Servant King based upon John 18:33-37 preached at Keswick-Ravenshoe Pastoral Charge November 22, 2015

Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?”  Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?”  Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

(Play) Hallelujah Chorus

Today is known as Reign of Christ, or Christ the King Sunday.  This is the final Sunday in the church liturgical year, the one in which we return to the picture of Jesus immediately prior to the crucifixion, and examine what it means to use those words.

All today’s lessons carry images that speak of the kingship of God. King David’s final words are God’s beginning words, that God will keep a long-standing promise to send Israel the ideal King. The Psalm reminds the people of their part in keeping the Covenant.  The Epistle leaps all the way to the projected end of history to see this King returning amid shouts and choruses, adulation and coronation.

Then there’s the Gospel lesson. Ouch. Surely there’s a better Gospel text for the celebration of a King, isn’t there? And I will be honest, I resist the words Christ, King and Reign. You will notice I don’t use the words very often, and even when I do a part of me responds quite negatively. For me they are a vestige of Empire in which a faith promotes violence and coercion, and every time those words are used in liturgy – for me it reinforces that image of violence and oppression in our Christian history.

Since this was a long week away in studies, I cheated a little on sermon writing, and drew from a sermon by Rev. Thomas Hall. He reminded me of theologian Frederick Buechner and his writing. So drawing from Tom’s example, let me sketch the Gospel text in a more contemporary way.

Close your eyes for a few moments, and imagine yourself in a room with a man who stands in front of a desk with his hands tied behind his back. He has been roughed up quite considerably, his upper lip puffed out, one eye swollen shut, bruises and cuts on almost every visible part of him. You are almost sick from the stench, realising he has not washed for some time. His feet are bare - big peasant feet, though he himself is not big. He stands bent in an awkward way, because of the way his hands were tied.  If there were just the two of them, Pilate thinks, he would give him bus fare and a couple of bucks for a hamburger and fries, and send him back to the boonies; but you and the guards are watching, on the wall sits the official portrait of Tiberius Caesar, his fat, powdered face and rather disgusting imperial smile, so Pilate goes through the formalities.

"So, you’re the man, the king of the Jews," Pilate says.

The man says, "My kingdom is not of the human world," but the combination of his strong accent, which Pilate barely understands – combined with his swollen mouth and broken teeth, makes it almost impossible to understand.

Pilate turns to the side behind his desk and crosses his legs. A pigeon flutters off the sill and floats down toward the cobbles, a rustle of wings. Standing by the door, one of the guards is surreptitiously scratching his nether regions, the other picking his nose and staring at the ceiling. Smoke from Pilate’s cigarette drifts across the desk - the picture of his wife, the gift from Caesar, the clay plaque with the imprint of his first son’s hand on it. Pilate squints at the man through the smoke and asks his questions.

The scruffy homeless man has said he came to bear witness to the truth. Pilate says, "What is truth?” The man with the split lip doesn’t say a blessed thing. Or else perhaps his not saying anything is the blessed thing. The soldiers stopped their fidgeting, not a sound in the room, just Tiberius grinning down from the wall like a pumpkin, and the smoke from Pilate’s cigarette drifting across the desk and into the face of the scruffy man.

“Are you the king of the Jews?”

“Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me? Are you actually speaking for yourself, or as usual, have others told you what to speak?”

Pilate, trying to control the conversation, responds “Am I a Jew?”

Jesus says “My kingship is not of your world.”

“So are you really a king?”

Jesus says “You are the one who keeps saying that I am king.”

I think Pilate realises that in fact he is not really in charge…the scruffy homeless guy is in charge. When Jesus says that his kingdom is "not of this world," he isn’t talking about heaven or some other time. He means now, that his kingdom, unlike that of Pilate or Caiaphas is not dependent upon the methods and means of Caesar’s world.

And notice that there is a second kind of trial going on outside at the same time.

"You’re one of them, aren’t you? His followers?"

“Who me? Not a chance."

"But I remember, you’re the one who tried to defend him."

"Listen, I’ve never laid eyes on him."

Out there the disciples’ courage suddenly fades, and in the end Peter finally denies the truth of Jesus, and loses control. On the inside the one who is in a formal trial is asking the questions, is in control. What a contrast! Outside in the darkness, the followers of Jesus are being questioned about the truth of their lives and their world is falling apart, coming unraveled. (Open eyes)


Well, that’s the Gospel lesson for the day. Christ the King in a setting that offends us -  a bedraggled, half-naked former refugee, his back still bloodied from a nasty whipping, and now standing before the Roman authority. Some soldiers in mock, have forced a crown of thorns down upon his head. And now the question: "Are you King?"

So why this passage? What is it about this trial that makes it the best portrayal of Christ as King?
 

I think part of my resistance to using those words – King, Reign, Lord – is how they have been separated from the person of Jesus in modern culture. Particularly in North American culture. There was a time when the word ‘christos’ hadn’t come along – that was a somewhat later development in the history of the movement…the followers were simply “People of the Way”. Eventually the figure of Jesus the Meshiach, the ‘anointed one’, acquired the title Christos, which in Greek also meant anointed one. He became Jesus the Christ. Yet he did not ever claim any of those titles for himself. Along the way, as Jesus became the Christ and Constantine made Christianity the ‘state religion’, in a convert or die kind of way, Christianity became associated with Empire, not  only throughout Europe, but all over the world – and the church always went into the other countries first, ahead of the military or hand in hand with them.

In recent years, it seems to me there has been a shift again, a divergence of Jesus and Christ. As the influence of Christendom and the Constantinian model of Empire wanes, the strident voices calling themselves followers of Christ get louder, and they are the ones who least follow the Way of Jesus. So my faith is undergoing a shift and that’s why I avoid the words. But perhaps I need to reclaim them, even briefly in a different way for this Sunday.

In the Hebrew understanding, a King was also a Judge, and the early Hebrew word for Judge, shofet, meant the ‘one who makes right’, the one who restores the balance of right against wrong. So it helps in working through my own theology to equate King and Judge in the sense of making something right.

I believe, as one who tries to follow the Way, that the person and teachings of Jesus do contain truth  - not a truth that only we can claim, but universal Truth. In the presence of this Truth we can only stand in silence, because his gaze beholds us, judges us, sees us through and through. There is silence. Because we also know what is right, even if we fear to do it. In the Lord of the Rings stories, by J.R.R. Tolkien – a strongly Christian writer – there is a point where the young hobbit Frodo realises what his task is – that it leads to the most fearful of all things, the loss of his life – and he says to the Queen of the Elves “I know what I must do. It’s just that, I’m afraid to do it.”

Jesus does not give a truth to Pilate; he doesn’t talk about the theology of salvation; he simply stands there as the embodiment of Truth. Pilate knows what is right and wrong, but he is afraid to do it. Jesus knows what he must do, and he does it. He doesn’t do it with great fanfare, he hands himself over to those who are weak, and offers his answer, not with words, but in an Act of love. He claims nothing for himself as a King, he claims no titles, yet he makes right. Faith and Truth meet in a Roman execution. There, Truth is laid out before the world.

So we live our lives as if Jesus is the king of the Realm which we choose to create together with him. No matter how frightened we are, no matter how small we may think we are. We are people of the Way, followers of Jesus, known as the Christos, the King.May it be so.

Sources:

1.      The Truth About Jesus The King a sermon based on John 18:33-37
by Rev. Thomas Hall

2.      Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring  J.R.R. Tolkien.