Christ Jesus doesn’t want to be a king; Christ wants us to be Christ, following him as the Truth of God in this world.
Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Reign of Christ, Last Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 34 B
Text: John 18:33-37 (plus 38a)
Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
We have a problem with this festival day. Jesus doesn’t want to be a king.
A few years ago, we joined many other Christians in renaming this festival “the Reign of Christ” to minimize the masculine language of the title king. But today Jesus is clear. We didn’t think deeply enough. Jesus doesn’t want the title king at all. He doesn’t want to be put in any kind of hierarchy, benign or otherwise.
Twice in Jesus’ trial Pilate asks him if he’s a king, and twice he says no. The first time, he says if he were a king, his followers would be fighting for him and he wouldn’t be standing in this trial. The second time, he says that Pilate’s the one who called him a king. But, Jesus says, “I was born and came into the world for only one thing, to witness to the truth.”
Yet for most of Christian history, we’ve insisted on making Jesus a king anyway, lifting him up as Ruler of all things, singing coronation hymns. Some of us claim he’s a different kind of king than worldly rulers – it’s why this festival was started in the first place. But far too often we have fought to make Christ our King a winner, proving him wrong in his confidence about us before Pilate, proving we don’t understand him.
The history is clear. Whenever we make Christ our King, people die.
When we make Christ a King we get the Inquisition and the Crusades and kill millions. When we put Christ’s cross on our banners, it ends up on our shields and war machines, and people die. We get Cortez slaughtering the Mexica for the glory of that cross. We create the Holocaust. We commit physical, spiritual, and cultural genocide on the native peoples of our land. When we lift up a hierarchical Christ the King we end up with two millennia of a Church that abuses, patronizes, demonizes, sexualizes, and excludes women, so much so that an outside observer might conclude the Church hates women. When we worship Christ as Supreme Ruler we get Christian nationalist fascism that wants to reshape our nation into a twisted, white-centric dystopia claimed to be under Christ’s rule.
But it’s always been this way. After the resurrection, the disciples asked Jesus if now was the time he was going to restore Israel, throw off Roman oppression. It’s as if they said, “we totally misunderstood that you were going to die. We were wrong. But now you’re alive again, we’re back to conquest, right? Now you have real power.”
Even as we look at the current national landscape, how many of us have fantasized about Christ coming in and sorting all this out, punishing evildoers? No matter how well intentioned, historically no outcome to a hierarchical view of the Triune God avoids getting out swords and hurting people.
And so Jesus says, “you say I’m a king. But I came only to witness to the truth.”
That’s the heart of it. Jesus, God-with-us, came to witness to the truth about God. Not our truth. Our need for hierarchy. The only truth the Triune God is willing for us to know and understand. And here it is:
God being born to an impoverished refugee family isn’t a nice detail to bring out when we consider immigration issues. It’s God’s central truth. Jesus walking as God-with-us among the poorest, the hungriest, the weakest, the most vulnerable, isn’t a side note to our view of God. It’s the only note. Jesus, one with the Father and the Spirit in the Trinity, hanging bloody on a cross isn’t a bump to overcome on the way to resurrection. It’s the only truth about God’s love that God wants you to know.
The truth, Governor Pilate, isn’t an idea. It’s Jesus, God-with-us. “I am the truth,” he said. Everything you and I need to know about God, everything, is contained in this human vessel, from birth to death.
This is the only truth Jesus wants us to know and follow. The only God God wants us to know is a refugee, impoverished, oppressed, killed by the hierarchy of the world. A God only seen serving others. A kneeling God, washing feet and sores, and offering a hand of love. God doesn’t want us to indulge our pathetic human need to elevate someone into a hierarchical authority structure. God’s truth is here, in the least, the lost, the broken. Period.
Faithfully celebrating the reign of Christ can only be on God’s terms. In God’s truth.
Where we rejoice and praise God when people are fed and cared for, when justice happens, when love changes hearts. Where we proclaim the only reality of the Triune God that matters, that God is with those who are refugees, impoverished, oppressed, killed by the hierarchy of the world.
What that means for our celebrating the reign of Christ, I don’t know. For the most part, the New Testament writers push language about reigning over all things into the world to come. Maybe there we’ll be able to praise the Trinity as the ultimate Ruler of All without hurting people.
But for now, for here, you and I know where God is. And if we’re going to follow the Truth, that’s where. Nowhere else. We don’t even put God on a pedestal. God will just get down anyway and go where God only wants to be found.
Jesus had an odd confidence, telling Pilate, “my followers know the difference.
They know I’m not a king.” So far we’ve proven we don’t know that very well.
But maybe Jesus was just expressing hope that we could figure it out. Maybe Jesus was saying to you and me, “If you’ve been listening to my voice, I’m confident you’ll hear this. And hearing, follow that truth.” And amidst all the slaughter and hate the Church is guilty of, if you look in history you can also see plenty of Christ’s followers who heard this voice, learned this truth and lived in this reign as God lives in it. Praising God the only way God will accept it, by lives of love amidst a world of pain and suffering. Love even to enemies and those who hate.
And here’s what those followers learned: when they followed God’s actual Truth, Jesus, God was always with them. They’d face ventures of which they couldn’t see the ending. They’d start down paths they’d never trodden on before. They’d face perils and dangers unknown to them before. But they’d do this knowing God’s hand was guiding them, God’s love supporting them. Always.
And so they followed.
What do you think? Do you want go along with Pilate and everyone else? Or do you want to follow the Truth, follow Christ on a path that will be with God all the way and bring healing and hope to you and so many, to the whole creation?
In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
