For our Advent candle lightings this year, our church is having actors/actresses from our drama ministry are performing historic-fiction monologues of first-century individuals who are processing the words of Christ from a certain angle and then celebrating his birth. Enjoy!
Salutations, dear gathering of Christians. My name is Cato. I’m an aspiring intellect and philosopher, and I’d like to tell you a little bit about how I became a follower of ‘the Way,’ as we Christians call it. I’m not the best public speaker, so I prepared my testimony on some notes here.
I would not have known about Jesus the Christ had it not been for the man you know as Pontius Pilate. We were always very different people. He spent decades in the military while I spent decades in school. Pilate spent a lot of time as far away as Judea, whereas I went and stayed as close to Rome as I could. But we had two things in common. We were both born in Bisenti, fifty miles or so from Rome, and, until recently, we were both very cynical about religion. We were what you would call “pen pals” for most of our lives.
Pilate didn’t really get along with the Jews he oversaw. He just didn’t understand why he couldn’t decorate Jerusalem with images of the state religion, even if only at night, or why he couldn’t use just some Temple money to build a town aqueduct, having the Jews contribute to their providing government. He always had a temper that got him into trouble with Emperor Tiberius.
But I consider myself to be an open-minded person. My cynicism about religion doesn’t come from any type of grown insensitivity or experience with stubborn religious folk. I’m just so used to seeing religion used for political career or personal convenience. Senators in Rome flaunt their fake devotion to gods, whom we somewhat copied from the Greeks, so they can climb the political ladder. Pharisees have been known to be publicly explicit about their rituals and followed laws in their lifestyles, so that they get governmental benefits for being “religious.” I guess, in all the religions I’ve encountered, I’ve rarely seen followers who are giving a god some royal respect, being willing to sacrifice personal lifestyle, career and even safety for a king.
That’s why I was so fascinated by Pilate’s last letter to me. He wasn’t whining about how he’d been disgraced and fired by the Empire for massacring some Samaritans. Pilate’s my friend, but I supported Governor Vitellius in that decision. Pilate, in his last letter, was still talking about his bewildering conversation with Jesus of Nazareth.
Like I said, Pilate was no weakling. Quite the opposite, and to a fault. But he was so rattled by Jesus. Jesus stood before Pilate, tortured and bleeding, and said that his kingdom is not of this world, and that he’s come to testify to the truth. Pilate, a longtime religious cynic and a military man who’s long served an empire that mostly transitions leadership by assassination, struggled with the battered Jesus’s confident words.
Pilate wrote to me, trying to process all of this: “He’s blameless and he’s not threatening Rome, so why is he being executed? And why aren’t he or any of his followers trying to stop it? If his kingdom is of another place, then what is he doing here? What is this truth to which he’s testifying? You know I’ve never believed much in truth.”
I learned later, exactly, what Jesus was saying. Pilate never really understood paradox. Jesus the Christ would die to set people free from the ultimate cost of their wrongdoing. He would rise again from the grave to conquer death. So, in essence, Jesus reigned, as King, from the throne of an execution tool: the cross. That’s a king I’d serve. And if his kingdom is of another place, why is he here? I think it’s a loving and compassionate effort to testify to this very truth.
So, as I light this candle, I think of the birth of Jesus the Christ as the promised King, who came down to earth from His Kingdom in order to testify to the truth. He has conquered death for us and reigns in all of our hearts, and we are to serve him with thankfulness and respect. Because Truth is not something flexible that gets twisted for self-convenience. It’s something that we’ve seen fellow Christians sacrifice and even die for.
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