The Feast of Christ the King
Daniel 7:9-14
Ps. 93
Revelation 1:1-8
John 18:33-37
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
AFTER WEEKS AND MONTHS of walking through the Bible, trying to come to grips with who Jesus is, we come today to the culminating feast of Christ the King. Without a doubt, I can trace the real spiritual growth in my life to the doctrine of the Kingdom of Christ, and, surprisingly enough, to the Wachowski Brothers’ movie, The Matrix. When I was in seminary, Renee and I helped out with the youth group at our church in Marlehead, and one night our friend, Jeremy, explained the concept of the Kingdom of God to the youth group by quoting a scene from that movie. If you haven’t seen it, a lot of the movie was about perception. The premise: Nothing in the world is what it seems. Machines have taken over the world, and they have humans hooked up to the Matrix, a vast network that makes us think that we are eating and working and getting married and doing all the stuff we do in everyday life, when in fact we are in a sort of suspended animation while the machines harvest us for energy. One of the main characters, Morpheus, disrupts the Matrix for a short time and gives another character, Neo, a choice: He can take a red pill and learn the truth about his existence – that everything he sees around him isn’t real, and he’s really hooked up to a machine -- or he can take a blue pill and go back to his life of blissful ignorance. Morpheus says: “This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”
I have no idea whether the kids got it, but a light went on in my head, and I realized that I had become so distracted and seduced by the trappings of my life that was clinging to them in blissful ignorance rather than living in the reality of Jesus’ kingdom. That night is why I am an Episcopalian, why we live and work in this parish and why we are so far away from our family.
Using today’s gospel text – actually two things that are in the text, and one thing that’s not – I want to try and explain what happened to me that night. First, look at Pilate’s question to Jesus. Second, Jesus’ answer. And then I’ll tell you what’s left out of the text that I think is actually very important.
Pilate’s Question
We arrive in John’s gospel abruptly – Jesus has already been arrested and dragged before the religious authorities, and now he is taken to Pilate, the Roman governor of Palestine. The first question Pilate asks is the same in all four gospels: “Are you a king?” Now, given the figure standing before him, Pilate is understandably incredulous. From the charges being leveled at Jesus, Pilate must have expected a revolutionary, a man with an army in the hills ready to attempt to overthrow the Roman occupation. But Jesus is in chains, so Pilate asks him “What exactly are you? Are you really a king?” Jesus responds to that question with a question: “Is that your own idea, or did others plant the idea in your mind?” If this is Pilate’s question, then what he really wants to know is whether Jesus is a threat to Caesar; if it is a question put into Pilate’s mouth by the Jewish religious authorities, then it asks whether Jesus is the promised Messianic king and, therefore, a threat to the Jewish authorities.
Pilate’s question helps us see one of the problems with this feast, namely that Americans don’t really know what a king is. After 200 plus years of the American experiment in democracy, the whole idea of monarchy is either tyrannical or quaint: We conjure up images of a despot ruling at the expense of his people, or we think of the anachronistic and largely symbolic “royals” in Buckingham Palace. So Pilate’s question can also be our question: What do you mean by “king”?
Pope Pius XI established the Feast of Christ the King in 1925 to repudiate systems that were gaining strength against Christ’s kingdom early in the 20th Century, systems like secularism and domination of the church by atheistic Communism.1 But other systems – materialism, individualism, pluralism – can stand against the kingdom of Christ in our own new Century.
Consider, for example, power: The most recent election cycle saw billions of dollars spent in pursuit of political power. The culture wars are alive and well, too. The New York Times Book Review of a couple of weeks ago had about 5 or 6 different books attacking Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity; and the evangelicals were on the attack just this last week against Madonna and Wal-Mart. Our own city bears the marks of struggles for power, perhaps in a unique way. Washington, DC is a city of monuments. You can’t go two blocks without running into a statue of somebody, many of which were erected to people who lived lives of great sacrifice, but many others are to presidents and military leaders and conquerors.
