Wholesome Goodness Pwned by Christ the King

Alright, I'll fess up. Jesus gave me a whuppin this time. I think I spent more time on this sermon than any other that I've ever preached. I rewrote it three times, got two people to proofread it, I even added some things in when I was up a-preachin, and still, it felt subpar to me. My thoughts: Christ the King Sunday was only an idea in 1925, which makes it way too contemporary for the church(read: BS reasoning which just vents frustration). Allow me to preach at you:

John 18:33-37 Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, "Are you the King of the Jews?" 34 Jesus answered, "Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?" 35 Pilate replied, "I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?" 36 Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here." 37 Pilate asked him, "So you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."

There’s a part of this reading that I get a little hung up on. Jesus replies to Pilate in his witty manner that if his kingdom were from this world, then his subjects would be fighting to keep him from being arrested. At the beginning of this chapter, you may recall, Peter grabs a sword and strikes the ear of the High Priest’s servant. Peter, from all accounts that I can gather, is a follower of Jesus and is trying to keep him from being arrested, so why, Jesus? Did you forget in the process of about 25 verses that Peter, a good disciple, was willing to do all that he could in order to save you from being arrested? Is Peter not one of your subjects?

In a humorous parody of the Terminator movies, the comedians at Mad TV made a poke that I think makes a serious point. The character pretending to be this futuristic machine made to look like a human travels back in time, to the first century, in order to protect Jesus. At the last supper, this machine takes out his shotgun and blasts Judas, so that he can’t betray Jesus. Jesus walks over to Judas and gives him a defibrillator-like shock and brings him back to life, and the terminator promptly pulls out his shotgun again and stops Judas. “Dang it!” Jesus yells, “Stop doing that! Don’t you see, this is necessary!” It may sound kind of funny, but I always thought that if I could go back in time, that’s exactly what I would want to do, and you might think this too. I would want to stop Jesus from dying, just like the fake terminator, just like Peter.

In the exchange between Jesus and Pilate we get an idea of the problem with the definition of Jesus as a king. Pilate is asking Jesus whether he is the King of the Jews, and if he is in fact the King of the Jews, why have his people dethroned him. We do a great disservice to ourselves and Christ as a whole here if we limit Pilate’s question to this small group of individuals in the first century. Certainly Pilate has this thought on his mind, though. Why are your people rebelling against you? How about that, why are your people rebelling against you? If that doesn’t make you shift in your seat a little bit, let me make sure that you understand who Jesus’ people are. We are the ones who have taken on the name of Christian. We are Jesus’ followers. We are the subjects of Jesus’ kingdom. Why are we rebelling against Jesus? What did we do to stop him from being arrested?

It would be fitting for a band of rebels to try and storm Pilate’s palace and try and rescue their king. That’s what Pilate would expect, and I think that’s what we would expect if we were captured. But that’s precisely the text on which I get hung up. If my kingdom were from here, that’s exactly what would happen. All of my subjects would come tearing down these walls and prevent me from being crucified, but that’s not how we do things in my kingdom. Preposterous! A nation that would not die trying to save its king?!?!

The temptation has always been in the church to leave Jesus to be king of Sundays. To let Jesus rule when all is happy and well, and say that when things are going poorly that things are tainted by humans, or by Satan. Let Jesus govern your lives for a few hours on a Sunday morning so that you can feel ok for a while, before heading back in to work the next day. Christ the King Sunday is meant to flip that around, to get us focused on the fact that God not only has a say in our life after death, but also in the way we relate to one another and the way we go about our business on this earth.

What I find remarkable in this story is that everything is part of the plan. The beating, the trial, the persecution, the rebellion, the worst that humanity can offer is all part of the plan for redemption. Is it so far of a stretch to imagine, then, that the plan for the kingdom is still in place today? I think it’s easier for some to imagine than others. After all, it’s easier when you are the CEO of a company to say that God has planned this all out, than to sit at the bedside of someone dying and say that the kingdom is here. But I think Jesus as King is an example of the latter situation. That Christ, laid aside his crown of glory and honor, and left his seat which sat perched above the world, and dove into it, picking up the crown of thorns, and becoming a new example of Christ the King. One that travels with us every step of our lives and not just on Sundays.

This exchange between Jesus and Pilate reminds me that God is in control. Everything seems completely out of whack, and despite my desires to try and find a way to rectify the wrong that has happened, to prevent Jesus from being arrested and killed, what I’m really doing is trying to take control, and tell God the way that I want things to be.

Jesus lets Pilate know that he came to bear the truth, and the truth is this, professing the love of God for all of creation. St. Augustine reminds us that Jesus did not say that his kingdom was not here, but that his kingdom was not from here. What that really means is that when Jesus humbled himself unto death on the cross, he became King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and not a King that would reign from a seat distant from his kingdom, but one that would be right in the middle of all the dirt and mud that happens to his people.

Christ is King of the good and bad in our lives. The temptation is to just let Christ be King on Sundays, when everything’s nice, but if we can get ourselves out of the way, and put our ideas of what the kingdom of God should be like aside, then we can realize that Jesus is King and in control of all that we do and all that we have and all that we are.