Holy Week
John 18:33 – 19:3: “The Silence of Jesus”
Christopher H. Edmonston
I.
Silence. Often, it
is disconcerting. Often, silence is
uncomfortable. I am sure more than a few
of you were uncomfortable when I just stood there for that long period of time,
saying nothing, doing nothing except inhaling and exhaling. I am sure a couple of us were bewildered –
“he’s a preacher – when’s he going to preach?”.
A few maybe even thought that I had forgotten my sermon -- that I had
messed up.
I can
tell you that there is no such thing as a silent preacher – imagine a preacher
keeping his mouth shut for any period of time.
In fact – I might have been set up for this vocation long ago – I used
to make all A’s in elementary school, and then would get a U for Unsatisfactory
in “Talking” – as in I spoke too much; spoke out of turn. I heard more than once growing up – “it would
be nice if you gave someone else a turn to answer.”
Silence
is the absence of sound, and when unexpected, it can be deafening and as a kid
I was never comfortable with it. If
things get too quiet after all – one begins to wonder if it is a good thing –
one wonders, “everything is quiet, has something gone wrong?”.
The
relatively unknown French Philosopher E. M . Cioran once quipped in a quotation
that has stayed with me for some time, “We feel safer with a madman who talks
than with one who cannot open his mouth.”
II.
I think that there is something deep within our minds
that tells us that wherever there is an absence of sound, there is an absence
of life. And we don’t like it. Our world in fact is never really
silent. There is always an electrical hum
somewhere, a leaf being blown, a car engine running, a far off radio playing,
the soothing sound of a fan oscillating.
To be sure, most Christian worship, falls into those worship services
that either have lots of noise and movement – or those that are more silent and
contemplative; but even the more silent and contemplative style is never
completely quiet as there is always a musician, a cantor, or a worship leader
speaking, chanting, or whispering.
When I was at Seminary we often talked about different
retreat formats we could lead when we became ministers. Some retreats are full of small group
time. Some are full of preaching. Some are full of song. And then there are the retreats about
silence, which are called retreats into silence. Where the group arrives on Friday and
promises to remain entirely silent during the day on Saturday. During one of the discussions, one person I
know spoke up. She said she had led that
retreat, a retreat in silence before, and that it was a disaster. She found that when we people are quiet that
long, especially for the first time in their lives, there is no where they have
to hide from their thoughts, their griefs, their pains, their mistakes. She told us that by Saturday at 5:00 PM, only
eight hours into the exercise she had to call it off. A 1/3 of her group was in uncontrollable
tears, a 1/3 was bitterly angry, and a third was outright depressed. Too much silence she found was not
necessarily a good thing if people were not prepared for it.
III.
I have often wondered how comfortable Pilate was with
silence? In this extended interrogation
of Jesus in John chapter 18, Pilate gets some of his questions answered, and
some are only met with silence. In what
is perhaps the climatic moment of Jesus’ teaching ministry in the Gospel of
John, Pilate asks, “What is truth?”
What is truth?
That question is as old as time (a question that might be both
metaphysical and existential – perhaps even experiential, to which the
Christian church and Christian theology have traditionally sought to answer
with an epistemological claim to revealed truth, which in my opinion is every
bit as valid as any of the previous alternatives). Even if we never ask Pilate’s question
precisely, we still yet ask, “how do I friend, find a safe and reliable place
to invest my time, my faith, my energy?
How do I know that I am not being lied to, friend, tell me, is this the truth?” What is truth?
Jesus only answers Pilate with silence. John’s Gospel doesn’t even spell out his
non-response, it doesn’t even say, “And the Lord was quiet.” It just moves on as if Jesus never even
blinked.
Never even breathed.
Never even acknowledged that the question was asked.
Pilate asks and Jesus only responds with a non-existent
answer.
With silence.
Deafening silence.
IV.
It has also come to mind this Holy Week that when we are
asking questions, silence is not the response that we are seeking. Each of us, for example, has had that
childhood moment when we said to a parent something like, “So I guess I messed
up pretty bad, huh?” And all we’re met
with is a stare, an arm-fold, and maybe if we are lucky, a sigh. The silence then was confirmation that our
question only stated the obvious. The
silence says louder than the loudest stereo speakers ever invented that our
fears are true that we have really messed up.
Coaches are masters of this – play a sport and have a terrible first
half and if the coach comes into the locker room and says nothing then you know
your worst fears are true – we really did stink as bad as we are afraid that we
stunk. That is the thought that goes
through the mind. The silence kills all
possibility of redemption – we are more afraid of the madman who says nothing
than of the madman who tells us everything.
