Christ the President/King

Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14 

The one coming with the clouds rules over all

As I watched, thrones were set in place, and an Ancient One took his throne, his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and flowed out from his presence. A thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending him. The court sat in judgment, and the books were opened. As I watched in the night visions, I saw one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him. To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.

Psalm 93 

Ever since the world began, your throne has been established. (Ps. 93:2)

The LORD is king, robed in majesty; the LORD is robed in majesty and armed with strength. The LORD has made the world so sure that it cannot be moved. Ever since the world began, your throne has been established; you are from everlasting. The waters have lifted up, O LORD, the waters have lifted up their voice; the waters have lifted up their pounding waves. Mightier than the sound of many waters, mightier than the breakers of the sea, mightier is the LORD who dwells on high. Your testimonies are very sure, and holiness befits your house, O LORD, forever and forevermore.

Revelation 1:4b-8 

Glory to the one who made us a kingdom

Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the earth. To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail. So it is to be. Amen. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the LORD God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

John 18:33-37 

The kingdom of Christ

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.”

*******

This morning’s story from the Gospel of John comes just a week after Jesus was hailed as the coming King of Israel, while riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, as the people called out "Hosanna to the Son of David!” It was a great big heroic celebration, a revolutionary public statement of power that wasn’t Roman for once, and seemed Jesus was the latest celebrity preacher to win the hearts of the people. Imagine Oprah coming to town with expectations to give everyone a brand new car, or something like that, only better, more like expectations that all mortgages would be paid off forever and a permanent end to crime. But instead, here we are, a week later, where Jesus has been sent to the principle’s office by his best friends and classmates, while Pilate is scurrying back and forth between talking with Jesus and trying to make sense of the people’s leaders demanding he put Jesus to death. What a quick turn around!

And what a way to end the year. The church year, I mean. It's sort of a cliffhanger as far as story endings go. Today’s the last Sunday of this liturgical year, the culmination of the stories we’ve been telling since last Advent, the big celebration of the final and complete victory of Jesus our King, and this is how we’ve chosen to end it? With this story from halfway through Holy Week? I know we’ve been through a year of Advent and Christmas, Epiphany and Lent, Easter and Pentecost, and we’re about to take off on that journey yet again with our Advent New Year Potluck next week, but to wrap it all up with this conversation between Pilate and Jesus seems a bit… a bit anticlimactic. There’s no Jesus storming the castle, no fire and brimstone battle of the armies who are righteous striving against the enemy who are many but not righteous enough. No ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers” to the glorious death. Not even a riding off into the sunset. We have a much more… enigmatic ending to this year’s journey with Jesus from the cradle to the cross to the creative works of the Spirit.

Though, to be fair, we did get beautiful end-time imagery from Revelation paired with this morning’s Gospel reading. And the Daniel version of the apocalypse is all sorts of fiery excitement, but it doesn’t show a God riding into battle as much as a God who is glorious enough that the only response possible is to bow down in worship. The consuming fire, the love, the strength and the grace and the glory, on open display before the masses, and the thousands upon thousands gathered before the throne of God, who can only respond by serving the Maker of the cosmos. John’s Gospel reminds us from the very beginning that the Maker had somehow been hidden in our midst the whole time. Remember how this Gospel according to John began: “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”

We have this obsession with being right and proving we are right by proving other people are just dumb. We do it all the time, as though finding the truth is a zero-sum game. But this right and wrong, black and white, my way or the highway, grounded in fear and insecurity, isn’t what we’ve got in the Gospel today. It’s in fact quite the opposite. We want to control, by the will of the flesh or the will of man, by genetics and family lines and race and class and immigration status, to be able to say who is in and who is out, but we are born children of God purely according to the will and free gift of God. When Jesus is talking with Pilate about truth, he’s coming from a tradition of faith that has a history of arguing with God, of Rabbis arguing with each other and with the sacred texts, of answering questions with more questions, of telling stories instead of giving yes or no responses. We hear this in his interactions with the teachers of the law all the time, and luckily for us our Jewish neighbors have kept much of this tradition of diverse interpretation alive. I remember back in college we had a guest preacher one week, William Willimon, who said that he believed in the Truth who is also the Way and the Life, who is the person of Jesus Christ. Which is a very different reading of that word ‘truth’ compared to, say, the truth of the laws of gravity and mathematical equations.

Heck, we even have this day called “Christ the King” as though we know what that phrase means. You can go ahead and break down the words, but that won’t get at the heart of things, only at the tip of the iceberg. See, “Christ” isn’t Jesus’ first name, it’s a descriptor, a title, a faith statement in and of itself. It’s from the word “Christos,” meaning “anointed,” and people are anointed as prophets, priests, and kings. To break that down basically and broadly, people are anointed to speak to the people on behalf of God, to speak to God on behalf of the people, and to settle disputes and protect people one from another. We like to separate these things, and ought to do so for the very least to protect leaders from burnout on the one hand or power corruption on the other. The only place where all three roles come together is in Christ Jesus, who as God with skin on brings together prophet and priest, serving also as priestly sacrifice. Where the kingship comes in is difficult to put a finger on exactly, because that’s an invented position. Some of us nerdier types have images of kings from stories like the Game of Thrones, or Lord of the Rings, or think of President Snow from The Hunger Games as the modern equivalent of an all-powerful state ruler. The reason, of course, that we give Jesus any of the titles of power from our own society, is to point out how differently Jesus ‘rules.’ Kings, Presidents, Governors, celebrities all have this sort of aura and public persona, this certain amount of protection from the masses because they are so outnumbered. These rulers typically have the power, sometimes even the authority, to call for a draft in time of war, or to institute a tax, or declare a holiday, or set minimum wage, without knowing personally the effects of those decisions on the majority of their people.

But Jesus is not that kind of king, not that sort of ruler. He lives in the world with us, fights beside us in the trenches, dies with us and carries us through to a life where he does not ask a percentage tax of our land and livestock, but rather demands a complete resurrection. Jesus works with us through many small deaths and renewals, through many conversions, through questions and stories and conversations and arguments, in relationship, which is not black and white, right or wrong, but living and active, both shining bright as the noonday sun above us and burning just as brightly within and around us.

There’s a line in the movie “The Princess Bride” where the Sicilian kidnapper has used his catchphrase “Inconceivable!” so often that his hired swordsman tells him, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” So we often do with words we use in church, words we use to talk about God. We get used to this language, or we expect that we ought to know what we mean by it, but to say Christ is King means something very different now than it did when Pope Pius XI called for its remembrance back in 1925. And that image of a King, and of who Jesus is and who Christians are called to be, is very different from what it meant in the time when the Gospels were first told around campfires and in secret catacombs gatherings.

To be sure, though, no matter what label we put on our God, what attribute we most want to lift up or what story we wish wasn’t there, God’s relationship with us is everlasting, God’s promise of resurrection is sure, God’s forgiveness is ongoing, God’s power outlasts every kingdom and country and war and term of office. Because even when we celebrate and look forward to the hopeful end of all the war and suffering, we will all of us be caught up in that everlasting that has no end, because our God is everlasting, without end, working in us and through us to put right this weary world, until all have found a home in God’s own kingdom and country.