Transcript
Jesus before Pilate
Richmond’s First Baptist, March 15, 2026
The Fourth Sunday of Lent
John 18:28-40
Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”
I got a text message from a friend last week that said, “Got up at 5:00 am, ran four miles, came back, made a vegetable smoothie for breakfast, did two loads of laundry, mopped and vacuumed all the floors, and that’s all I remember about my dream.” That’s funny, right? But it got me thinking about dreams. I had heard somewhere that the human brain is not able to distinguish between dreams and reality when it’s asleep, and so I asked the Internet: “Can the human brain distinguish dreams from reality? This is what it said:
In a sense, no—at least not while the dream is happening. When we are in REM sleep (the stage when most vivid dreaming occurs), the brain areas responsible for visual perception, emotion, and narrative experience are highly active. But the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain that handles logical evaluation and reality-testing—is much less active. Because of that:
· The brain generates sensory experiences internally that feel real.
· The dreaming mind usually accepts the scenario without questioning it, even when it’s absurd.
· Only when we wake up does the reasoning part of the brain say, ‘Wait—that couldn’t have happened.’
That’s why in dreams we can talk with people who have been dead for years, walk through walls, or suddenly find ourselves back in high school—and it all feels perfectly plausible. There’s even a phrase researchers use: the dreaming brain is “offline from reality-monitoring.”i
So, when we’re dreaming, we don’t know what is real and what is not. And that sounds a little too much like the world we’re living in today. I read an article recently about a 15-second video generated by an artificial intelligence platform called Seedance 2.0, where it looked as if Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise were having a fistfight on a rooftop. I clicked the link and watched it and I couldn’t tell the difference between that video and a clip from any of the other multimillion dollar blockbusters in which those two have starred. It was frighteningly realistic; frightening in the sense that the entire motion picture industry thought it might soon be out of a job.ii Maybe you’ve had that experience: where you look at something on your screen and have to ask yourself, “Is that real?”
Or you read something on a social media post and have to ask yourself, “Is that true?” A few years ago I shared a story about a man named Edgar Welch, who loaded his car with weapons and drove from Salisbury, NC, to Washington DC because he was convinced by something he had read online that a well-known former secretary of state was running a child sex-trafficking ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor in Chevy Chase. When Welch finally found himself inside the restaurant and discovered that it had all been a hoax—that Comet Ping Pong doesn’t even have a basement—he laid down his weapons, walked out the door, and surrendered. He admitted to the arresting officers, “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.”iii
I could share plenty of other examples, but maybe you can see my point: the line between reality and fantasy is getting blurry, as is the line between truth and fiction. It
makes it hard to function. How can you make a good decision when you don’t have all the facts, or when you can’t be sure that all the “facts” you have are true?
I think that’s where we find Pilate in this morning’s Gospel lesson. He’s trying to make a decision about Jesus, about whether to put him to death or let him go. The Jewish religious authorities are telling him one thing but his actual experience of Jesus is something else. For starters, Jesus is not afraid of him. He sits there calmly, looking Pilate in the eye, not as if they were equals but as if he were somehow above him. Pilate asks him if he’s a king and Jesus says, “My kingdom is not from this world.” When Pilate says, “Oh, then you are a king,” Jesus says, essentially, “If that’s how you want to see it. But what I’m really here for, what I’ve really come to do, is testify to the truth.” And Pilate says, “What is truth?”
He wasn’t the first to ask that question. Four hundred years earlier the Greek philosopher Plato had suggested that what we think is real and what is actually real might be two different things. He illustrated that difference in his famous “allegory of the cave.” You may already be familiar with it, but if not, here’s a quick summary:
Imagine that there are some prisoners, who are chained inside a cave. They can’t turn their heads to the right or the left; all they can see is the wall in front of them. But behind them there is a fire, and servants who hold up objects that cast their shadows on the walls of the cave. The prisoners see these shadows and assume that they are the real thing. They spend their time talking about them and arguing about their meaning.
But then one of the prisoners escapes. He sees that what he’s been looking at are only shadows cast by the fire. And then he climbs up out of the cave. At first all he can see is the shadows cast by the sun, and then he begins to see the things that are casting the shadows, and finally he is able to see the sun itself—“the form of the Good”—which he understands to be the ultimate source of knowledge and truth.
So he goes back into the cave to tell his fellow prisoners that what they have been looking at is not real, that those are only the shadows of real things. But he has been temporarily blinded by the sun, so that he can’t even see the shadows on the wall anymore, and for that reason his fellow prisoners don’t trust him—they think he’s making the whole thing up.iv
For our purposes, let’s imagine that the author of John’s Gospel is the escaped prisoner who has seen the Light of the World. For him the ultimate source of knowledge and truth is not the S-U-N, but the S-O-N, the one who has come down from heaven, and he wants to tell his story in a way that will illuminate the difference between what is real and what is not.
§ So, in the Prologue of his Gospel, he talks about the Word that was with God and was God becoming flesh and living among us in the person of Jesus. He refers to him as the “true light that enlightens every person.”
§ When Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night, Jesus tells him that he has to be born again, but Nicodemus thinks he’s talking about physical birth. Jesus clarifies by saying, “No, you have to be born from above.”
§ When the woman at the well of Samaria starts talking to him about water Jesus says, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is talking to you, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.
