I cam across a commentator on John 19 this week and he said,
“This passage is so shocking that words refuse to communicate how offensive it is.”
That’s what we’re getting into this morning. There are various and complex emotional responses to this for those who love Jesus. There’s cause for holy anger, and there’s cause for godly sorrow. And what I don’t want you to miss this morning is there is cause for awe — to be amazed, to wonder at the greatness of Jesus and what he goes through in John 19.
John 19:1-16,
Then Pilate took Jesus and flogged him. 2 And the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head and arrayed him in a purple robe. 3 They came up to him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and struck him with their hands. 4 Pilate went out again and said to them, “See, I am bringing him out to you that you may know that I find no guilt in him.” 5 So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Behold the man!” 6 When the chief priests and the officers saw him, they cried out, “Crucify him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and crucify him, for I find no guilt in him.” 7 The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has made himself the Son of God.” 8 When Pilate heard this statement, he was even more afraid. 9 He entered his headquarters again and said to Jesus, “Where are you from?” But Jesus gave him no answer. 10 So Pilate said to him, “You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?” 11 Jesus answered him, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin.”
12 From then on Pilate sought to release him, but the Jews cried out, “If you release this man, you are not Caesar's friend. Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar.” 13 So when Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judgment seat at a place called The Stone Pavement, and in Aramaic Gabbatha. 14 Now it was the day of Preparation of the Passover. It was about the sixth hour. He said to the Jews, “Behold your King!” 15 They cried out, “Away with him, away with him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.” 16 So he delivered him over to them to be crucified.
It would be easy to focus this morning on this horrific miscarriage of justice, on the shocking evil of the Jewish leaders, on the fickleness of the crowds, on the gutlessness of Pilate, and we’ll get to all that. But I want to make sure we don’t miss the most important thing.
At the end of chapter 20, John tells us why he wrote his Gospel:
so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
In that light, I want to ask three (rhetorical) questions about Jesus as he is delivered over to be crucified.
If you don’t yet believe in him, I want you to believe in him. And if you do believe in him, I want your faith in him to grow and deepen and sweeten as we watch his stunning composure in the face of the most grievous and outrageous injustice.
1. Can you believe how Jesus is treated?
We saw last week Pilate’s initial report to the Jews about this man they brought to him, saying he is worthy of death: “I find no guilt in him” (18:38). Now he says that twice more. Verse 4: “I find no guilt in him.” Verse 6: “I find no guilt in him.” Pilate says it three times in such short space, yet look how Jesus is treated, beginning with Pilate himself.
In verses 1–5, Pilate aims to release Jesus, but also to appease the Jewish leaders at Jesus’s expense. To do that, he has Jesus flogged (whipped here, it seems, then later scourged), and the Roman soldiers strike him and mock him by putting a crown of thorns on his head and a purple robe on his back. Then Pilate parades Jesus out before the crowd. This is a very sad moment. Verse 5:
Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Behold the man!”
And like Caiaphas in chapter 11, Pilate speaks better than he knows. He says, Look, is this the man you’re so worried about? Isn’t he pathetic? Surely, he’s not a threat to anyone.
But oh the irony. “Behold the man.” This is the Word made flesh, the very image of God, the ultimate man, who, as Carson says, is “displaying his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, in the very disgrace, pain, weakness and brutalization that Pilate advanced as suitable evidence that he was a judicial irrelevance” (John, 598). Jim Hamilton writes,
“John 19:5 may contain the greatest display of humility, patience, self-control, restraint, and nobility ever seen in human history. . . . Never was one worthy of more honor treated with more infamy. Never was more power restrained in the face of more provocation. Never was one with more authority treated with more disregard by those dependent upon his goodwill and kindness.” (280)
Pilate hopes that the injustice he’s already done to Jesus will satisfy the Jewish leaders, so he’s caught off guard in verse 6 when they cry out, Crucify him! Crucify him! Pilate doesn’t get it. He hits back: you crucify him; I find no guilt in him.
So, the leaders try another angle: we have a law that says he should die (Leviticus 24:16, “Whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death”). This has been a growing chorus against Jesus in the Gospel of John:
As early as 5:18: they “were seeking . . . to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.”
Then again in 10:33, because Jesus calls God “Father,” they wanted to stone him “for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God.”
Oh the irony. He’s not trying to make himself God, but he has so humbly, so patiently sought to let those know who have eyes to see that he is God himself, the divine Son, in human flesh. The God of Israel, who called Abraham and spoke to Moses and raised up David, and promised to visit his people and rescue them, has come at last in this man. And they reject him.
Back in chapter 1 we heard: “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.” And the climax of that rejection comes in verses 12–16, and with an exclamation point. (We’ll come back to verses 9–11.)
