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Monday, Sept 06
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Sunday, November 22, 2009
John 18:33-37
Christ the King
Craig Shirley
Who is this King of Peace?
Marcus Borg writes “Jesus is Lord” is the most widespread early Christian affirmation, and it is an affirmation with striking political implications.
The key to seeing its political meaning is realizing that “lord” was one of the titles of the Roman emperor- Caesar was called “lord.” To say “Jesus is Lord” is to say –“Caesar is not lord.” To affirm the Lordship of Christ is to deny the lordship of Caesar.
Thus the familiar affirmation “Jesus is Lord,” now almost a Christian cliché, originally challenges the lordship of the empire. It still does. To use examples from more recent times, it is like Christians in Nazi Germany saying, “Jesus is mein furher – and thus Hitler is not. Or in the United States, it would mean saying, “Jesus is my commander in chief” - and thus the president is not. The lordship of Christ versus the lordship of the empire is the same contrast, the same opposition that we see in the Kingdom of God versus the kingdom of this world. “(Heart of Christianity)
“I must admit that I know little from experience about being a Lord or a political king. The closest any of us may come of understanding the concept is the childhood game “king of the hill.” Here we have a monarchy in miniature. The monarch is on top and others try either to topple the monarch or to tow the line. Even with elected leaders this is true. So long as they can be elected again, from the moment they take office, elected leaders are trying to fend off potential successors and consolidate power. There is something heady about being elected and reelected and even politicians like New York’s Michael Bloomberg find themselves reversing their stances on term limits and running again – even when they promise they will step down after two terms. Keeping one’s political party in the majority seems to be of more importance that passing important legislation that will benefit the nation. Being on top and staying on top seems to be the object, and most everyone knows it.
How then, does Jesus fit into this picture? How is Jesus Lord? How is Jesus king? Certainly in this lesson from John Jesus is anything but lording it over anyone. Much of the royal language that Pilate uses here is more of a taunt than a title of honor. Jesus’ answers are evasive, talking of other worldly kingdoms and fending off any notion that he is a king. So the governor, widely know to be ruthless, sends him to be king of another hill, Golgotha. Even his own people reject him. They do not see him as the anointed one who will be king.
It’s easy enough to do – to reject Jesus’ kingdom of peace. Many people have rejected Jesus’ claim upon the world and upon our lives because we are engaged in our own personal and private game of king of the hill. So Jesus becomes a great “moral teacher” or our best friend and constant companion “He walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own” – but never a king. We won’t have Jesus as Lord because we are busy trying to make our own way as king or queen, if not of the universe, then at least of our little corner of it.
Still others are convinced that Jesus will eventually be king. The cross, they assume, is but a temporary setback in Jesus’ plan to take the world by force from the evil that inhabits it. Jesus, they say, is just biding his time until it is the right time to come again – this time with a mighty army, to destroy the world and all those in it. Bernard of Clairvaux was a gifted teacher, leader and church builder. He helped establish the Knights Templar. Unfortunately he totally misinterpreted Scripture as he encourages people throughout Europe to take up weapons of destruction to “fight pagans and Saracens” in the Holy Land. Bernard maintained that God calls upon the faithful to commit acts of violence “in his name” and so he recruited crusaders, preaching that those who wore the cross on their uniforms were acting as agents of God’s grace, even as they performed acts of violence against Jews and others. The second crusade failed miserably and Bernard died as broken as his theology.
Bernard neither understood nor grasped the meaning of Jesus’ title as “Prince of peace”. Jesus boldly stood up to those who wished him harm. The peace of God in Christ is intended to end hostility, to transform people, churches, and the world. Anyone can be a bully. It takes the love and strength of God to be a peacemaker. God sent his son into the world not to condemn it, but to make it whole again!
The problem of course is that we assume that the world’s way of being a king, the world’s way of exercising authority, is the way that God would be Lord. Those on top enforce their will by pushing down and crushing those who challenge it until all are defeated. But that is to miss the point of the cross and surprising good news.
Maybe you heard the Public Radio presentation this past week concerning the work of Reinhold Niebuhr. It was most interesting. Niebuhr exerted a significant influence upon mainline Protestant clergy in the years immediately following World War II. However, that influence began to wane and then drop toward the end of his life, when American liberals began to embrace pacifism, which Niebuhr had once embraced and then eventually rejected. Theology of his day adopted a more optimistic attitude toward human capabilities; a return of sorts to what Niebuhr would have termed Pelagian Enlightenment sensibilities – that is “we can do for ourselves what God doesn’t seem to want to do”. Historian Arthur Schlesinger described the legacy of Niebuhr as being contested between American liberals and conservatives, who both wanted to claim him.[11] Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave credit to Niebuhr's influence. Foreign-policy conservatives point to Niebuhr's support of the containment doctrine during the Cold War as an instance of moral realism; progressives cite his later opposition to the Vietnam War.[12]
His legacy continues to be important to contemporary thought. Both major-party candidates in the 2008 presidential election cited Niebuhr as an influence: Senator John McCain, in his work Hard Call, "celebrated Niebuhr as a paragon of clarity about the costs of a good war."[13] President Barack Obama called Niebuhr his "favorite philosopher"[14] and "favorite theologian".
And it is for that reason that I speak of him today. Niebuhr is one who understands this complicated idea of the reign of Christ, because he was able to maintain and perhaps even live out, this complex set of opposites that Christ’s kingship demands from our own understanding. Once a pacifist, he was able to see that there was a time when evil must be fought. Once a true evangelical who chastised the church for not working harder to convert Jews to Christianity, he was one of the first to write publically about the atrocities being visited upon the Jews in Nazi Germany – well before political leaders were willing to admit to such actions. And the fact that two opposing political candidates running against one another can both call him inspirational, speaks either to his “flip-flopping” as some political pundits would claim of such dramatic dichotomy of thought, or instead it speaks of his ability to see life with a mind that was constantly seeking the truth. And in that truth, Niebuhr found the freedom to speak out – without political gain or worry.
The strange irony of our Gospel text and the story of Jesus at all, is that Jesus IS king, precisely when he least looks like it. If the king is the one to whom all others bow, then a true king must conquer all enemies, including the greatest of all – death itself. God is, in Jesus on the cross, both playing the game of “king of the hill” and ending it. He plays the game by toppling not only the powers of this world, but also that way of being in power. No longer will force, which in its extreme can threaten and deliver death, serve to keep someone on top while others are kept down. The game itself, because of the cross and resurrection, is ended. It is defeated not by force, but by love, a love so great that Jesus lay down his own life. The one who declared himself to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life, said to his disciples that we shall know the truth, and the truth will set us free. And so we who know Christ are, free indeed. Amen
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