Christ is King!
Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, called Jesus and asked him: ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ Jesus answered him: ‘Are you asking this on your own, or have others told you about me?’ Pilate replied: ‘I’m not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?’ Jesus replied: ‘My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my followers would be fighting to prevent me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here. Pilate asked him: ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus replied: ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth. All those who belong to the truth listen to my voice.’ Pilate asked him: ‘What is the truth?’
Welcome to the last Sunday of the Christian year, a day traditionally known as the feast of ‘Christ the King’.
I appreciate that there probably aren’t many here who manage their schedule according to the church calendar, but I’m sure we’re all familiar with how different countries and cultures celebrate the New Year at different times. Culturally we celebrate the New Year on January 1, while the Chinese New Year is celebrated at a completely different time, and the church New Year is celebrated on the next Sunday, which means that this Sunday is the last Sunday of the old year. ecclesiastical, a day on which we traditionally remember the reign of Christ.
Now, I say ‘traditionally’, but it’s really just a tradition that goes back about 80 years, to 1925, when Pope Pius IX proclaimed the holiday.
1925 was a very interesting time for our world. We had just come out of the war to end all wars, and the signs were everywhere that it was headed for another. We were in the grip of a global economic depression and we were desperately looking for answers.
And, of course, there were some outspoken leaders who believed they had answers to those questions. One was the Italian leader, Mussolini, who had just celebrated his third year in office. Another was a young agitator named Adolf Hitler, who had been out of goal for a year at that stage, and whose Nazi party was rapidly gaining popularity throughout Germany.
The world was watching, waiting for answers and listening to these powerful men vying for the spotlight, so the Pope at the time felt it was time to remind Christians around the world that our allegiance is to Christ and not none of these worldly rulers.
And then we have ‘Christ the King’ Sunday, and we’re also presented with this Gospel reading, an excerpt from the dialogue between Jesus and Pontius Pilate which, I suppose, is meant to tell us something about the way Christ interacts with power. . players of this world.
“Are you a king?” Pilate asks Jesus. “I’m not that kind of king,” says Jesus. “I came to bear witness to the truth.” “Ha!” says Pilate. “What is the truth?”
That is the heart of the dialogue, I would suggest, and it reflects the great gulf between Jesus and Pilate.
Pilate had an agenda, and you don’t need to have a PhD in Ancient Near Eastern history to know what Pilate’s agenda was. Pilate’s agenda (and indeed his entire life) was about seizing power and keeping it.
“Are you a threat?” he asks Jesus, because he has been told that Jesus is a gambler, a competitor, a political power broker in his own right.. “I’m not that kind of king” says Jesus. My Kingdom is about truth and not power, he says. And Pilate immediately loses interest. He walks out the door and tells Jesus’ accusers, “I’m done with your king. You can take him back.”
I suggest that the important thing to realize from this dialogue is that Jesus and Pilate really had absolutely nothing to say to each other.
Christians have often made the false assumption that the dialogue between Jesus and Pilate was somehow significant and that Pilate must have at least left with a lot to think about. In fact, there were stories circulating at one point in Christian history that Pilate and his wife secretly converted after this conversation, silently won over by the words of truth that Jesus spoke to them. This is almost certainly complete rubbish.
Most likely, Pilate learned absolutely nothing from Jesus that day, since Jesus had absolutely nothing to offer Pilate that was of any value to him.
Now, it’s true that we see Pilate making an effort to free Jesus, and it might be tempting to assume that this was because Pilate was somehow touched by Jesus’ innocence, but when you look at the larger history of dirty deeds and massive violence from Pilate, it would have been unbecoming of him to have tried to rid Jesus of any pious concern for justice.
Much more likely it is that any attempt Pilate made to free Jesus was more a by-product of his sincere dislike of the Jewish leaders, such that he would have liked to upset them by leaving Jesus as a thorn in his side, or that it was because of some superstitious fear he had, that harming Jesus might have harmed him, a belief that may well have been based on a dream Pilate’s wife, we are told, had.
Read the dialogue: Pilate asks very little of Jesus because Pilate has nothing to gain from Jesus, and conversely, Jesus has little to say to Pilate because Pilate has nothing to offer Him that He values.
Pilate had assumed, of course, that Jesus would be very interested in conversing with him: “Don’t you realize,” he says to Jesus, “that I have power to kill you and power to set you free?” (John 19:10) but Jesus tells him that he does not have as much power as he thinks he does. “You have no power except what is given to you from above”, and indeed, Pilate knows very well that just as it was given to him from above, so it can be taken away very easily.
