger finds welcome and the weary find release and leaders choose compassion. No nation in the history of the world has fully achieved that. But it is a remarkably accurate description of the kingdom Jesus was describing to Pilate — a kingdom where, as Brent’s anthem puts it, every soul is valued.

Not every citizen. Not every taxpayer. Not every person of the right religion or the right politics.

Every soul.

Then Jesus says something else. “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

Citizenship in this kingdom is not determined by birthplace or ethnicity or wealth or religious credentials or national origin. It is determined by one’s relationship to truth.

And Pilate — standing right in front of the answer — asks: “What is truth?”

It is one of the most haunting lines in all of Scripture. Because the answer is looking him in the face, and he cannot see it. Truth, in the Jesus kingdom, doesn’t look like power. It looks like a beaten man standing calmly in a Roman court, talking about mercy, knowing what comes next, saying it anyway.

This is the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence. And it occurs to me, on this particular weekend, that this nation was itself founded on a particular kind of treason.

The Declaration of Independence was, by every legal standard of the British Crown, an act of treasonous defiance. The founders pledged — in that extraordinary final line — their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to a vision of human dignity that the empire of their day refused to recognize.

There is something in the American story, at its best, that resonates with what Jesus did in that courtroom. The conviction that there is a truth worth standing for, even at great personal cost. The belief that human dignity is not granted by empire but is inherent to every person.

The founders got a lot of things wrong. Some of them owned human beings while writing about liberty. The gap between the American ideal and the American reality has been, at times, a canyon rather than a crack.

But the ideal — the one worth fighting for, the one worth continuing to hold this nation accountable to — sounds a little like the anthem we heard this morning. A land of mercy. A place where each soul is valued. Where the stranger finds welcome and the weary find release.

Jesus stood before Pilate and said: there is a kingdom built on truth, on mercy, on the dignity of every human soul — and I am its king. You can do what you are going to do. But I will not pretend it isn’t real.

And here is what I want us to sit with: he knew what Pilate was going to do. He had been awake all night. He knew the charge. He knew the options. He knew the outcome.

And he said it anyway.

I think too often we have this image of Jesus as the “meek and mild.” And he was, in many ways, gentle and kind and tender. But there is nothing meek and mild about standing in front of the representative of the most powerful empire in the ancient world — beaten, sleep-deprived, alone — and saying, quietly and without apology:

I have a kingdom. And it’s not yours.

That is not weakness. That might just be the bravest thing anyone has ever said in a courtroom.

So here is the challenge I want to leave with you this morning — the thing I’m asking you to actually do as a result of what you’ve heard.

This week — after your neighbors fire off the last of the fireworks they purchased while you’re trying to go to sleep— I want you to ask yourself one question:

What would it look like, in this moment, to be a citizen of the Jesus kingdom first?

Not instead of loving your country. But before it. Your primary allegiance.

What would it look like to live out Christ’s kingdom ideals in your daily life — to be the person in the room who chooses mercy over contempt? Who sees the soul in the person they disagree with? Who refuses to let fear determine how they treat the stranger?

What would it look like, in your small corner of this beautiful and broken country, to build — one conversation, one act of welcome, one moment of genuine compassion at a time — something that looks a little more like the kingdom Jesus described to Pilate?

One good treason at a time.

Pilate asked: “Are you a king?”

Jesus didn’t say no. He said: yes — but not the kind you’re used to.

And that, it turns out, is the most important distinction in the history of the world.

Because the kingdoms built by force eventually fall. Every single one of them. Rome fell. Every empire that followed Rome fell. Every regime that has ever tried to hold power through domination has eventually crumbled under its own weight.

But a kingdom built on truth, on mercy, on the radical welcome of every human soul —

that kingdom, Jesus said, is not from this world.

Which means it cannot be destroyed by this world either.

In a few moments we will come to a table that belongs to that kingdom. A table with no borders, no admission requirements, no loyalty tests. Just bread broken and cup outpoured for every soul Jesus has ever loved.

Which, it turns out, is every soul there is.

Come and receive it.

In this world, may we be like Jesus.