Psalm 93
1 The Lord reigns, he is robed in majesty;the Lord is robed in majesty and armed with strength;indeed, the world is established, firm and secure.
2 Your throne was established long ago; you are from all eternity.
3 The seas have lifted up, Lord, the seas have lifted up their voice; the seas have lifted up their pounding waves.
4 Mightier than the thunder of the great waters, mightier than the breakers of the sea— the Lord on high is mighty.
5 Your statutes, Lord, stand firm; holiness adorns your house for endless days.
Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14
9 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.
10 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.
13 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.
14 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.
Revelation 1:4b-8
Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, 5 and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood 6 and made us a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.
7 Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him,even those who pierced him, and all the tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. So it is to be. Amen.
8 “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
33 Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” 34 Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” 35 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?” 36 Jesus answered, “My kingdom does not belong to this world. If my kingdom belonged to 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.” 37 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.”
Today marks the final Sunday of the church year before we begin again next week with the first Sunday of Advent. Every year we tell the story of Christ from start to finish, beginning with Christ humble and ending with Christ the King exalted.
If you’ve read a bit of the Bible or if you’ve been around church for a while, all this language of kings and kingdoms is familiar. The passages of Scripture we read and the songs we’re singing employ this imagery, and it’s one of the most common images in Christianity. But if you’re not familiar wit the Bible or church, all of this stuff about kings and kingdoms might seem rather odd and not so compelling. After all, we live in a world in which royals have been more or less eliminated in favor of other less authoritarian forms of government, and where royals endure their function is merely symbolic, pomp and circumstance but with little power or influence.
And yet this language of kings and kingdoms remains central to how we are to think about who Christ is to us and for us. But the truth is that we’re so far removed from time and place this imagery originated that it just doesn’t speak to our experience and desires as it wouldn’t have for someone in the first century (or many centuries since). And there’s a lot of seemingly outmoded language like this in the Bible. One danger is that we keep on speaking a language that doesn’t communicate with others, or even really with ourselves. So then the temptation is to dispense with such language and only use words and concepts which seem “relevant” to modern people. But for better and for worse (mostly for better) to be Christian is to immerse yourself in the conceptual world of the Bible - the Gospels especially - and have your imagination transformed.
So that’s what we’ll try to do this evening, and for the rest of our days. Perhaps the place to start the story of king in the Bible is in the book of 1 Samuel (which read a bit of last Sunday) where God’s people, discontent with being ruled by God, demand for themselves a king so that they may be like the other nations. God has been rejected but grants their desire anyway. Sometimes you just have to give your kids what they want and let them learn their own lesson. As predicted, the whole king experiment is more or less a disaster. The very first king, Saul, though chosen by God, is eventually abandoned by God. Then comes David, the man after God’s own heart (though an adulterer who has the husband of is mistress killed) whose reign gave shape to future messianic expectation of a mighty warrior who would deliver and establish God’s people. After one of David’s sons, Absalom, leads a rebellion against his father, Solomon eventually becomes king and brings the nation to it’s greatest heights. He built the temple, and was renowned for his great wisdom and his great number of wives, which - as the Scriptures tell it - was his downfall. From there it’s a parade of kings who, with only a few exceptions, “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord”. And finally, the experiment comes to an end when the Babylonians conquered Israel, destroyed the temple, and sent God’s people into captivity - a condition they came to understand as punishment for their unfaithfulness as exemplified by their unfaithful kings. The people wanted a king to elevate them above other nations, but instead they became subject to those very nations.
Despite all this - or actually, maybe because of all this - we find in Scripture depictions of the Lord seated on the throne, taking his rightful place, restored to where he always belonged. In Psalm 93 we see that the one who is on the throne is the creator and ruler of the earth, mighty and powerful. The powers of the earth are nothing compared to the power of the one who made them. This psalm declares the truth about the way things really are - the Lord reigns - while at the same time (at least to my ears) expresses the hope in the way things might be when the Lord reigns in full.
The passage from Daniel first presents the Lord enthroned in holy splendor, then introduces a
an enigmatic character called the Son of Man, “one like a human being”, whom the Lord grants power and authority to reign over the earth and its people. The desire here - consistent throughout the Scriptures - is not that the people might depart to be with God, but that God’s justice and peace would come to earth through this holy emissary sent from above. You can probably guess whom Christians have taken this figure to be.
And then there’s the passage from John in which Jesus is interrogated by Pilate, who cares about Jesus only to the extent that Jesus has been disrupting the peace with his talk of coming kingdoms. As much out of curiosity as anything, he asks Jesus: “Are you the king of the Jews?” And Jesus never gives an insincere man a straight answer, instead posing a question of his own.
The truth is not Pilate’s concern; he sees this as an intra-Jewish squabble which makes no claim on him. He’s going to do whatever is necessary to maintain order, fair or not. He has the authority in this jurisdiction, and it’s almost like Jesus doesn’t understand the gravity of the situation; he just makes vague statements about his kingdom not being of this world when he’s on the brink of being sentenced to death. Pilate decides Jesus hasn’t done anything worthy of being executed, which is to say he doesn’t see Jesus as a threat, just a an eccentric. And yet the expedient thing is just to consent to the wishes of the mob and have Jesus killed anyway.
It’s hard for us to appreciate just how subversive a scene this is. To any one looking on it would’ve been obvious just who had the power in this situation. Pilate is a Roman governor, invested with power and privilege, and Jesus is a Galilean peasant. Pilate can decide to execute Jesus, not just if he’s guilty, but for any reason - or no reason. (Even after declaring Jesus innocent he essentially hands Jesus over to be killed.) It’s simply a given that the world is stratified, with men like Pilate near the top and men like Jesus near the bottom. Truth doesn’t matter - what is truth? What matters is power. Pilate has it and Jesus does not.
And yet, looking back on this episode in the light of of Easter, we see the conversation turned upside down, the balance of power perfectly reversed. Pilate, sitting on the judgment seat, wearing his fancy clothes, presumes to have power, but the authority actually lies with the one who’s bloody and beaten, wearing a crown of thorns. True power is shown not to lie in the ability to use intimidation and brute force, but in the capacity to remain faithful even in the face of brutality. Power lies not with those who exalt themselves, but with those who humble themselves. The prideful may temporarily be kings on earth, but there is a coming from heaven with an entirely different economy.
In the first century, the thought that Jesus might have power over Pilate when it sure seems the other way around would’ve been preposterous. scandalous even. What an absurd notion. And while the centuries of referring to Jesus as “king” have inoculated us against the scandalousness of this picture, it still seems more or less just as preposterous to us. The passage has lost it subversiveness because we scarcely believe it to be true. We still live in a world in which men like Pilate who have power can do what they want without accountability, and where people who lay down their lives get trampled.
But what if it really is true that Jesus triumphs over Pilate, over every earthly power, not by beating them at their own game, but by playing a different game altogether? And what if it’s really true that we finally overcome to the extent that we, like Christ, trust God to insure the outcome, letting go of the desire to make the story turn out the way we want and instead trusting that God will bring about the desired end?
We may no longer live in a world of kings, and we may have rejected all authority and rendered ourselves little tyrants over the tiny dominion of our own lives, and yet we still retain the longing for someone, for something, to come and make things right. Although most of us don’t recognize it as such, I’m convinced that we too desire what the psalms and the prophets envision, when there will be perfect peace and justice on earth as it is heaven. What we want, whether we realize it or not, is for Jesus to be King. And while we await that time when he comes again to establish his kingdom in full, we’d do well to remember that, though absent, so to speak, he is still the king, even here and now, that those who submit to his lordship can exercise the very same power with which he overcomes the powers of this world.
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