NEAR THE BEGINNING of Matthew’s gospel, magi from a faraway land came to Jerusalem looking for “the one who has been born king of the Jews” (Matt 2:2, NIV). At the time, Herod the Great held the title of king over Judea, but everyone knew that the real power lay with the emperor, making Herod more of a regional governor. History tends to remember him as an ambitious, ruthless, and somewhat paranoid man who wanted the people’s admiration but would do anything — including murder — to protect his power. The magi, unfortunately, could not know the trouble they had started merely by asking a question that suggested that someone else might be the rightful king.

At the end of John’s gospel, the idea of Jesus being the king of the Jews also comes to the fore in a striking way. This was, after all, part of strategy Jesus’ opponents used to get him crucified. They had no legal charge they could bring against him that would hold up in a Roman court. But they could legitimately say that Jesus claimed to be a king. This made it possible for them to paint Jesus as a revolutionary who disturbed the peace and set himself in opposition to Rome.

When Jesus was arrested and brought before Pontius Pilate, the governor was eager to settle the matter of whether Jesus was, in fact, the so-called “King of the Jews.” By the end of the interview, however, Pilate found that Jesus was innocent of any real crime and tried to release him. This forced Jesus’ opponents to publicly play their ace in the hole: “If you release this man, you are no friend of Caesar; everyone who makes himself out to be a king opposes Caesar” (John 19:12). Rome had eyes and ears everywhere, and Pilate was not about to gamble his own destiny on this odd man from Nazareth. Jesus’ fate was sealed.

Pilate knew when he was being manipulated, however, and he didn’t like it. “Shall I crucify your King?” he asked the riotous crowd. And in a stunningly desperate act of hypocrisy, the chief priests shouted back, “We have no king but Caesar” (vs. 15).

It was a politically correct and spiritually dead thing to say.

In theory, Pilate could still have released Jesus, but it would have been political suicide at best, literal suicide at worst. He had been backed into a corner, forced to do what he didn’t want to do. Yet he still found a way to have the last word in the debate. He wrote out a notice and had it nailed to the cross: “Jesus the Nazarene, The King of the Jews” (vs. 19).

The chief priests, predictably, had a fit; they insisted that he change it to read that Jesus only claimed to be the king. But the deed was done. I imagine Pilate wearing a smug expression as he told them, “What I have written I have written” (vs. 22).

. . .

THE APOSTLE PAUL, as we’ve seen, tells the Colossians that yes, as uncircumcised and sinful Gentiles they were once as good as dead before God. But that, of course, wasn’t the end of the story:

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. (Col 2:13-14)

Paul wasn’t suggesting that circumcised Jews had no problem with sin; he was saying that circumcision wasn’t the answer. The cross was. The holy God, in grace, took the initiative by taking the legal claim he had against sinful humanity and nailing it to the cross with Jesus.

Again, what the New International Version translates as “the charge of our legal indebtedness” is literally “the handwriting in the decrees,” and interpreters disagree as to what Paul means. There needn’t be a single “correct” meaning, of course, any more than the vivid imagery of Jesus’ parables can be boiled down to a pithy bit of bumper sticker wisdom.

But many scholars have suggested that when Paul envisaged this legal document — whatever it represented! — being nailed to the cross, he also had in mind what is known in Latin as the titulus crucis, the sign Pilate wrote out and had nailed to the cross. The words “Jesus the Nazarene, the King of the Jews” were written in three languages so that everyone who passed by would know the “crime” for which Jesus had been crucified.

If this is indeed what Paul had in mind, it adds more layers of meaning to what he writes in Colossians. Pilate did not condemn Jesus, even though he was forced to execute him. For him to nail that sign to the cross, bearing those words, was his implicit condemnation of the hypocrisy and jealousy of the chief priests who handed over their own king to be crucified. In that sense, the sign wasn’t a charge against Jesus; it was a charge against them, a backhanded declaration of their guilt.

That charge, the charge of being a king rather than a seditionist, is one Jesus deserved. And as the rightful king, he stood in for his people. Whatever he suffered, he suffered on behalf of his people. He died so that every charge against his people might die with him, making it possible for them to be raised again to life as he knew he himself would be raised.

How much of this would the Colossians have heard in Paul’s words? Who knows. But we can hear it. And we can be amazed and grateful to be adopted into the people for whom Christ — who is now our king — died.