Good Friday
Texts: John 18:12–19:42;
Isaiah 52:13–53:12
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from Ibram X Kendi
GOD’S AUTHORITY (IN AN AGE OF AUTHORITARIANISM):
“FROM ABOVE” OR ALONGSIDE?
OR: THE GREAT REPLACEMENT THEORY VS.
THE GREAT RECONCILIATION EVENT
John 19:10b-11: Pilate said, “Don’t you know that I have the authority to let you go, and the authority to crucify you?”
“You couldn’t have any authority at all over me,” replied Jesus, “unless it was given to you from above. That’s why the person who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.”
Pontius Pilate thinks he has power and authority over Jesus. Jesus challenges his thinking, telling him in no uncertain terms that any authority he has regarding Jesus is “from above.” We might assume that Jesus is talking about God. That God has ultimate authority over everyone “from above.”
But I would like to take a few minutes this evening to question this assumption. Is Jesus really talking about God when he talks about an authority “from above.” What’s at stake here is the kind of authority which God truly shows us through Jesus. Our human authority is certainly “from above.” The long history of nationalistic empires is infamous for top-down power and authority. Is God’s authority like that, only higher? “From above?” Or is God’s power and authority of a quite different nature?
In John’s Gospel, Jesus is the Word with God at creation, the Word which then becomes flesh and tents among us (John 1:14). In short, Jesus might be showing us God’s power and authority coming alongside us — an authority not “from above” but right in our midst. And this very different kind of authority comes to a climax during these Three Days which we memorialize this weekend in our worship. It began last night with Jesus washing his disciples feet at the Last Supper — an event which only John records (John 13:1-17). What is the point of Jesus their master doing something that only a lowly servant would do in the top-down world of human beings? I believe it is to challenge the entire system of human authority, which always works as a hierarchy of power and authority.
With Jesus’ life in the balance, he confronts Pilate about his perceived authority. The few, or even one, who hold all the power and authority to determine who lives and who dies, they hold power over even people like Pontius Pilate. Pilate would never be able to sentence Jesus to death if he wasn’t granted authority from Caesar and the Roman Senate. I don’t think Jesus is trumping Pilate’s authority with God’s authority when he talks about an authority “from above.” He’s teaching Pilate the realism that his power and authority is limited — always less than he thinks. As much authority as Pilate has, Caesar has more.
Jesus is, however, checking Pilate’s power with God’s power in the next thing he says: “That’s why the person who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.” Who is the one who handed Jesus over to Pilate? We might answer Judas, who betrayed Jesus. Or we might answer Caiaphas, the head of the Judean Council who literally walked Jesus over to Pilate. When John the Gospel-writer reintroduces us to Caiaphas at Jesus’ trial before the Judeans, he reminds us about when we first met Caiaphas plotting Jesus’ death back in chapter 11: “Caiaphas,” the Evangelist reminds us, “was the one who had advised the Jews that it was better to have one person die for the people” (John 18:14). In short, the scapegoat principle. And regarding Judas, before the Last Supper begins, John tells us, “The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him” (John 13:2). The devil. Also known as Satan. I believe that whether we think of Caiaphas and his scapegoat principle or Judas and his betrayal, John is telling us that the one who handed Jesus over is the devil. Satan is the one guilty of a greater sin.
We might even say that Caesar’s power and authority also come from above, if we understand the power and authority human regimes to have kind of a plug-and-play that is satanic. Whether Caesar happened to be named Julius, or Augustus, or Tiberius, or Nero, did it make much difference in terms of the deadliness of the outcome? It seems that no matter who we plug into those top-down nationalistic power schemes, it turns out roughly the same in terms of the brutality with which the power is wielded. As the maxim by Lord Acton goes, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I believe this corruption is what the New Testament names as Sin and personifies as Satan.1 So when Jesus confronts Pilate with an authority from above, he may be telling him: ‘Caesar has more power than you, and Satan’s power is above even Caesar’s.
In essence I believe that Jesus, as he stands before Pilate, is contrasting two kinds of power and authority. The human brand of authority relies on things like a top-down power structure placed in the hands of one ruler or a very small group of men — oligarchs, we call them today. Human power and authority comes down “from above” and commands things like the death of society’s scapegoats and betrayal of fellow citizens, precisely because everyone in this satanic game is competing for higher rungs on the ladder of power and authority. As Jesus submits to this brand of authority as the one cast out, he is naming it all as satanic. He is, after all, the Lamb of God who has come to take away the sin of the world. Jesus, in dying on the cross (which we solemnly remember today), is blowing apart our entire human brand of top-down authority. He comes into our midst, willing to subject himself to that authority, precisely to both expose it as satanic and to offer us something different. He offers us the Word made flesh who dwells among us. He offers us a master who washes our feet in order to teach us mutual service, a way of serving one another that can only be done among equals. In our human top-down way of doing things, based on inequality, serving always turns into servitude.
