John 18:33-37
This day is a peculiar one in the church calendar. Depending on who you ask, this day is Proper 29, or the 27th Sunday after Pentecost, or Christ the King, or Reign of Christ Sunday. Technically, Christ the King is not a major feast in the Episcopal Church. It is not listed in our Prayerbook and has been included in the lectionary and on our liturgical wall calendars only because of our ecumenical relationship with the Roman Catholic church out of which this observance comes. The last Sunday of the church year was designated as Christ the King Sunday by Pope Pious the eleventh in 1925 in response to growing secularism, atheism, and communism. Of course we know from our vantage point in history that the same era saw the rise of fascism in Europe and the devastation of the Great Depression in the US. The Pope’s stated intention in 1925 was to remind humanity that while governments come and go, Christ reigns as King forever.
Proponents of observing this feast lift it up as a response to the first rumblings of fascism, a feast that draws our attention to the discrepancies between our earthly rulers and our heavenly King. Opponents of the feast’s observance point out that the same Pope who instituted it was at the same time developing very close ties to the rising fascist regime in Italy and benefiting from the powerplay between the Church and the State. I find both arguments compelling, and I have more reading and praying to do on the subject between now and a year from now when we will be choosing how or if to observe this feast.
A third camp exists in the debate, one that takes issue with the premise itself. Christ’s throne, Christ’s reign, Christ’s kingship are all images of humanity attempting to map onto the divine our own constructs of power. In a country that has long since rejected the monarchy and cut ties with kings and queens, some have pointed out that these images do not speak to us the way they might have spoken to Christians of previous generations. Our presidents, our justices, the members of our Congress do not hold a comparable position to that of the monarchs of other nations. Whether we as individuals approve of a particular person holding a particular position in our government or not, they were not born and raised into the role. People voted to elevate them, and in most cases they will leave their post by a prescribed date.
It is not so with a King. Kings are kings regardless of public opinion. Kings become kings because someone died and made them so. The first kings of Israel were chosen by the Prophet Samuel, son of Hannah, who made his choice not by lineage or qualification, but by listening for the Lord’s approval. The Emperor of Rome during Jesus’s lifetime inherited the title from Caesar Augustus, who inherited from Julius Caesar. The Emperors of Rome believed themselves to be divinely empowered and were worshipped as deities throughout the Empire. In most cases, monarchs and emperors maintain their power through violence and the threat of violence, and human history has shown that very few of them remain satisfied with the land and resources they inherited.
So is it helpful for us to call Jesus our king, if this is what kingship conjures in our imagination? Do we put Jesus Christ in the category of entitled, power-wielding, army-leading, land-grabbing nepotists? We must turn back to scripture for some answers.
In our Gospel reading, Pilate has summoned a beaten and chained Jesus to be interrogated for suspected sedition and treason. Jesus has been in custody since late the night before, sleep-deprived and grieving the betrayal and abandonment of his friends. Pilate, an official of the Roman Empire, asks the bruised and bedraggled Jesus if he is a king. As is so often his way, Jesus responds with a question of his own, and when he finally does give an answer, it is characteristically cryptic. Pilate keeps asking about kings, and Jesus talks about truth. The next line of dialogue, which is left out of the lectionary, is Pilate’s infamous question “What is truth?”
Martin Luther made a distinction between two types of theologians- a theologian of glory, and a theologian of the cross. According to Luther, a theology of Glory calls evil good and good evil. Fundamentally, theologians of Glory have no regard for the truth. A theology of the cross, on the other hand, calls the thing what it actually is. The theology of the cross, for Luther, is the theology of truth.
This capital T Truth is not the same as honesty, the virtue which has so often been distorted to excuse harmful and even violent speech. Truth, the theology that calls a thing what it is, is about reality. The theologian of the cross is concerned with what is real.
Jesus tells Pilate that he came into the world to testify to the truth, and those who listen to him belong to the truth. Pilate’s question “What is truth?” reveals him to be a theologian of Glory, incapable of distinguishing what is real from what is not real. His refusal to see what is good and what is evil springs from a concern for his own power. If Jesus is the King, the Truth, then Pilate is not. Pilate wants the kingship of earth, and so he cannot recognize the King of heaven kneeling before him in chains.
This is what we mean when we say that Christ is King. We mean that the Truth reigns, even when the powers of this world insist on calling good evil and evil good. We mean that our very concepts of kingship and kingdom have been turned rightside up by Jesus who overturned tables in the halls of power. When we say Christ is King, we mean that we are not. By saying Jesus is Lord, we call a thing what it is, we tell the truth. This is the theology of the cross. What is truth? Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.
Mother A Writes 