Christ the King

Twenty-Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Sunday, 24 November 2024

NOTES ON THE READINGS

2 Samuel 23:1-7

David lifts up the defining quality of the ideal king of Israel (“One who rules over people justly, ruling in the fear of God”). There can be no gainsaying of the ideal, or of its application to the messianic king who is to issue from David’s house. David is not on such firm ground, however, when he implies that he has exemplified this ideal, and that his descendants will do the same. This passage should be read in the light of Samuel’s warning (1 Sam 8:11-18) to the people of Israel about the predatory ways of kings. David’s treatment of Uriah bears out Samuel’s pessimism, but not his self-congratulation in this passage. And many of his descendants, from Solomon on down, are better described by Samuel’s warning than by the messianic ideal. The point is not to run David down, but to emphasize the depth of the Bible’s skepticism about earthly kings, a skepticism that extends even to Israel’s anointed monarchs.

Revelation 1:4b-8

John’s opening greeting lifts up four dimensions of Christ’s kingship that are the first importance for our understanding of the dialogue between Jesus and Pilate.
(1)    The eternity of the Son who is incarnate in Jesus
(2)    Jesus’s faithful witness to the truth
(3)    Jesus’s victory over death
(4)    The Son’s authority over the kings of the earth

Gospel: In this first dialogue between Jesus and Pilate, we see Pilate struggling unsuccessfully, as he will throughout his encounters with Jesus, to comprehend Jesus’s kingship. Pilate cannot see past the exploitative kingship of the Caesars, the source of his own subservient power. As Jesus will show later on (Jn 19:11) he has a crystal clear understanding of the relationship between his own kingship and that of Pilate’s employer. The source of Pilate’s strength—his fealty to a king who rules through violence and fear—is his greatest weakness: the religious authorities use that fealty (Jn 19:12) to maneuver Pilate into crucifying Jesus against his better judgment. Paradoxically, Jesus the prisoner is freer than his captor, because his kingdom is not of this world, and his power derives not from violence but from unwavering love of God, and fidelity to God’s saving purpose. The lethal violence of Roman rule cannot deter him from his mission to speak (indeed, to embody) the truth. Nor is the death that earthly kings can impose a match for the life-giving power of God’s love. (Local practice permitting, it would be worth adding 18:38a: see point 1 of the outline below.)

The later section of the passage encourages people to hold to their faith, and to love and care for each other. The believers are encouraged to keep meeting together, and not to stop as some had. Finally, right at the end of our passage we see a clear mention of the Second Coming, “the Day approaching”.

DRAFT SERMON/ SERMON OUTLINE

1.     A Clash of Dominions: John invites us to contemplate Jesus, bound and on his way to the Cross, with Pilate, invested with the coercive power of the Roman Empire. Throughout Pilate shows his inability to understand Jesus’s kingship, a kingship which consists in acceptance, for love of the world, of worldly weakness. Pilate’s understanding of kingship begins and ends with dominating power of the Caesars. Pilate’s concluding question (“What is truth?”) expresses his contempt, and his failure to recognize that he is faced with the One who is the way, the truth, and the life.

2.     Exploitative Dominion: Pilate is charged with the oversight of the extraction of wealth from the colonized peoples of Palestine, and the diversion of that wealth to the coffers of the Emperor. Though some worldly kings are better than others, the temptation of riches extracted from their subjects has proved impossible for many to resist. Even David, Israel’s paradigm of kingship, confirmed Samuel’s clear-eyed pessimism about the ways of kings.

3.     Self-emptying Dominion: Jesus comes before Pilate empowered by and for his mission to preach the truth of God’s redemptive love. Christ has a kingdom, but unlike the kingdom Pilate serves, Christ’s is not founded on violence. His royal status is founded on his unity with the Father (John 10:30). Precisely because he is eternally close to the Father, Jesus has refused Satan’s offer of worldly domination (Matthew 4:8-10). He lives into his divine power not by dominating but by emptying himself (Philippians 2:6-8) in loving service of God and God’s world.

4.     Our Dominion over the Earth: Since the Industrial Revolution, prosperous nations have misinterpreted the dominion God granted humankind (Genesis 1:26,28) as a license to extract resources recklessly from the earth, and from colonized nations. We have misused our God-give dominion by modeling it not on the self-emptying love of Christ the King, but on the self-serving domination of the Caesars. As the effects of climate change become ever more undeniable, we see that it is a matter of life and death for us to follow Christ’s example in our dominion over the natural world. Self-emptying dominion in the service of God’s Creation requires us to identify and root out, wherever possible, the ways of living that rest on exploitative dominion. And we must become conscious of, and actively resist, the socioeconomic structures and practices that ravage and exploit the earth.

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL

Hymn 494 in the Episcopal Church’s 1982 Hymnal (“Crown him with many crowns”) contains a good deal of the theology underlying this sermon outline. The final stanza, which addresses the members of the Church as “ye kings,” provides a useful bridge from the description of Christ’s kingship to our responsibility to exercise our royal authority as he exercises his: in loving, self-emptying service.