Daniel 7.9-10, 13, 14, John 18.33–37
Christ the King, Sunday 21 November 2021, Clapham
Today, we celebrate the festival of Christ the King. In some ways it’s the oddest occasion in the Church’s calendar.
Why would I say that? 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 proclaim 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, in fact he went out of his way to avoid being seen as one. Look at the way he wriggles through Pilate’s interrogation on this subject. Although the focus of his teaching was the Kingdom of God, he was clear that meant something entirely different from the kingdoms of this world.
The scriptures show us how 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. And to this day, we seem to be subject to living this. It’s sometimes called the way of empire; or a domination system, in which those few people who make up the governments, organisations, and institutions that regulate human affairs, control the many to their own advantage. [1].
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 expansion programmes fed by high taxation, land possession and slave labour, meant that this was a time of great struggle for the mass of ordinary people in the land. [2]
Jesus stood for God the Father, and that meant him standing against the domination system of his day. He spent his ministry confronting 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 defying 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 family, in the lineage of the elite, Jesus’ father was an ordinary carpenter, his mother a modest country girl.
- Not educated in a military academy, Jesus sought out his learning in the temple, at the feet of teachers of scripture, forming his leadership style in humility before the Father.
- 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 find Jesus on the road healing the lame, giving sight to the blind and famously ‘eating with tax collectors and sinners’. [3]
His parables provoked his listeners to consider the ways of unjust stewards and punitive employers in contrast to the gracious ways of God. On Palm Sunday Jesus ridiculed the pomp and power of Pontius Pilate by riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, posing as a mock king. [4] From his subversive statement ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God’s’, through his cleansing of the Temple [5], all the way to his execution by the powers who ruled his world, Jesus determined to show them that if he was a king, he wasn’t their kind of king at all.
The powers-that-be sent Jesus to his death, precisely because the 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.’ [6] and so they arranged 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.
As Archbishop Desmond Tutu famously puts it, “Goodness is stronger than evil; love is stronger than hate; light is stronger than darkness; life is stronger than death; victory is ours through Him who loves us.” [7]
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 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 align our hearts with his heart, to put him first, to live under his direction, and only then, in light of that, to respond to the pressures the world places on 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
Adapted from Jesus - killing the king, raising the Kingdom preached at the Church of Ss Asaph and Cyndeyrn, Llanasa, 2013.
[1] Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium
[2] Marcus J. Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, p.77-108
[3] See my children’s poem Jesus - a funny sort of king for more along these lines.
[4] 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 for more on this interpretation of Palm Sunday.
[5] Mark 12.17
[6] John 11.50
[7] Desmond Tutu, An African Prayer Book
[8] Mark 15.39
[9] Acts 2.33
[10] The King of love my Shepherd is, Henry Williams Baker, 1868
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