John 19:10-11a – The Father Factor
From John 19 –10 Then Pilate said to Him, “Are You not speaking to me? Do You not know that I have power to crucify You, and power to release You?”
11 Jesus answered, “You could have no power at all against Me unless it had been given you from above.
I'm reading David Halberstam's The Children in which college students not so different from those am privileged to work with change the country by challenging its assumptions about their color. Standing up to social pressure to conform to an unjust system, I'm finding, required a certainty about one's own identity and value.
For most of the young participants in the early stages of the Civil Rights movement, this value when identity took time to discover. This realization was also the steady work of mentors like Jim Lawson and Jim Bevil. Digging deeper, as Halberstam does, we find roots go beyond the intense, media-worthy crisis of legal confrontation which is the book's main subject.
Halberstam delves into the sense of certainty instilled in the Movement's participants, and where the older mentors found it. He writes, "The more time James Bevel spent with Jim Lawson, the more Lawson reminded him of his father. The parallels between both men were strong: Neither seemed to worry about being envisioned by local officials as inferior, mostly because it never occurred to them that they might be inferior. Exterior things, the laws of segregation, could not defeat them; their own inner truth, a belief in a just God, sustained them."
Halberstam's steady sourcing reminds me of another confrontation with unjust power in John 19:10 and 11. In verse 10, Pontius Pilate offers a kind of local approval, a pass-through." Are you not speaking to me?" he tantalizes. Do you know who I am? Do you know what I can do in my superior position that you cannot in your inferior position? "Do You not know that I have power to crucify You, and power to release You?"
Jesus knows, of course, where the only meaningful power and affirmation comes from. When He says in John 19:11 the power comes from above, it isn't an address. Above is where He and His Father shared in perfect relationship with each other from eternity past, where They established before the foundation of the world the mutual Gospel mission They would undertake, and where They participated together in Creation.
Jesus didn't need to know from the latest dignitary on the spot whether He was innocent, whether He was righteous because His Father had already declared it so again and again. He didn't need to search each face and the nuances and pitfalls of each situation to determine if His stock was rising or falling. Established in the only court that mattered, Heaven's, any other valuation of His worth doubtless never occurred to him.
That Lawson and Bevil possess even a shadow of that certainty in their own crucible hour stirs our hope. We can, parents and mentors, teachers and coaches, establish a baseline of value, especially as we impact others at an early age. Bevil's father did, and because he did Bevil recognize that same bedrock conviction later in life. He was drawn to people who said about his life what his father said about his life, what his God said about his life.
For nearly all of us, it's too late to even pretend that existential doubts haven't occurred to us. They have, and they will again. But, there's another story competing for the lead as we re-tell ourselves the main storylines of the previous day in the previous week. What have those who have known us from our beginnings declared? The affirmation of the human father or father figure may be easier to find and reestablish if we remind ourselves of the verdict from above.
11 Jesus answered, “You could have no power at all against Me unless it had been given you from above.
I'm reading David Halberstam's The Children in which college students not so different from those am privileged to work with change the country by challenging its assumptions about their color. Standing up to social pressure to conform to an unjust system, I'm finding, required a certainty about one's own identity and value.
For most of the young participants in the early stages of the Civil Rights movement, this value when identity took time to discover. This realization was also the steady work of mentors like Jim Lawson and Jim Bevil. Digging deeper, as Halberstam does, we find roots go beyond the intense, media-worthy crisis of legal confrontation which is the book's main subject.
Halberstam delves into the sense of certainty instilled in the Movement's participants, and where the older mentors found it. He writes, "The more time James Bevel spent with Jim Lawson, the more Lawson reminded him of his father. The parallels between both men were strong: Neither seemed to worry about being envisioned by local officials as inferior, mostly because it never occurred to them that they might be inferior. Exterior things, the laws of segregation, could not defeat them; their own inner truth, a belief in a just God, sustained them."
Halberstam's steady sourcing reminds me of another confrontation with unjust power in John 19:10 and 11. In verse 10, Pontius Pilate offers a kind of local approval, a pass-through." Are you not speaking to me?" he tantalizes. Do you know who I am? Do you know what I can do in my superior position that you cannot in your inferior position? "Do You not know that I have power to crucify You, and power to release You?"
Jesus knows, of course, where the only meaningful power and affirmation comes from. When He says in John 19:11 the power comes from above, it isn't an address. Above is where He and His Father shared in perfect relationship with each other from eternity past, where They established before the foundation of the world the mutual Gospel mission They would undertake, and where They participated together in Creation.
Jesus didn't need to know from the latest dignitary on the spot whether He was innocent, whether He was righteous because His Father had already declared it so again and again. He didn't need to search each face and the nuances and pitfalls of each situation to determine if His stock was rising or falling. Established in the only court that mattered, Heaven's, any other valuation of His worth doubtless never occurred to him.
That Lawson and Bevil possess even a shadow of that certainty in their own crucible hour stirs our hope. We can, parents and mentors, teachers and coaches, establish a baseline of value, especially as we impact others at an early age. Bevil's father did, and because he did Bevil recognize that same bedrock conviction later in life. He was drawn to people who said about his life what his father said about his life, what his God said about his life.
For nearly all of us, it's too late to even pretend that existential doubts haven't occurred to us. They have, and they will again. But, there's another story competing for the lead as we re-tell ourselves the main storylines of the previous day in the previous week. What have those who have known us from our beginnings declared? The affirmation of the human father or father figure may be easier to find and reestablish if we remind ourselves of the verdict from above.
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