In verses 12–16, Pilate is now seeking all the more to release Jesus, until the Jewish leaders issue the decisive word that turns the tide. Verse 12:
“If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend. Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar.”
This is the checkmate. Pilate is cornered. He would not want word to get to Caesar that he freed a pretender to the throne. The die is cast, but Pilate will take one more dig: “Shall I crucify your King?” Then one last death knell and the lowest point in the long history of Israel’s depravity: “We have no king but Caesar.”
It’s hard to state how callous this is. One of the nation’s distinctives was that the one true God was their king. How scary that the leaders of the Jews would stoop to this, renouncing in effect the God in heaven as their king in the name of the pretend god in Rome, to manipulate his governor in Judea, and send their own Messiah to death. This is a ghastly moment.
So, how is Jesus treated? He is falsely accused, then even when Pilate has determined he’s not guilty, he is unjustly whipped (and later scourged) and mocked and utterly humiliated; a crown of thorns is pressed into his brow; then to appease the crowds, with no legal basis, Jesus is sentenced to the horrific, gruesome, literally excruciating public execution of the cross.
This is an appalling miscarriage of justice. Not that we don’t know injustice today. But this is next level. To be clear, we don’t get perfect justice in this world, but we wait for the end, when God will fully right every wrong.
Yet sometimes there is reasonable, solid justice: the righteous acquitted, the guilty punished fittingly (we thank God for that). And sometimes there is disappointing injustice. And sometimes there is egregious injustice, where everybody knows, or at least everyone without a specially warped spirit knows, that’s not how things are supposed to be.
And then, there is the injustice of John 19, that stands above them all. Here the universe’s most worthy person is falsely accused, and unjustly flogged and publicly mocked, and delivered over to be crucified, when the governor himself has said three times, Not guilty. This is God himself in human flesh. Perfect God and perfect man, in one person, being delivered over to death on the cross.
No incident has ever been more tragic, and no future event will ever match it. No surprise attack, no political assassination, no financial collapse, no military invasion, no atomic detonation or nuclear warfare, no cataclysmic act of terrorism, no large-scale famine or disease — not even slave trading, ethnic cleansing, or decades-long religious violence can eclipse the darkness of these moments.
No suffering has ever been so unfitting. No human has ever been so unjustly treated, because no other human has ever been so worthy of praise. Can you believe how Jesus is treated?
2. Can you believe how Jesus responds?
The greatness of Jesus is on display in verses 9–11. Even Pilate is taken aback — first by Jesus’s silence, then by his words.
The Jewish leaders have said “he has made himself the Son of God.” Verse 8: “When Pilate heard this statement, he was even more afraid.” (This passage turns on key statements back and forth: behold the man, then crucify him, then I find no guilt, now this, then later you’re not a friend to Caesar.)
So, Pilate brings Jesus inside for a private conversation and asks, Where are you from? How is Jesus to answer that in a way Pilate will understand? Pilate is showing himself to be swine, and Jesus will not here cast his pearls this question would require. And Pilate is stunned with the silence.
Now, the prophecy of Isaiah 53:7 comes to mind:
“He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he opened not his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he opened not his mouth.”
I suspect Pilate’s not used to people not answering his questions. He’s unnerved. Who is this man? Verse 10: “You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?” Why aren’t you begging me for mercy?
Then Jesus speaks, and again it’s not at all what Pilate is expecting. No panic. No cowering. Fully composed before the Roman governor who will send him to the cross. These are the most important words in our passage, and they are the only words of Jesus in our passage, and the final words of Christ before he goes to the cross.
So, Jesus doesn’t speak when Pilate expects blabbering panic, and then when he does speak, it is with stunning authority. Who is this man who would even dream to hold his tongue in such a moment, then to speak like he does to the Roman governor?
I marvel at the composure of Jesus, and this dual glory: glory in his silence, glory when he speaks. And do take note that there are times when silence is not cowardly but divine. There are times when saying nothing speaks loudest. It’s unnerving to anxious people who demand certain words right now. Beware when frantic people demand you say certain things.
So when Jesus does speak, what does he say? Verse 11:
You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above (we’ll come back to that). Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin.
Jesus doesn’t say Pilate has no sin; Pilate is responsible. But Jesus says someone else has “the greater sin.” Who could that be?
It could be Judas. He says to the leaders in Matthew 26:15, “What will you give me if I deliver him over to you?” Jesus had seen it coming in Matthew 20:18: “See, we are going up to Jerusalem. And the Son of Man will be delivered over [that’s Judas] to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified…”
So, it could be the Jewish leaders. They arrested Jesus and bound him and delivered him over to Pilate (John 18:12, 19). Pilate has just said to Jesus in 18:35, “Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me.”
