Christ the King: a sermon

Jesus, shackled and powerless, stands before the local embodiment of massive imperial power. But where does the true power lie in this exchange? Pilate imagines that his power over life and death is ultimate. Jesus stands for something more powerful, but what is it? As always, John’s Gospel presents complex meaning in simple language in a way that leaves us a great deal of work to do. There can be no doubt that Jesus is not broken by Pilate’s interrogation, but what is it that can resist the Empire’s total control over the fate of any individual who dares to question its logic?

The complex exchange here centres around the question of kings and kingdoms. Jesus is accused of claiming to be King of the Judeans, though there is no evidence that he ever said this, but he does not deny that he is, indeed, some sort of king with some sort of kingdom. Indeed, he says that the kingdom he embodies does not even fit into the logic of what we might consider to be ‘natural law’ – it doesn’t use the grammar of power that we imagine to be hard-wired into the way of the world. So what is it?

Let me take you on a bit of thought journey as a way of approaching this. I’m not saying that I’m right [ever!] but let me play with an idea. Jesus is some kind of a king. With all we know from scripture, we can narrow this down: he is a king of the Davidic line, born in Bethlehem, as we will soon hear again in our celebration of the Nativity. It all connects, doesn’t it?

But what does that mean? What do we hear when we hear the name of David? Is it the territorial claim of a kingdom stretching from Dan to Beersheba? Is it the callous calculations of a powerful man who does the unspeakable in order to marry Bathsheba? Or is it the man who deeply mourns his son who becomes his enemy, who expresses his undying love for Jonathan, who painfully learns penitence when faced with his crimes? Who is this king in whose line Jesus is said to stand, this Jesus who now stands before Pilate, accused of claiming the throne of his ancestor?

In some Christian traditions, if you say the name of David, only one thing comes to mind – the book of the Psalms. David is the poet whose words continue to shape the daily prayers of hundreds of millions of people across the world. They are deeply human words that speak of tenderness  and vengeance, pain and desire, wisdom and lament. When I looked to the Psalter to find some clues about the kind of king Jesus might claim to be, I looked for words that echoed something central to Jesus’s testimony before Pilate. In what I think is the central verse in this passage, he said, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.’ We know that truth is central to our understanding of Jesus in John’s Gospel because he places it in his prologue, which we will hear again a few short weeks from now: ‘And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.’

And what is truth? Well, Pilate asked the same question but didn’t hang around long enough to hear an answer. The powerful know nothing of truth because it means nothing to them – they create it and change it according to their needs. They think that it is a matter of opinion and their opinion trumps all others. It is appalling to see that, in our own day, the powerful are brazen enough to say overtly that they are willing to fabricate any ‘truth’ that will server their purpose.

But the Kingdom of God is not of this world, not of this kind of so-called logic. The Kingdom of God belongs to an entirely different order.

So, back to my search through the Psalter, the book of King David, to find a different take on what truth might be. The compilers of the Psalter knew what they were doing. One third of the way through its 150 song-poems, sits a Psalm that is recited by many Christian every day – Psalm 51, 50 in the Greek numbering. It has this verse: ‘Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.’ My kingdom is not of this world. The Kingdom of God is within you.

Could it be that this king in David’s line, standing in chains before the awful might of Rome, speaks of a kingdom that is a matter of truth in the inward being, a matter of wisdom to be found in the secrecy of the heart? In his steady composure in Pilate’s presence, is he, perhaps, demonstrating the power of a kingdom that is rooted in inward wisdom and profound grounding in the truth?

Perhaps the Kingdom of God is to be found first of all in the inner peace of those who know in their very marrow that ultimate truth and power consists entirely in love, not coercion. The church has fallen all too often into the lure of the power that dominates, aligning itself with political power or being seduced by the power over others that leads to the foulest abuse. When it does so, it has forgotten the power shown by the Son of David who stood before Pilate, who would soon hand him over to the full power of the state, and testified to the truth. That hidden truth, that inner wisdom, which is not of this world order, begins, as Psalm 51 says, with a broken and contrite heart, a tender heart, a heart of compassion.

Now, this wisdom is inward and hidden, but that doesn’t mean that it lacks political consequences. Indeed, it is the truth that has motivated martyrs in every age, and continues to do so. The Kingdom of God grows not by conquest, but by every act of tender-hearted compassion born of inner peace that passes all understanding, all calculating logic. The Kingdom of God grows by every act of steady, courageous witness to the truth that no single life is of less value than the life of the most powerful. How do we know this? Because God has come to us in the form of a chained criminal, an executed nobody, a vulnerable child who will come to us soon, full of grace and truth.

Fr John on Feast of Christ the King, Sunday 24 November 2024