Christ’s kingdom isn’t about that sort of power. The monument of Christ’s kingdom isn’t a military emblem; it is a cross. The scene at the cross wasn’t just an execution; it was a coronation, and Jesus reigns from the cross precisely because he defeated his enemies through apparent weakness. To someone like that, we ask with Pilate: “What are you?”
Jesus’ Answer
When Pilate says, “You are a king, then” (18:37), Jesus confirms it, but he leave no doubt that his is “not a kingdom as the world understands kingdoms.”2 Two ways it differs from the kingdoms of this world are (1) what it’s built upon and (2) how it spreads.
First, the foundation of Jesus’ kingdom: Jesus’ kingship rests not upon the amount of force he brings, but upon who he is. In Daniel 7, we see the vision of the son of man, the messianic king, coming “with the clouds of heaven.” (Dan. 7:13) The logical temptation is to succumb to the mythic representation of Jesus coming through the clouds, but it doesn’t say that. It says coming with clouds, and that’s pivotal. Remember that when the children of Israel were traveling through the wilderness, God went with them as a fire at night and a cloud during the day. When God descended to Mt. Sinai to give the Law to Moses, a cloud came down on the mountain. All through the OT, clouds are associated with God’s presence, and Daniel’s vision isn’t that of a king coming through the clouds but of God himself coming. Jesus’ authority rested and rests upon his identity as God, the Creator and Sustainer of all that is, by whom and from whom all things were made.
The second way Jesus’ kingdom is different is how it expands: Human history is replete with accounts of kingdoms that expanded by the sword, through violence, and there is an element of violence associated with Jesus’ kingdom. It’s just not the sort of violence Pilate ever would have expected. Yes, if Jesus had wanted to overthrow Rome’s military power, then he would have recruited soldiers to fight to prevent his arrest. But Jesus didn’t fight; he submitted willingly to the powers assembled against him. When an overeager Peter took his sword and cut off a soldier’s ear, Jesus rebuked Peter and commanded him not to take up arms. The violence I’m talking about is not the sort of violence Peter envisioned. Paul Zahl writes:
The kingdom of heaven is violent in the same way that the plant bursts through the soil when it grows. It uproots one’s life in the place and context of one’s inherited values and loyalties. It twists and bends as it also reshapes. It is not a process. It is not a slow burn. It is a ripping and a tearing, a re-formation. It is the contemporary work of God in lives and history.3
Christ’s kingdom expands in us, the church, and through us in the world, by doing violence to our old hearts focused on power or arrogance or materialism or pride, and conforming them to Christ’s heart, which lives to serve, to heal and to die so that others might live.
One last point, and this is what is not in the texts for today: The whole interrogation of Jesus by the religious authorities and Pilate is in John 18, but John throws in two little sections that aren’t part of the interrogation. They are Peter’s denials of Jesus. What’s so significant about that? One commentator says that’s important
because that is where the real trial is taking place, outside by the charcoal fire. Inside, Jesus is being questioned, but it is meaningless; Jesus moves with firm purpose to his own glorification. But outside, Simon Peter (and the disciples, and the church) is being questioned, and that trial is not going well at all.4
No matter what Pilate did, and no matter whether we take the red pill or the blue one, Christ is still king. (I heard an old Southern preacher say once: “You can’t impeach him, and he’s not gon’ resign.”) What mattered was whether Peter saw it. And what is at issue for us is whether we see it and realign our lives under his kingdom. Because of the night Jeremy explained the kingdom to me, our family started trying to do just that, to seek God’s kingdom above all else in our lives, and that led us to places we didn’t dream. Is Christ a king? The answer is “yes.” The question is: When we finally see it, will we bow?
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
1. http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius11/P11PRIMA.HTM, last visited 16 November 2006.
2. Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John (NICNT) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995): 680.
3. Paul Zahl, The First Christian: Universal Truth in the Teachings of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003): 68.
4. Fred B. Craddock, et al., Preaching Through the Christian Year: A Comprehensive Commentary on the Lectionary (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity, 1993): 481.
© 2006 Sam Wood