§ After Jesus feeds a multitude with five loaves and two fish the people think they will never have to work for food again, but Jesus says, “I am the bread of life.” And again, he’s not talking about bread, but about his body.
It goes on and on in this Gospel. There is this physical reality, down here, where birth is birth and bread is bread and water is water, and then there’s this spiritual reality—the other Gospels call it the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven—where birth and
bread and water are merely shadows of the thing itself, and the thing itself is LIFE, or in Greek, the zoen ton ainion. We often translate it as “eternal life,” but a more literal translation would be “the life of the ages”—life that is abundant, overflowing, and everlasting.
Life with God.
That’s what’s up there, outside the cave, and Jesus came to tell us about it but most people didn’t get it, they didn’t get him. John, on the other hand, did. And now he’s trying to tell us the truth, and one of the ways he does that is by telling the stories of people who wake up to the reality of God.
§ Nicodemus might have been one of those. He’s certainly curious enough. He asks a lot of the right questions. But after Jesus says that in order to have eternal life you have to be born of water and the Spirit Nicodemus kind of fades from the scene. He reminds me of King Agrippa in the Book of Acts, who was “almost persuaded” to become a Christian.
§ But that woman at the well of Samaria? You can practically see her waking up to the reality that is sitting there in front of her, beginning to understand that this stranger who talks about “living water” is actually the Messiah, the one who will reveal everything. She wanders back into town in a daze, leaving her water bucket behind her.
§ And then the Man Born Blind, whose physical eyes are opened after Jesus smears some mud on them and tells him to go wash in the Pool of Siloam, but whose spiritual eyes are opened in the remainder of that story. At the end Jesus asks him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He asks, “Who is he, Lord, that I may believe in him?” And Jesus says, “You have seen him, and the one who is speaking to you is he.”
And then Jesus says, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see may see and those who do see may become blind.” And if you think about Plato’s allegory of the cave you can almost see him talking to those prisoners who are still staring at shadows on the wall, trying to convince them that what they see is not reality. John says that some of the Pharisees who were standing nearby heard what Jesus said and asked, “We’re not blind, are we?” Jesus said, “If you were blind you would have no sin, but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains” (John 9:41).
And what about Pilate? He thinks he can see. He thinks he knows the truth, and for him the truth is the power and politics of the Roman Empire. It’s whatever it takes to keep that reality intact. So, when someone comes along claiming to be a king Pilate has to do something about it—he has to put him down. The Roman Empire can only have one king, and that king is Caesar. But there’s something unsettling about this Jesus. He acts as if the Roman Empire is not the Ultimate Reality, as if Pilate, and his soldiers, and even Caesar are only so many shadows on the wall.
“My kingdom is not from this world,” Jesus says, looking Pilate straight in the eye. “I came into this world to testify to the truth.” And Pilate says, “What is truth?” But you get the feeling he’s waking up. He’s seeing something in Jesus that is more real than anything else he has ever known. He can’t bring himself to condemn him. But the Jewish religious authorities insist, saying, “This man claims to be the Son of God!” And when Pilate heard that, John writes, he was “more afraid than ever.”
Suppose he had reason to be? Suppose he had begun to see that his world was not the real world, and that his position, his power, his army were all just shadows on the wall. This man sitting in front of him, however, was real! He was speaking the truth! He was in touch with something Pilate had never even seen before, but it’s possible that he wanted to. It’s possible that he wanted to wake up, and rub his eyes, and see the
world as it really is. But if he did he would have to see the Roman Empire for what it really was—a shadow play—and to see himself for what he really was—a puppet—and it’s possible that he wasn’t ready for that. It’s possible that very few of us are ready for that.
Imagine that this world we think is real—this world of politics and power—is just shadows on the wall, only a dream, but because we’re in it we think it’s real. And so we behave as if it were. We take sides. We draw lines in the sand. We post hateful things on Facebook. I keep waiting for that moment when we will wake up, and shake our heads, and say, “Thank God! It was only a dream!” But so far we haven’t.
We’re still dreaming.
In my research I learned that there’s an interesting exception to that rule about not being able to tell the difference between dreams and reality. Occasionally people experience something called “lucid dreams,” where the prefrontal cortex partially reactivates, and where the dreamer realizes, “Oh, I’m dreaming!” I’ve been imagining Jesus as that Lucid Dreamer, as one who walked through this world fully aware that what he was seeing and hearing were part of the dream, and that the reality was God’s kingdom. And so he tried to wake us up to that reality. He told us parables of the Kingdom to sharpen our spiritual senses, and to whet our spiritual appetites for that which would truly satisfy—bread from heaven, living water, abundant life.
When I was talking to you about near-death experiences a few weeks ago I quoted from an article that said, “It is reported that the afterlife feels far more real than life on Earth. The afterlife feels like it is the ultimate deepest truth, whereas by comparison, life on Earth feels like a dream.” As I said then, I got that information from the Internet and I have no way of knowing if it’s true, but what if it is? What if you get there and realize that so much of what you were arguing about on social media was really just shadows
on the wall? Wouldn’t you wish then that you had focused on the things that really matter? So, what does really matter? Well, Jesus keeps trying to tell us. He keeps trying to tell us the Truth. And he is the one I trust most to do that. After all,
He is the Truth,
And the Way,
And the Life.
—Jim Somerville © 2026
