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One of the reasons Jews do not believe Jesus is Messiah is that the
kingdom Messiah promises to bring is not evident in what we see around us. “In that day,” the Scriptures
tell us, the one who is to come “will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up
sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. In that day, the wolf will live with the lamb,
and the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together.... The cow
will feed with the bear, and the lion will eat straw like an ox. The infant will play near the hole of
the cobra, and the young child will put his hand in the viper’s nest.”
But instead of seeing that, every day we watch the old kingdoms still going about their fearful
business. We see parents who are afraid of their own children. We find infants abandoned in parking lots
and toilets by their teenage mothers. We read of homeless men seeking shelter from the cold under a
bridge and being scooped up by a garbage lifter and crushed. We remember the assassination of a President
and shiver at the news of those daily assassinations of people which we call ordinary murder. We read of
war in Iraq and bombings in Turkey, and of fear at home. These are not signs of Messiah’s
kingdom.
But these are not the only signs we see. Signs of the presence of Messiah’s kingdom occasionally
get our attention as well. We see those who take the abandoned infant and offer the child a home and
love. We hear of others who leave the kingdoms of power or wealth or comfort to care for the sick and the
lonely. We learn of an elderly woman in Mississippi who washed clothes for other people all her life and
saved her pennies, a woman who, through her frugality accumulated $150,000 throughout her life, so that
she could leave it to a local college for scholarships. We hear of others who give their lives in all
kinds of ways for those they love.
Today we celebrate Christ the King, Christ the King of a kingdom that is somehow here now, but
also somehow not yet here.
"So you are a king, then?" Pilate asked.
"It is you who say it," answered Jesus. "Yes, I am a king. I was born for this, to bear witness
to the truth. And all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice."
"What is truth?" Pilate asked.
Christ is King because he stands before Pilate as witness to the truth about God, the truth about
the world, and the truth about us.
What is the truth Christ is king of? What is the truth about us and the world and God which
Christ is witness to?
Several years ago Philip Yancey wrote a book about Jesus, The Jesus I Never Knew. In researching
this book, “the first thing I learned about Jesus,” says Yancey, “is that Jesus lost the culture wars.
Every time an election rolls around in the United States I hear things like, ‘We need to get God’s man in
the White House.’ [But] when I put myself back in Jesus’ day I have a very hard time imagining Jesus
sitting around thinking, ‘Let’s see, who should be God’s man in the Roman Forum? Should it be Julius, or
Octavius, or Nero?’
“You see,” Yancey goes on to say, “the kind of kingdom Jesus was setting in motion” is a kingdom
that can work anywhere, in a country with a Christian heritage, or in a totally secular nation, or in a
Muslim country or a Jewish country, which was, after all, the kind of country where his kingdom was born
in the first place. “The man I follow, Jesus, a Jew from first century Galilee, was involved in a culture
war in his day, as well -- [and he lost it]. He went up against a rather rigid religious establishment,
and he went up against a pagan empire. But his response to them was not to fight. His response to them
was to give his life. And in fact among the last words he spoke on earth were these: ‘Father, forgive
them, for they don’t know what they’re doing. That’s a lesson we can learn from Jesus about fighting a
culture war.
“...Another thing I learned from Jesus in doing this book,” adds Yancey, “is [that Jesus is not
the church and] that Jesus saves my faith. I’ll be honest with you, my back is against the wall when
somebody asks me, ‘Okay Philip, why do you stay a Christian?’ [My answer] is simply Jesus.... The
questions I tend to struggle with, the questions I write books about, take on a different light when I
bring them to Jesus. In fact, Jesus has become for me something like a magnifying glass for my faith.
“I’ve got one of those Oxford English Dictionaries at home that’s been shrunken down -- nine
pages shrunken into one page. And it takes this huge magnifying glass for me to even read the words on
the page. I notice when I look in that magnifying glass that the words right in the center are in very
sharp focus. I can read them easily, but out in the margins things get kind of fuzzy. That’s the way
I’ve found that my faith has become. I’ve found that I spend a lot of time out in the margins, and what I
need to do is start bringing those [fuzzy] questions into the center, where it’s sharp and in focus.”
