Re:Verse passage – John 18:33-40 (day three)
“My kingdom is not of this world.”
“Heaven good, earth bad” might seem like an implication present in this passage. But when Jesus speaks of the world here, what does he have in mind? The marvelous creation we read of in Genesis? The seas teaming with life? The dry land? The vegetation? Animals? Human beings? Has he at long last now, here before Pilate, given up on this place where we are born and where we live? Or does he mean the system of striving for power over one another, the system that has unleashed unbearable and unfathomable suffering – from warring families to warring nations, from depression to deforestation, from cancer to concentration camps? Pilate was a man of the system. Jesus stood before him as a man of the good. Pilate forced. Jesus loved. The system cannot stand against such a kingdom.