Among the chief priest, Caiaphas played the key role, as John has emphasized (11:50; and again in 18:14). Whether Jesus’s focus is Caiaphas or the whole group of Jewish leaders, this seems to be the main referent. Caiaphas and the Jewish leaders are the party with “the greater sin” than Pilate’s.
Still, Pilate himself is responsible. He is the ranking Roman onsite; he sits in the seat of judgment and issues the formal decree. He is the one, as he says, with authority to release. He is the one, verse 16 says, who “delivered [Jesus] over . . . to be crucified.”
Now, apparently, crowds have gathered by Friday morning, and they too have their part to play, in rallying to the release of Barabbas and joining the chant to crucify. So, a few weeks later, Peter will preach to crowds in Jerusalem,
You delivered [Jesus] over and denied [him] in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release him. But you denied the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. (Acts 3:13–15)
So, Judas, Caiaphas, the leaders, Pilate, the people, and there’s one more unseen, culpable party: you and me. There is a profound sense in which we delivered him over. Our sin delivered him over. Paul will write to the Romans, Jesus was “delivered up for our trespasses” (Rom 4:25); and to the Corinthians, “Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor 15:3); and to the Galatians, Jesus “gave himself for our sins” (Gal 1:4). And 1 Peter 2:24: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.”
And there’s one last person in Jesus’s words in verse 11 we must reckon with. Now look back at the first part of verse 11: “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above.”
Those might be the most important words in this chapter: “given from above.” Even in the world’s most horrible miscarriage of justice, God is here, in full control, accomplishing the rescue from sin. In the evil of Judas, the evil of Caiaphas, and the evil of the Jewish leaders, the evil of Pilate, God is doing his greatest through our worst — which is how you and I in our sin, get involved. Apart from divine intention, this whole episode has nothing to do with you and me. But it’s not apart from God. It is “given from above.” He is at work, doing his greatest through humanity’s worst.
What humans meant for evil, God meant for good. He did not only allow it, but as the early church would say in Acts 4, he planned it:
truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, 28 to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. (Acts 4:27–28)
Isaiah 53:10: “it was the will of the Lord to crush him.” But beware a danger here we’re all prone to. In our natural human thinking, wanting to get ourselves off the hook for our sin, or pretend God is not in control, we assume that his sovereignty and our responsibility must be related inversely: the more sovereign God is, the less responsible I am, and vice versa.
But that is dead wrong. God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility are compatible, not mutually exclusive. They operate on different levels.
Pilate’s authority is “given from above.” And when Judas betrays Jesus, and Peter denies him, and the leaders plot against him, and the crowds reject him, neither have they escaped the sovereign hand of God nor have they escaped their responsibility for their sin.
3. Can you believe how Jesus did it?
It is outrageous how Jesus is treated. And it is stunning how he responds. And now we ask, how did he do it?
Let’s end with one text that both brings together this moment in John 19, and our comparatively small moment as a church in 2026.
The text is 1 Peter 2:18–24. It mentions Jesus’s silence, which was not weakness but strength, and a fulfilment of Isaiah 53. And it mentions the grace (“gracious thing”) that God is pleased to do in our lives by his Spirit in the face of injustice, like the grace that shines in the darkness as Jesus stands before Pilate:
Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust. 19 For this is a gracious thing [this is grace! — the world may not yet see it, but God never misses it], when, mindful of God [literally, through consciousness of God], one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly. 20 For what credit [kleos, glory] is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God [this is grace with God]. 21 For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. 22 He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. 23 When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but [here it is:] continued entrusting himself [παρεδίδου, delivering himself over] to him who judges justly. 24 He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.
So, when you are treated unjustly, and you endure by being mindful of God, it is grace. And verse 23 says the way Jesus did it was: he continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. Literally, he continued giving himself over, delivering himself over, to his Father, knowing every wrong will be righted in the end.
And the greatness of Christ isn’t that it is just a moment. He “continued to entrust himself” because temptation returns again and again to seize justice for ourselves. I’ve entrusted myself to God for a few minutes or hours, or weeks, or ten months; now I’ve had enough; now I’ll return reviling for reviling. But Jesus — and may we be like this, Cities Church — Jesus continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.
No Guilt in Him
As we come to the Table, we remember how Pilate spoke better than he knew. We saw that Pilate says three times: I find no guilt in him. But not only did Jesus not deserve death; in fact, little did Pilate know, there was “no guilt in him” at all.
And as we come to this Table we celebrate that because of Jesus, and our union with him by faith, God now says of us what Pilate said of Jesus: “I find no guilt in him.”