Then Yancey goes on to talk about how all those questions in the fuzzy margins, those questions
out on the margins of what life and church are all about -- questions like what does the creed mean, and
questions like whether pastors should wear vestments or not, and whether women should be priests, and
which prayer book we should use, and who should be a bishop and who shouldn’t be a bishop -- all those
marginal questions about which we can at best have only fuzzy answers because of our fuzzy vision, all
those are put into perspective and brought into focus by Jesus on the Cross, where he died for love of all
of us and for the world. “Now,” says Yancey, instead of worrying out there on the fuzzy, marginal areas
about questions that I will probably always have, and questions that you may have, “I try to take those
very questions and bring them to what is clear in the Gospel. What is clear, of course, is Jesus.” And
especially Jesus before Pilate, and on the Cross.
Part of the truth is that we worry too much about what we think about God, as if it’s all about
us: Am I right? Are my beliefs about God correct? How am I to understand how God can be one God but
three persons? How, exactly, did God create the world? Who does God not want to be a bishop? Part of
the truth is that most of our theologizing, most of our own talk about what God wants or thinks -- which
is really only what we think God wants or thinks -- is simply beside the point when we examine it
through the magnifying lens of the Cross and the focus which the Cross provides. For the truth is that
what is much more important than what we think about God is what God thinks of us!
"So you are a king, then?" asked Pilate. "Yes, I am a king," answered Jesus. "I was born for
this." With these words, Jesus speaks not only the truth about himself, but also the truth about you and
me. For we, too, are born to kingship, created for it in the beginning and redeemed for it by Christ
through his witness before Pilate.
Kingship -- royalty, sovereignty -- is nothing other than genuine authority. Kingship is the
freedom to be oneself, the freedom to act as you truly wish to act, the freedom to love. Kingship is
about who is in charge, about who is free to act on his own without being beholden to someone else.
Who is king in Jesus' dialogue with Pilate? Who is in charge in that exchange? Who is the one
who is really free, the one with the power?
It's not Pilate. Pilate wants so much to let Jesus go, wants so much to send him home, because
Pilate knows, deep down, what the truth is. The truth is that Jesus is no threat to Caesar. But Pilate
can't act as he wants to act, because he is caught in a squeeze. He is captive to Caesar and to all the
others who want no trouble. And he knows that if he lets Jesus go, there will be trouble, because there
are too many in the mob and in the political and religious establishments who want Jesus dead.
The truth is that Pilate is bound, a captive. Pilate has to pay his debt to save himself. So
even though he knows that, in truth, Jesus is innocent of any punishable offense, Pilate sentences Jesus
to death and hands him over to the troops, and thereby reveals the truth about himself. He lets all the
world know which kingdom he is prince of.
"To make it perfectly clear, however, that he wanted no part in the dirty business, Pilate said,
'I am innocent of this man's blood.' And,” Frederick Buechner goes on to say, “in a dramatic gesture that
not even the dullest colonial clod among them could fail to understand, he stepped out in front of the
crowd and went through a ritual hand-washing in a basin of water....
"And in a sense he was right. Insofar as he'd done all he reasonably could to save the man --
even offering to let them crucify Barabbas instead, if it was just a show they were after -- Pilate was,
in a manner of speaking, innocent. The crucifixion took place against his advice and better judgment.
“In this connection,” adds Buechner, “you can't help thinking about that other famous hand-washer,
Lady Macbeth. Unlike Pilate, Lady Macbeth had committed murder herself, and what she was trying to wash
away in her sleep, long after her hands themselves were clean as a whistle, was her tormenting sense of
guilt over the terrible thing she had done....
“Pilate's case is different, and worse. For him, it was not so much the terrible thing he'd done
as the wonderful thing he'd proved incapable of doing. He could have stuck to his guns and resisted the
pressure and told the chief priests to go to hell.... He could have spared the man's life. Or, if that
is asking too much, he could have spared him at least the scourging and catcalls and the appalling way he
died. Or, if that is still asking too much, he could have spoken some word of comfort when there was
nobody else in the world with either the chance or the courage to speak it. He could have shaken his
hand. He could have said goodbye. He could have made some two-bit gesture which, even though it would
have made no ultimate difference, to him would have made all the difference.
