Rome crucified people publicly and deliberately. The cross was theater. The empire’s way of showing the world what happens when you cross Caesar. It was meant to humiliate. It was meant to crush any idea that the person hanging there was anything other than a grotesque warning.

At Jesus’ crucifixion, Pilate had a notice made indicating the charge against Jesus. The reason he was being crucified. He knows what he’s doing when he writes the title. “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” He puts it in three languages, Aramaic, Latin, and Greek, the languages of religion, empire, and culture. Every educated person passing by could read it. 

This trilingual sign is a taunt aimed at the Jewish leaders who pushed Pilate into this execution, though he said three times, “I find no guilt in him” (John 18:38, 19:4, 6). You want me to crucify your king? Fine. Here’s his coronation plaque.

The chief priests panic. “Don’t write ‘King of the Jews.’ Write that he said he was king.” Pilate shuts them down: “What I have written I have written.”

What’s happening here is ironic at a depth Pilate doesn’t perceive. He meant to mock. He ended up proclaiming. The man on that cross, crowned with thorns, nails in his hands, soldiers gambling below him, is, in fact, the King of the Jews. He is the King of Kings. The Lord of religion, empire, and culture. Pilate, without knowing it, posted the theological fact of the universe on a wooden cross.

In Aramaic, Latin, and Greek, languages that covered the three great spheres of life, Pilate was trying to humiliate one man. He accidentally addressed the whole world. F.D. Bruner explains the unwitting missionary implications of what he calls the Gospel according to Pilate,

“And the sign was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek.” The Cross speaks in tongues the moment it is planted. The Gospel according to Pilate is no sooner preached than it becomes immediately missionary, reaching out to the religious world that spoke Hebrew (in the Aramaic dialect), to the secular-political world that spoke Latin, and to the intellectual-commercial world that spoke Greek. The Cross is international the moment Jesus mounts it. He intends world mission. (The Gospel of John, Eerdmans, 2012, 1101.)

John’s Gospel shows us that the cross is not the place where the King was defeated. It is the place where the King is enthroned. This fact is the great paradox of the gospel: the crucified One is the reigning One.

Revelation 5:9 is the worship song of heaven, and it teaches us that the reason Jesus is worthy to open the scroll is not just that he rose; it’s that he was “slain,” and by His blood He “ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.” The Lamb is on the throne precisely because he was slaughtered. His death is not the prelude to his reign. It is his coronation.

Rome’s instrument of execution became a throne of glory, and the pagan governor who thought he was humiliating a failed messiah was, without knowing a word of it, fulfilling a thousand years of prophetic scripture because the cross is not where Jesus’ Kingship ended. It is where it was accomplished.