After Pentecost Devotional - Day 54

“Jesus was brought before Pilate the governor, who asked him, 'Are you the king of the Jews?' 'Those are your words!' Jesus answered.” Matthew 27:11

The cycle repeats itself day in and day out. We want to place people into nice, neat categories with which we are comfortable. We want to order and structure our world around issues and concepts that we believe make sense.

It's about meeting our own needs for maintaining a grasp on the world around us. It is about keeping stock of the way we understand the world and divide it into friends, enemies, love ones, and people who don't matter. The problem is that it just does not work. It does not do justice to the realities of life. While we want the issues to be simple, the categories neat, and uncertainties brushed aside as irrelevant, life just does not cooperate.

Pilate had a list of priorities before him. He was a servant to the interests of Caesar and Rome. He was tasked with keeping order in the territory surrounding Jerusalem. Peace was not really his concern, but subjugation and maintaining the status quo of Roman occupation was high on his list of priorities. The Roman answer to any who would work to change the power structure was simple: prompt torture and death. In order to enforce the priorities, Pilate had essentially three categories: threats, supporters, and the inconsequential.

He was looking to place Jesus in one of those three boxes and dispatch his responsibility under Rome. He looked through his classification system and came up with the term “king,” as one attempting to install himself as a threat to Roman political and military power. It was Rome's term. It was one of Pilate's categories. It was not an appropriate category for who Jesus understood himself to be.

Therein lies our problem with placing people into boxes. Try as we might to understand others, when we place them in categories, we place them in categories that we have defined. We place them in categories that do not match the realities of their lives, identities, and the complexity of human experience. Our shortcuts may help us order life for the sake of our own comfort. In the larger picture, however, they fail to deal with the fact that people are so much more than our neat categories.

The 2016 presidential election cycle has shown us that our categories don't work very well to predict how people respond. Pundits and polls place people into categories by age, gender, ethnicity, wealth, education, and party affiliation, then the categories melt down in light of the fact that people are more complicated than a short list. We are more complicated than that.

Jesus had not come to be king after Pilate's categories and definitions. He had come to reign according to his own priorities and principles. He was not concerned with applying force and coercion. He was concerned with applying love, grace, mercy, and justice to those denied full participation in society, granting access to God's acceptance and love.

How do the categories you use limit your understanding of others and keep you from applying Jesus' priorities to your interactions?

"Lord, grant me to see beyond categories to love others with the depths of your grace."

—©Copyright 2016, Christopher B. Harbin

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