And Pilate
sneered, "And what is truth?"
I'm disappointed
that our gospel did not include Pilate's immediate response to Jesus'
proclamation, "Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my
voice." How ironic in John's gospel that Pilate asks "What
is truth?" when he has come face to face with Truth itself!
The scene,
of course, is the Passion narrative in John's gospel. Jesus has been
betrayed by Judas, arrested by soldiers, brought before Caiaphas the
high priest, and then to Pontius Pilate, the Roman proconsul of Palestine.
He's about to be crucified but Pilate believes Jesus to be an innocent
man. Deluded, perhaps, but innocent. In the end, however, politics and
expediency rule the day and Pilate agrees that Jesus should die. The
crime? He was the King of the Jews.
Today,
this last Sunday of the long green season of Pentecost, this last Sunday
before the season of Advent, the Church celebrates Christ the King.
And while Jesus tells Pilate his kingdom is not of this world, our readings
from Daniel and Revelation assert that his kingdom is everlasting and
that his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.
And yet
what is our experience of a king? At least in this country our last
experience was one over which we had a revolution. And yet we retain
a fixation with royalty if not by marriage or succession as in England,
then certainly by the mythology and fascination that surround public
figures. An example of both: Lady Di in England and President Kennedy
in the United States. Interesting that conspiracy theories are related
to both of their deaths and that Kennedy's White House was called "Camelot."
And of course today the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, and his kingdom
Neverland are very much on the front page. But however we might define
a kingdom of long ago or a kingdom today, it is the Church's witness
that it is Christ's love that makes him our king and that his kingdom
is truly a commonwealth in which his outstretched arms on the cross
embrace the whole world.
And so
we go back to that exchange with Pontius Pilate in our realization that
it is exactly Christ's willingness to die for our sake that makes him
our king, and that his authority has nothing to do with the world's
standards of authority, of power, of influence-that Christ's authority
is a love so deep and so profound that it reveals the very heart of
God.
Moreover,
that posture of Christ the King with a crown of thorns will always beg
the question, "Who's in charge here?" The fact of his crucifixion
was intended to say that Caesar was in charge. It was also intended
to convey that the mob was in charge-those who screamed, "Crucify
him! Crucify him!" And for the first three hundred years of its
existence, the Church which named itself after the crucified Jesus was
a seditious church, illegal, martyred, willing to die for the sake of
the gospel, willing to sacrifice as the king of Love had sacrificed
because Christians knew that not Rome, not the mob, that Christ the
crucified and risen king was in charge.
Some
say that as soon as the Church became the legalized and then the religion
of the Roman Empire that it's been downhill ever since, that the Church
had a temporal authority its master would never have envisioned. Today,
some say we have entered a post-Christian era where the Church and the
culture-at least of Western civilization-are no longer one and the same.
Sunday is just another shopping day and church is one of a number of
equal options. If that is true, perhaps it's an opportunity for Christ
to reclaim his kingdom as not of this world but is of sacrificial love,
and how it is that we can serve others as he served us. Perhaps we will
yearn for that peaceable kingdom where the lion and lamb will lie down
together "and a little child shall lead them." Perhaps we
will then fully walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself for
us, an offering and sacrifice to God.
Amen.