We could pose the question in this scenario, ‘who really has the power?’ Pilate believes that he has the ultimate executive power, the power of life and death, but it is Jesus who is really in control of his own destiny. True enough.
However, the most important idea here, for our purposes today, is that the kind of power that Pilate had was of no interest to Jesus. He was not interested in competing with Pilate for power at that level. He just didn’t play that game!
And that’s why there can’t be a meaningful dialogue between the two, because they’re playing different language games. Pilate is playing a power game. Jesus is playing a different game. In his own words, his concern is with the ‘truth’, and as he points out, unless you’re already of the truth, you can’t play games. “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice,” says Jesus. Pilate, of course, does not ‘belong to the truth’, so he does not hear the voice of Jesus, and therefore he has no idea what Jesus is talking about.
Thinking about this passage, I was reminded of an old Goon Show episode where the Goons re-enacted the Roman invasion of Britain. The only problem for the British, however, in the Goon Show retelling of the story, was that when they heard that the Romans were coming to confront them, they assumed it was at a football match. And so, as Caesar watches the Britons line up on the battlefield, he asks: ‘What army is this that fights with a ball at its feet?’ while the British quickly blow the whistle and shout ‘foul’, reminding César that he is only allowed to have eleven players on the pitch at a time, whereas they had counted at least 40,000, all of whom seemed to be playing very hard! !
You can’t have meaningful commitment unless you’re playing the same game. We Christians forget this very easily when we try to relate to the world. “Jesus is the answer” we like to say, but it’s really stupid to say it because it completely depends on what the question is.
Pilate had questions:
* How do I hold on to my power?
* How I adhere to the Jewish leaders
Jesus was not the answer to any of those questions!
We make the same mistake when we try to build our evangelistic outreach by trying to scratch where we think contemporary Australians itch.
Of course, contemporary Australians ask many questions, such as
* How do I get ahead in my job?
* How do I invest wisely to get a bigger bank balance?
* How can I improve my sex life?
and in each of these cases again, Jesus is the answer to NONE of these questions!
Jesus doesn’t play those games. He doesn’t answer those questions. He’s not the one to talk to when you’re looking for more sex, wealth and power. What Jesus offers is the truth, and those who are of the truth recognize it when Jesus speaks it, truths such as:
* that under God all people – Romans and Jews and blacks and whites and in between – are all equally people.
* That those who live by the sword die by the sword, and that the pursuit of power is a lust that is never satisfied
* That a person’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions but that personal sacrifice is the key to self-realization.
And, of course, Pilate needed to hear those truths, but he was never going to hear them, because he was not of the truth, and he could not afford to be, since the focus of his entire life was elsewhere.
And here we are on Christ the King Sunday. And, of course, the world has changed significantly since 1925, when this holiday was first proclaimed, and a lot has changed, although, as we all recognize, a surprising number seem to have stayed the same.
Once again, this country has just come out of a war and is actually getting more and more deeply entangled in another war, and we are in a recession and people are looking for answers. And once again, there are big players in political power strutting around on the world stage and offering to provide those answers.
So how does Jesus line up with these 21st century power players? My feeling is that with most of them, for the most part, He doesn’t really have a say. He doesn’t take them on his own terms. He doesn’t fight fire with fire. He just doesn’t play those games at all. Instead, he offers the truth, and those who have ears hear.
And maybe that sounds a bit defeatist, but on the contrary, the Good News, the real Good News, is that in the end the truth wins!
He always does! Look back in history at the long history of global lies, violence and deceit that has been foisted on the human race: mass slavery that has been based on the lie that people of one skin color are superior to people of another skin color. In the end the truth wins!
And look at the powerful lies we work under today that keep us off balance and knee-deep in endless war, lies like the one that tells us that Christians and Muslims can never be friends, but that we are victims of an inevitable clash of civilizations, resulting in an inevitable and endless war. We know that in the end… the truth wins!
For he who brings down the mighty from their thrones and exalts the lowly, who fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty, will see to it that in the end the truth wins out over all, and that the earth is so full of knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
And until that day comes, we will proclaim with faith that Christ is King and that His truth is the future of our world: His is the Kingdom, His is the power, His is the glory, forever and ever. Amen!
First preached at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, November 2009
