Every now and then a passage of Scripture sneaks up and smacks me upside the head, hits me in a way that I never saw coming. It happened today with Matthew 27:11. Pilate is questioning Jesus, and asks, “Are you the king of the Jews?”

Now, in the predictable, oft-read and oft-quoted NIV, Jesus replies “Yes, it is as you say.” Nice, neat, no denying his black-and-white affirmation. But the New Century Version (my favorite translation of all time) reads differently. In the NCV, you can almost hear Jesus mumbling “Those are your words.”

Quite a different meaning!

So different, in fact, that I went to BibleGateway.com to see which was more in line with the other translations. And the ambiguous mumbling in the NCV seems to win out. The King James has Jesus replying “Thou sayest.” The New Living Translation reads “You have said it.” The English Standard Version says “You have said so.”

It seems less an admission of sovereignty, and more an acknowledgement of what Pilate, and the rest of the world, was trying to make him out to be. A tired acceptance of their small thinking and petty paradigms. Jesus didn’t need to be king of the Jews, could never squeeze the entirety of himself into such a small role. He was, and Is, more. Overarching. Beyond.

And yet, 2000 years later, we continue to assault Jesus with our preconceptions of who he should be, what roles he should play in our lives and in our world. Many of the labels we apply to him are factual, but do we limit him to those? Are our paradigms so small that we only glimpse a small sliver of his glory?

Well, of course they are. We’re only human, after all. But this week, I am going to be looking for a God who is so much More than I’ve made him out to be, who can do so much More than I could even begin to imagine.

I don’t want to mistake the hands that formed the Universe for the hands of some small, petty puppet ruler subject to the laws of a more powerful, earthly empire. No, I do not. Because I need more than a king–I need Everything.