For its own part, the Bible gives us direction about
silence too. Proverbs 17:28 says, “Even
fools who keep silent are considered wise; when they close their lips, they are
deemed intelligent.” In other words
sometimes the best answer is a non-answer.
Sometimes we are better off when others are exposing their own lack of
knowledge and when we say nothing, we come out seeming the better and
smarter. Personally this has never
happened to me, but, it does play true.
It plays true in the Old Irish saying, “A silent mouth is melodious.”
V.
One wonders if Jesus was trying to make melody in
Pilate’s chamber with his silence? Was
he trying to frighten Pilate? Was he
trying to seem that much more intelligent than he was? Was he trying to take the safe road by saying
nothing?
Several points in response to such wonderings become
clear when we look at this passage.
Jesus is not afraid nor is he trying to cause fear. Pilate, on the verge of executing the one who
is accused of calling himself the Son of God, which is just a few verses after
those we read today – Pilate – will become afraid for a few moments because he
does not fully understand the full implications of the drama in which he is
playing. He will fear the pain of fear,
but not because Jesus has tried to make him feel it. Pilate at first probably thinks Jesus not
that intelligent, after all, here is a man only hours from execution and he is
not begging for his life. What type of
man could this be? Ironically, the
convicted Jesus who refuses to beg and answers questions selectively by the end
of the story becomes the one who convicts Pilate and us all. In this encounter, on the flip side of Jesus’
silence, Pilate, the interrogator, becomes the interrogated for all time.
We want to ask him, “couldn’t you see he was
innocent? Pilate, couldn’t you tell he
was falsely accused? Pilate, couldn’t
you see the truth in him? Pilate,
couldn’t you tell the mistake you were making?”
Pilate is only human, of course. The only way he could answer such questions
would be to say, “But he didn’t beg for his life, he wouldn’t answer all of my
questions. Jesus didn’t give me anything
to work with. He didn’t even try to save
himself.”
In John’s Gospel Pilate is the one who asks the most
obvious question of all, “What is truth?”
Frederick Buechner has written, “We are all of us Pilate in our asking
after truth, and when we come to church to ask it, the preacher would do well
to answer us also with silence, because truth and Gospel are one, and before
the Gospel is a word, it too like truth is silence – not an ordinary silence,
silence as nothing to hear, but silence that makes itself heard if you listen
to it the way Pilate listens to [Jesus before him]” (this short quotation is
taken from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Comedy, Tragedy, and Fairy Tale).
VI.
You see, John’s gospel, from beginning to end is one that
is rife with symbols. Light and
Dark. Truth and un-truth. Life and Death. The way of discipleship and the way of
rejecting God. And here, if you will, at
John’s 19th chapter is the final expression of truth. Jesus has already declared himself, days ago,
to be the “Way, Truth, and Life.” And
Pilate asks him, almost philosophically, “What is truth?” and the response of Jesus is saying loudly in
its silence, “The truth is right before your eyes. Why are you even asking the question?”
Frederick Buechner: “Before it is a word, the Gospel that is
truth is silence, a pregnant silence in its ninth month, and in answer to
Pilate’s question, Jesus keeps silent, even with his hands tied behind him he
manages somehow to hold silence out like a terrible gift” (Telling the Truth).
Jesus’ gift to the world was his life. He did not beg to save it, rather he gave it
willingly. He could of, I suppose,
answered Pilate’s question philosophically and fully. But he chose to remain quiet in his
silence. His silence denied nothing, it
admitted nothing, it only convicted Him.
The truth is, though, that it also convicts us. It convicts us with the truth that is in
Jesus Christ. The truth found in his
silence, turns out to be the loudest single moment in human history. Church bells on every continent, in every
country, in every city ring out and shout his glory. In the end, this silence of Jesus is the
loudest noise of all.
Mother Theresa once said, “We need silence to be able to
touch souls.” And she was right. We need divinely given silence. Silence that says we know the gospel and we
know the truth. Silence, that, like the
silence of Jesus, confirms all that we need ever to know, and all that we could
ever want to believe.
So then, What is truth?
That, friends, is a big question.
But, when met with a confident response, even a silent response, that
proclaims the truth in Christ, we might rest assured in an answer more touching
and profound than any question ever can be.
May
the glory be to God, revealed in Jesus Christ, the way, truth, and life. Amen.