Asking the wrong question

My thoughts have been occupied as I've prepared this week's talk, thinking about the consequences of asking the wrong question.
    I'm not so much thinking about those cringeworthy times, such as asking a woman when she's 'due' only to find out that she's not pregnant; or the painful time I asked a particularly glum faced chap "Who's died?" to be told alter that he'd just come back from a funeral (the black clothes should probably have been a hint...)
    No, I'm not thinking about putting your foot in it. I mean those times when you need information, but because of the way you phrase your question you don't get what you need.  For example:

A man has tickets to a concert at Carnegie Hall, but he's lost in the city. Seeing another man carrying a violin case, he assumes he will know, so asks.
  "Excuse me, do you know how to get to Carnegie Hall?"
  "Practice man, practice."

Or consider:

A man is walking in the park and sees a small boy sat on a park bench, with a big dog beside him.
  "Does your dog bite?" He asks.
  "Nope," says the boy.
  On attempting to pet the do, the man is savagely bitten.
  "I thought you said your dog didn't bite,"  complained the man.
  "That's not my dog."

In both cases the answer to the question is correct, but it doesn't give the enquirer what they need to know.

Now, how many time in the Bible does Jesus refuse to give a straight answer?
    He often chooses to answer a question with another question or, as in today's gospel reading (John 18.33-37), to give an answer which seems unhelpful.

Jesus wasn't trying to hide anything, he came to testify to the truth. He was the truth. But perhaps the questions that were asked of him wouldn't give us the answer that people needed to hear.
    Pilate asks several questions and never gets a straight answer. But the answers that he does get tell us much.

Question 1: Are you the King of the Jews?
    The answer could have been a simple 'yes' or 'no', but that would have caused much confusion because of what Pilate understood by the phrase King of the Jews.
    So, instead Jesus says "Do you ask me this, or did others tell you about me?"
    If we stop and think about that question the answer is obvious: of course someone told Pilate.  As prefect of Judea he had his hands full, he'd never met Jesus before, and he wasn't likely to know much about every potential messiah until they started causing problems.
    Jesus's answer draws attention to the fact that Pilate has got his information second-hand, that he doesn't have the full picture; and Pilate's answer "I am not a Jew am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me," is an admission that others have had to give him the facts.
    He then asks another question: "What have you done?"
    Well, this is a pretty vague question. Does he mean 'what have you done to make the priests hate you?' or 'what have you done as your ministry for the past three years?' Who knows, but Jesus isn't going to answer any part of it.
    Instead he goes back to the first question.
    "My kingdom is not of this world."
    He's almost admitting to being a king, but again his answer says more. He is repeating that Pilate doesn't know what's going on.
    Jesus knows that Pilate is thinking about King Herod when he says 'King of the Jews', but Jesus knows his Tanakh (our Old Testament), and in there is Daniel's vision.

The Ancient One, dressed all in white, sitting on a throne of flames, with a million servants and hundreds of millions of attendants, gives dominion to the messiah to rule over all peoples for all time. Not just the Jewish nation, and not just for 160 years (roughly the reign of the Herodians), but ALL peoples for ALL time.
    Jesus is saying to Pilate: you can rip up the rule book, because you've never seen anything like me.

But wait, because there's a question that we need to ask, and we need to get it right.
    When will Jesus's reign begin?

We might well decide that it is going to begin sometime in the future. After all we pray "Thy kingdom come" pretty much constantly.
    Yet, in Revelation, writes "To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father."
    He made us to be a kingdom, priests serving God.

We are the kingdom, we are those millions of servants and hundreds of millions of attendants, and the more we focus on God, and on serving him and attending to him, the more we make Daniel's vision a reality.

So, when will Christ's kingdom come: both now, and not yet.
    But we aren't to wait idly for his return, we are to do all we can to serve God now.