“But he didn't do it. He didn't do it, and on that basis alone you can almost believe the sad old
legend is true -- that again and again Pilate's body rises to the surface of a mountain lake and goes
through the motion of washing its hands as he tries to cleanse himself not of something he'd done, for
which God could forgive him, but of something he might have done but hadn't, for which he could never
forgive himself.” (Peculiar Treasures, pp. 138-139)
Although Pilate was sitting in the judgment seat and Jesus was standing in the dock, it was,
really, Pilate who was on trial. Would he find for Jesus the way the law and the truth he knew directed?
Or would he, in his fear, ignore the truth who was standing before him and order the truth to be bound
over to be killed?
Who, under the circumstances, acted in accordance with his true self? Pilate? Or Jesus? Who,
under the circumstances, had power over himself? Who had genuine authority? Who was free to act, to live
and to die, as he really wanted to?
As it happened, Pilate, a prince of this world was captive to fear, captive to his fear of the
truth and captive to his fear of the mobs. And in an attempt to free himself from their threat, Pilate
had Jesus bound over. But Jesus, bound over to the troops and soon afterwards bound even more to the
Cross with nails, even under these circumstances it is Jesus who is free, and it is Jesus who frees Pilate
and us.
"Father, forgive them," he whispers from the Cross. “Father, set them free. Let them go. Unbind
them. Let it be. Release Pilate and all who live with Pilate's fear.”
Rabbi Stanley Wagner of Denver says that, for a Jew, the meaning of loving God with all your
strength is to be willing to share what you have with those in need and to love God no matter what God
metes out to you, to love God no matter the circumstances.
Jesus is king of his circumstances. Even with his body bound to the Cross and crowned with
piercing thorns, even then his heart and his person are free. His love and his heart permit him to unbind
those who would bind him. Even at that point on the Cross, about to be bound further by the bonds of
death, Jesus' love allows him to forgive, allows him to free those who were responsible for nailing him
there, even those who knew that the truth was that he was innocent but who were bound to their fear.
Those of us old enough to remember the assassination of President Kennedy are old enough to
remember the freedom riders of the ‘60s who would ride from town to town in the South challenging
segregation laws? And Tom Long tells about a group whose bus was stopped by police and who were arrested
and thrown in jail. Their jailers did everything possible to make the prisoners miserable and to break
their spirits. They deprived them of sleep with noise and lights during the nights. They oversalted
their food to make it distasteful. Then they began to take away their mattresses, one by one, hoping to
create conflict among the group over the remaining mattresses.
At first the scheme worked. Morale began to sag. Then one day, while looking around at his
dispirited fellow prisoners, one member of the group began to sing a Gospel song. Others slowly joined in
until the whole group was singing at the top of their voices, and the puzzled jailers felt the cell block
vibrate with the joyful sound.
When the jailers went to see what was happening, the prisoners pushed their remaining mattresses
through the cell bars in triumph, and said, “Here. You can take our mattresses, but you can’t have our
souls.”
Who was victorious? It was the prisoners in jail who prevailed, and it was the broken and rotten
world of the jailers and of all the Pontius Pilates of history that was perishing. Even behind bars, the
freedom riders were kings of their circumstances because they were kings of their fears and kings of
love.
And that's the truth. That's the truth that is not of this world. That's the truth of the
kingdom Jesus is king of, the truth that love is more powerful than all the threats of the crowds and all
the troops of Caesar. And that's the kingdom we're invited by Christ to join him in -- right now, right
here today -- the kingdom where the truth is that even when all the powers of this world have done their
worst one still has power over his own heart and his person. The truth that Jesus bears witness to before
Pilate is that if you and I wish to love those who have not acted in love toward us, we are free to do so,
regardless of circumstance. And the truth is that Jesus did, and God does. Because God thinks highly of
us, which is much more important than what we think about God.
God's love is the perfection of truth. It’s not that truth is unimportant, but what the truth is,
is that God's love in Jesus on the Cross is the purpose and end of truth. God’s love in Jesus on the
Cross trumps all other truth, even the truth of being right. It is the truth of Christ the
King.
We see the purpose of truth most vividly, not by Jesus standing on his righteousness, but in Jesus
crowned with thorns. We feel its power not by Jesus demanding what is right; we feels its power when he
whispers the kingly word, “Father, I love them. So forgive them.”
And by that truth, we are changed, freed.
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |