Holy Criminal
The difference between legality and morality
This post is adapted from a sermon I preached at Williamsburg Baptist Church on March 22, 2026. The Narrative Lectionary passage was John 19:1-16a.
Today’s text is a heavy one. It is a violent one and, as such, it is one that should make us uncomfortable. That discomfort reminds us of our humanity, of the desire each of us has to see our neighbors treated with compassion and dignity. I never want to go numb to the suffering of innocent people, as much as it may hurt. Today’s story is an invitation to truly feel it.
Before we get to today’s text, I want to invite us to revisit a story that may seem out of place this week. But, considering that the trial Jesus endures coincides with the Passover celebration and that celebration commemorates the liberation of the Hebrew people out of slavery under the Egyptians in the book of Exodus, perhaps the story of Moses is a perfectly appropriate story to revisit when sitting with today’s text.
Moses was born to a family that was enslaved. Moses also had a disability. Early in life, Moses suffered a traumatic head injury after the slavemaster threw a heavy weight at another slave, missed, and hit Moses in the head. The injury affected Moses, which led to dizzy spells and nausea. It also meant Moses experienced vivid dreams and visions (many of which Moses believed came from God).
At the age of 27, Moses escaped from slavery and later returned to rescue the family. Moses realized, though, that Moses couldn’t in good conscious leave so many enslaved people behind. Moses kept going back, leading more and more people to freedom.
Some of you may be thinking that I’ve got my story wrong, because this is not what the Bible says about Moses. However, the abolitionist Harriet Tubman was dubbed the “Moses of her people” because she led so many African Americans out of slavery along the Underground Railroad. She was famed for never losing a passenger, which is what escapees along the road were called. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, which required free states to return any escaped person back to slave states if they were caught, Harriet Tubman helped escapees flee further north to Canada and even helped them find work. She was truly a hero, risking life and limb to helping hundreds of people get to freedom.
I could regale you with countless historical stories of people doing similar things: Civil Rights leaders; families who hid Jewish people during the Holocaust; and others. Here’s the thing I think we most often gloss over about these moments in history: those people were breaking the law. Harriet Tubman was breaking the law. Escaping from slavery was illegal. Aiding in other people’s escape was also illegal. Technically, by the laws of the time, Harriet Tubman was a criminal.
Me saying that might make you a little uncomfortable, because criminal is a word we usually use to describe someone who does something bad. But, a criminal is just someone who breaks the law. There’s no morality inherent to the word; we assign morality to it. We make the assumption that if someone breaks the law, that makes them a bad person. But I’m willing to bet that everyone in this room agrees that Harriet Tubman was a hero. She broke the law in order to do the right thing.
Too often, we make the assumption that legality and morality are the same thing. But when a law attempts to criminalize the essence of who a person is, it’s clear that the law is not rooted in a desire for justice, but it is instead rooted in a desire for control–by any means necessary. That is not a motivation concerned with morality.
Photo by Alex Noriega on Unsplash
In today’s story, there are many groups who crave control more than they crave justice. In this text, we find ourselves in part two of Jesus’s trial. Let me recap the first half. The religious leaders bring Jesus before Pilate. Pilate asks them to indicate what crime Jesus had committed, and they respond by saying, “If he hadn’t done anything wrong, we wouldn’t have brought him to you.” When Pilate asks why they don’t just judge Jesus according to their own laws, they essentially say, “Our laws won’t let us kill him, but yours will.” Pilate then asks Jesus if he really is the King of the Jews, and Jesus responds by saying his kingdom is not of this world. Pilate then leaves the choice to the gathered crowd. Who do they want released? Jesus or Barabus? The crowd chose Barabus, a known outlaw.
Today, we witness the second half of the trial. This half includes torture, mockery, and more questioning. As we see the dialogue between Pilate and the religious leaders escalate more and more, it’s clear that the core issue is not about justice, but control–and the parties involved are not above immoral uses of the law to keep control.
The religious leaders are concerned about the following Jesus is gathering. They fear that Jesus will undermine the authority they have worked hard to build for themselves. They worked hard to get into these positions of power that let them oversee things like the comings and goings at the temple. Their status also put them in a good position with the Roman Empire, and that came with perks of their own. They weren’t about to let this quirky man ruin their good standing.
The Roman empire is also concerned about the following Jesus is gathering. The Jewish people had been under their control for a while and Rome likes it that way. They want to continue taking resources from these folks and levying unfair taxes upon them. They couldn’t have some out-of-the-box rabbinic-type rallying the people and giving them hope. And they certainly couldn’t stand for this guy uniting the people in favor of a new kingdom. He simply had to go.
And then we get to Pilate. Pilate is the governor of the region and, as such, is the liaison between the religious leaders and the Roman Empire. He knows that he must walk a delicate tightrope in order to keep the religious leaders happy while maintaining the authority of Caesar. While the text seems to strongly imply that Pilate didn’t want to crucify Jesus, it also reads like he believes his hands are tied. He does whatever he can to distance himself from the verdict; instead of taking the judge’s seat, he puts Jesus on the judge’s bench–a small but important detail in this scene. It’s clear Pilate doesn’t want to make the call.
Legally, Jesus was a criminal. He didn’t refuse the title King of the Jews. He also didn’t refuse the title Son of Man, which he or others use to describe him twelve times throughout the Gospel of John. To claim that title went against his religion’s laws, as well as the laws of the Roman Empire. Son of Man was one of the many titles used to address the emperor. For someone other than Caesar to claim that title was treason—which the religious leaders remind Pilate of over and over again. If Jesus had just followed the law or recanted, he could have avoided the slaps. The whip. The thorns. If he had just stayed in line and done what the authorities told him to, he could have avoided a death sentence. Why didn’t he just follow the law?
Photo by Carlos N. Cuatzo Meza on Unsplash
Here’s the dramatic irony of the story. Dramatic irony is when the audience knows more about the story than the characters in the story do, and we know something that neither the religious leaders nor Pilate know: Jesus really was the true Son of Man. We know that Jesus really is the Son of God, really is King of kings. In essence, they have criminalized Jesus’s very personhood. They’ve declared that the unchangeable reality of who Jesus is is illegal. If that’s the law, then Jesus can’t be anything but guilty of this crime. He was a holy criminal.
We have seen in our lifetime what it looks like for a government to criminalize people based on the essence of their personhood. Many of us were alive when the Civil Rights Movement fought against such laws targeting Black Americans and remember when heroes like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, and Rosa Parks were arrested for breaking the unjust laws of the time. They were holy criminals.
It wasn’t terribly long ago that same-sex couples were denied the right to marry. I have colleagues who were plaintiffs in the Obergefell v Hodges case that led to marriage equality. Before the case, they went to their local courthouse in the state of Kentucky in the early 2000s to request a marriage license. Same-sex marriage was illegal in Kentucky at the time and the clerk denied their request. They went through this back and forth on multiple occasions before they couldn’t take the indignity of it any more. They peacefully sat down and said they wouldn’t leave until the courthouse granted their request. They were arrested and forcibly removed. They were holy criminals.
Just a few weeks ago, Kansas legislature invalidated the drivers licenses of all its transgender citizens–about 1300 people. With no notice, the legislature passed a law that immediately indicated that if a trans person was caught driving with a license with a gender marker that did not align with their gender assigned at birth, they would be arrested. They are holy criminals.
The thing is, the law cannot dictate who any of us are at our core, just like the law couldn’t and can’t dictate who Jesus is at his core. God, master creator and author of our lives, is the only one who gets to determine who any of us are.
When the law attempts criminalize someone’s innate God-given personhood, it’s clear the law is no longer concerned with justice, but instead with control. Here, Jesus could not be controlled, so the only way for the unholy union of religion and empire to keep control was to kill him. And so, spineless Pilate lets the soldiers take Jesus away to crucify him. Pilate–who was in a position of privilege and could have intervened because he knew that, even though all of this was technically legal, it was wrong–turns his back. Was his comfort and privilege worth more than Jesus’s life?
I wonder how many people died in that way under Pilate’s watch. Victims of a crime they couldn’t help but be guilty of because the Empire deemed their personhood illegal, overseen by a judge more concerned with his own position than he was with caring for those in his charge. Is our own comfort and privilege worth more than anyone’s life?
Photo by Carlos N. Cuatzo Meza on Unsplash
When I was in seminary, my preaching professor encouraged us to always end our sermons by finding the hope in the text. I have to be honest, I don’t see a lot of hope in today’s scripture– at least, not in the story itself. I see an ancient story about the abuse of power that we have seen retold hundreds of times over throughout the course of human history. Seeing brokenness repeated doesn’t exactly speak hope to me.
Perhaps for today’s scripture, the question to end with isn’t where’s the hope, but a different question: How do we learn from this story and do better?
First, we might do well to admit that in a perfect world, legality and morality might be synonyms, but we don’t live in a perfect world. Legality and morality aren’t the same thing; if today’s scripture doesn’t show us that, I don’t know what does. Acknowledging that reality means that we have to engage questions about our own laws and morals with more intentionality and nuance than we might want to initially. But I would urge us to do it; just like in today’s story, good people’s lives are in the balance.
But I think there’s a second, more powerful reminder for us in today’s story: don’t let others tell you what to believe about people whose lived experience is different from your own. Get to know those people yourself. Pilate didn’t know Jesus personally before this trial, and he was affected by Jesus in the few short hours he got to know Jesus. Perhaps if he’d gotten to know Jesus even better, Pilate might have had the courage to do the right thing.
In this era where perceived difference is vilified, getting to know someone whose lived experience is different from your own is one of the most radical acts of love we can take. It shouldn’t be radical, but it is. Perhaps if we take that challenge seriously, we can build a world where no one’s personhood is criminalized, and legality and morality will finally be more alike than different. May it be so. Amen