In short, Jesus comes to offer us a whole new kind of power and authority that comes from God. Not an authority over other human beings from above, but an authority to serve one another as equals, as friends, as siblings. He teaches us to live by one and only one commandment: that we love one another as Jesus has loved us. Love is the only power and authority that truly gives life — even as it is the kind of love that paradoxically is willing to lay down its life for friends. The power the Caesars offer us is the dog-eat-dog world of trying to beat out others for the next rung of the ladder. Jesus offers us the Beloved Community in which we treat every person as equally a child of God whom we are privileged to serve in mutual service. We are here to make each other’s lives better, not to beat each other to the next rung of the ladder — with very little chance, to be honest, of ever getting near the top of the pyramid of power.
And let’s be even more honest with ourselves: what would we do if we ever got near the top of the pyramid? Behave like the authoritarian leaders and oligarchs who currently govern us? Would we use that power and authority more benevolently? Or. Or should we judge that kind of authority and power to be satanic and choose to give it up?
As we ponder Jesus’ death on the cross today, an execution legally carried out by human authority, might we also ponder the choice given to us by the launching of God’s reign on earth through Jesus? Might we ponder the wholly different kind of power and authority which God offers us through his Word of love made flesh that still mightily lives in our midst through the Holy Spirit? Do we see glimpses of that kind of power, in fact, in the promise which our American experiment still holds out for us? Namely, the promise of a multi-racial democracy where all citizens truly enjoy equal opportunity to serve one another and to see our lives flourish?
I’m going to wrap up these meditations soon. But I wanted to at least point you to where I think the cross points us today in this time of rising authoritarianism. I just started reading the incredibly important new book by Ibram X. Kendi, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age.2 He brings into focus what we are living through, by ‘naming’ a theme running through the current rise of authoritarianism.
He begins with a French author who not many Americans are familiar with, a man named Renault Camus. One American who is very familiar with Camus is Steven Miller, President Trump’s chief advisor, who is a big fan of Renault Camus’ two books, titled The Great Placement (2011) and You Will Not Replace Us! (2018) — with the latter book title being a chant used by the Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, VA in 2017. Kendi names the dominant theme of today’s authoritarian regimes as “The Great Replacement Theory.”3 Those at the very top keep the rest of us divided by stoking anger at those who supposedly threaten to replace us on the ‘ladder of success.’
In tonight’s Sermon Notes I sketch out what I see to be the wide difference between the so-called Great Replacement Theory of human authoritarian movements and what the New Testament refers to as the Great Reconciliation Event, represented by the events of these Three Days — Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter.
To bring an end to these meditations, I refer you to the Excerpt Page from Kendi’s new book. The excerpt sketches out the kind of authority “from above” which I believe the cross means to expose as a dead end. In societies where all but a very few at the top have truly dominant authority, the billions of the rest of us fight for relative position. We seek to use any privilege we are granted from above to keep ahead of those disadvantaged folks below us. It’s like an endless “Chutes and Ladders” game where we the privileged try to stay ahead of the less advantaged or disadvantaged. And the only true winners by the rules of the game are the very few at the top.
But doesn’t the promise of a multi-racial democracy offer us the beginnings of something truly different? Here are Kendi’s own questions which I see as posed to us by the alternative in Christ’s cross and resurrection: “Will members of privileged groups spend this century chained by their own ideas, defending their privileges by empowering those [at the very top] who dominate them? Or will they spend this century breaking their chain of ideas and joining with members of disadvantaged groups in the grand power struggle for antiracist democracy?”4 In the words of John’s Gospel: will we turn away from the satanic power games of human authority and turn toward the Beloved Community of friends and siblings in mutual service to one another? Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, April 3, 2026
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from Ibram X. Kendi
Notes
1. In John’s Gospel, Jesus makes a direct connection between Satan and human governance in terms of paternity: “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). While anti-Semitic regimes use a verse like this to justify brutality against Jews, I’m arguing here that a verse like this actually points precisely to the workings of such brutal regimes. It is an anthropological description of how human authoritarian governance operates, based on murder and lies.
2. Ibram X. Kendi, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age (One World, 2026).
3. Kendi skillfully sketches out all these connections in the Prologue, Chain of Ideas, especially pages xvii-xxiv.
4. Ibid., xxxvii.
