Easter is around the corner. Good Friday is coming up, people will be off work, and many will be out flying kites and gathering together for a meal.The regular teacher for our discussion group on Sunday morning was gone, and I had been asked to fill in.

The lesson focused on a story I had heard so many times before that I wondered how to approach it. Was there really anything new there for us to consider?

When people are young children, they like to hear stories over and over again. If they enjoy a story, or the way a storyteller tells a story, they want to experience that repeatedly.

I suppose that’s like the pie my wife made last night; after one piece, I really wanted another. There is something about children that enables them to get as involved with a familiar story as if it were new and delightful all over again, but adults seem to grow tired quickly of such things. I found myself groaning with it. Would we all just rehearse facts we’d already known, and would we all sit in a circle making speeches to one another on subjects we had once discovered but were now just database fodder? I wanted more than that.

The well-known story was about the various trials of Jesus, as He stood before the religious leaders, Pontius Pilate, and Herod.

You may also already know how He was in the upper room spending Passover with His disciples and how He then went across into the Garden of Gethsemane to pray, where he was betrayed and turned over to Roman soldiers by Judas, and you may also know that then Jesus endured physical and emotional abuse before He was crucified. Mel Gibson made a movie about all that not long ago.

So, I came to the section in the gospel of Luke where Jesus stands before his accusers, and I had studied it over the course of 30 years as a Christian, considered its theology in seminary, and watched it dramatised through three major movies (The King of Kings, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and The Passion of the Christ). To be honest, I was rather bored with it.

Then I began to realise that each of the people before whom Jesus stood, before whom He was commanded to give an account, were different. They came with their own purposes and their own approaches to dealing with Jesus, and suddenly I began to see familiar types of people that I have met in life. The subject became more interesting.

The religious leaders came knowing they wanted to rid themselves of this new messiah, who threatened the spiritual status quo, who called into question their teachings, and who seemed to be gathering popularity. He certainly did not fit their theological categories. He broke their rules. He did not fit in their boxes. This reminded me of rigid people who make rules to structure all of life and who must pin down people, events, relationships, and matters of culture somewhere in their self-made universes. They always seem more condemning than affirming.

Pilate was a politician looking for expediency. He wanted to advance his career. He enjoyed wielding power. He wanted nothing to disturb the peace, and he wanted troublemakers out of the way; for him that included the religious leaders asking him to kill Jesus as much as it did Jesus himself. He eventually acquiesced to placate the people, make political alliances, and avoid political mistakes.

That reminded me of the players and manipulators I’ve met in life. I call them “this-world-only” people, because their entire scope of awareness consists of how to gain an advantage over the next person, how to get more for themselves, and what works best in that pursuit, but they do this with a very limited horizon — the immediate geo-political and economic system only.

Herod was a false authority, a puppet leader under Roman authority, and he wanted to see Jesus in order to be entertained. He had heard about Jesus, but had not actually met Him, and he was hoping he might see a miracle, have an experience, and get a thrill out of it.

This reminded me of people who are wilful and determinedly superficial or limited in their understanding. They often either do not know how to think, or they don’t want to think about certain kinds of things. They are like pleasure seekers passing by true works of art in order to obtain candy bars.

C.S. Lewis once likened such people to little children who had access to a wondrously beautiful garden but preferred to play in the gutter mud instead.

To the first group Jesus answered their theological questions directly and truthfully, giving them all the fuel they needed to condemn Him according to their rigid and myopic structures. To the second, He answered plainly and simply, cutting through political expediency to the life issues that usually reside somewhere beneath political drama. To the last, those wanting to be entertained by life, Jesus had nothing to say. All three He left to the natural consequences of their actions.