Jeremiah 23.1-6, Psalm 46, Colossians 1.11-20, Luke 23.33-43
Church of Ss Asaph and Cyndeyrn, Llanasa, Christ the King, 24/11/2013
Today, we celebrate the festival of Christ the King. In some ways it’s the oddest occasion in the Church’s calendar.
Why do I call it odd? After all, the songs of Christian people the world over have been forever full of praise for Jesus seen as a monarch: from ‘Praise, my soul, the King of heaven’ to ‘This is our God, the Servant King’; and our creeds have always proclaimed Jesus as one whose ‘kingdom will have no end’.
I call it odd because if you look closely at his life story as told in the gospels, you’ll realise that Jesus never positioned himself as a king, just the opposite in fact. Although the focus of his teaching was the Kingdom of God, that meant something different altogether from the kingdoms of this world.
Knowing his scriptures Jesus would remember the story of old Israel putting thecovenantwith God to one side and asking Samuel to appoint a king, which he did, but only after warning them that:
‘A king will take your sons and make soldiers of them, or to labour on his farms, or to making weapons of war. He’ll take your daughters to work in his palaces. He’ll take your best fields, vineyards, and orchards, your prize workers and best animals for his own use. He’ll tax your crops to support his extensive bureaucracy. He’ll tax your flocks and you’ll end up no better than slaves’. [1]
And sure enough, from Saul onwards, Israel’s kings were each at best flawed, and at worst their lust for power, possessions and military might was satisfied at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable in the land. To this day, it’s the way of things, it’s the way of empire, it’s the way of kings.
The way of kings is sometimes called a domination system , in which those few people who make up the governments, organizations, and institutions that regulate human affairs, control the many to their own advantage. [3] I think you can think of examples of how that works today.
In Jesus’ time and place the domination system was sustained by the Roman occupying forces, and their client Jewish king Herod Antipas. Their voracity for power and wealth, their great city-building expansion programmes fed by high taxation, land possession and slave labour, made this a time of great struggle for the mass of ordinary people in the land. [4]
If we were to say one thing which Jesus stood for, and one thing which he stood against, the best answers might be that he stood for God the Father, and he stood against the domination system of his day. He spent his ministry confronting the kings, the powers-that-be, and proclaiming the Kingdom of God, the gracious, gentle and generous power that emerges on earth wherever people allow God the Father to rule. You might say that Jesus’ whole life was a series of prophetic acts confronting the kingdoms of the world and symbolising the values of this new Kingdom:
- Not born in a palace to the tolling of cathedral bells, but in a barn in the cold of the night.
- Not born to a noble families, which is how the elites perpetuate themselves, of course, Jesus’ father was an ordinary carpenter, his mother a modest country girl.
- Not educated in a military academy to learn a particular style of leadership, Jesus sought out his learning in the temple, and at the feet of teachers of scripture, developed the qualities of character which made him a uniquely charismatic leader.
- Not moving in the circles of the famous and gifted and rich, Jesus’ closest friends were fishermen and common folk.
- Not showing his powers at the helm of great warships or at the head of great state banquets, in the gospels we see Jesus on the road healing the lame, giving sight to the blind and famously ‘eating with tax collectors and sinners’. [5]
Let us be clear about Jesus’ intentions. All of this was deliberate. All of this was designed to be provocative, all of this was designed to directly challenge the ways of the kingdoms of this world, and to introduce instead, the values of the liberating Kingdom of God. That’s what many of his parables were about - getting his listeners talking about the ways of unjust stewards and punitive employers in contrast to the generous, gracious ways of God.
And this was never clearer than on the day we call Palm Sunday. At the beginning of the Passover festival, always a turbulent occasion in Jerusalem, the Roman army would bring in reinforcements to keep the crowds in order, and that year, at the same time as the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate rode into Jerusalem by the main gate, the East Gate, with a large array of troops and armaments in a great show of force, Jesus rode into Jerusalem by a back gate, the West Gate, on a donkey, deliberately posing ridiculously as a mock king.
Pilate’s procession embodied the power, glory and violence of the empire that ruled the world. Jesus’ pantomime procession mocked Pilate’s pomp, and embodied an alternative vision, the Kingdom of God. [6] The confrontation between these two kingdoms continued through the last week of Jesus’ life. From his cleansing of the Temple - challenging the Temple authorities’ involvement in the domination system of the day - through his conundrum over a Roman coin, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's’ [7], and so on. As we all know, the week ended with Jesus’ execution by the powers who ruled his world. If he was a king, he wasn’t their kind of king at all.
We have often been told that Jesus died on the cross to satisfy God’s demands of justice so that the sins of the world can be forgiven, and we can live in his heavenly kingdom forever. Some people find it difficult to relate to such an abstract idea, and its suggestion that a loving Father could be satisfied by the cold-blooded killing of his only Son.
But in the gospels we see something far more tangible: like things we see in the world around us every day. We see that the powers-that-be sent Jesus to his death, precisely because of the way he directly challenged them. Jesus was crucified to satisfy the demands of the domination system, that subversives should be silenced so that the kingdoms of the world can be maintained. The high priest Caiaphas spoke for the powers-that-be when he said, ‘It is better that one man should die for the people than for the whole nation to be destroyed.’ (John 11.50) and so they found a way for Jesus to be accused, condemned and crucified.
Now, we see things from the other side of the cross. We look on that scene, where above Jesus’ crown of thorns is Pilate’s inscription: ‘King of the Jews’. And see in it a terrible, wonderful irony. Because with hindsight we realise that what died with Jesus on that cross was the authority of the domination system. Because Jesus died an innocent victim of trumped-up charges, the true motives of those who executed him were revealed to all who had eyes to see. And because Jesus had spent his life announcing the coming of the Kingdom of God, we realise that what was born at Jesus’ resurrection was the power for that Kingdom to continue growing in the world - in the lives of all who put their hearts together with the heart of God. And wherever this Kingdom grows, so the powers of the world’s kingdoms diminish and decline.
The first person whose eyes were opened to this was that centurion at the foot of the cross, who looked up at the executed Jesus and proclaimed. “Truly this man was the Son of God!” [8] Now, in that place and time there was only one person who could be called the Son of God: and that was the Emperor of Rome. For a centurion of Rome to say what he said marked a real conversion in that man. The centurion knew what he said was heresy, but his eyes had been opened to a whole new way of seeing, a new perspective in which his status as a subject of Caesar’s kingdom began to be subject itself to his new status as one who had entered the Kingdom of God, right there and then.
To that centurion the Emperor of Rome was no longer divine - Jesus was. Caesar was no longer king in his life, for Christ had become King of his heart. And for those of us who have had our eyes opened in the same way, that is why today we proclaim Christ as our King. Jesus now reigns in glory at the right hand of the Father [9], and every time we pray, ‘Thy Kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven’ we invite him to help us to put our hearts together with his heart, to live under his Kingship, his direction, every day, whatever the kingdoms of the world demand of us. In the words of Henry Williams Baker:
The King of love my Shepherd is,
whose goodness faileth never;
I nothing lack if I am his,
and he is mine for ever. [10]
Notes
[1] 1 Samuel 8.11-17 (The Message, edited)
[2] 1 Samuel 10.1
[3] Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium
[4] Marcus J. Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, p.77-108
[5] See my children’s poem Jesus - a funny sort of king for more along these lines.
[6] See Marcus J. Borg, John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week, What the Gospels really teach about Jesus’ final days in Jerusalem, p.2-3, and my sermon, Jesus’ crowd is a Flash Mob, 24/3/2013 for more on this interpretation of Palm Sunday.
[7] Mark 12.17
[8] Mark 15.39
[9] Acts 2.33
[10] The King of love my Shepherd is, Henry Williams Baker (1821-1877), 1868
Comments