'Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” 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?” 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.” 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.”'
--John 18: 33-37
One lasting image of kingship for me is Arthur, King of the Britons, giving his credentials to man named Dennis and an unnamed, poor woman – who, it should be noted, didn’t vote for him. Arthur recounts the story of how the Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest, shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by Divine right that he, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. “That,” Arthur tells them, “is why I’m your king.” But Dennis sums the whole thing up best when he retorts, “Strange women lying in ponds, distributing swords, is no basis for a system of government! Arthur is having none of this political commentary, so he represses Dennis, and then rides away.
That scene in the early moments of Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a classic. Our system isn’t perfect, but at least we don’t rely on strange women distributing swords to declare who our leaders will be – though, maybe we should. We may not think much about what kingship or sovereignty mean because this is ‘Murica, and we literally fought a war not to have a king, but Christ the King Sunday, or, Reign of Christ Sunday, as it’s also called, comes around each year to invite us to do just that.
The Solemnity of Christ the King was established in 1925 by Pope Pius XI to be observed on the last Sunday of the liturgical calendar. The world was just seven years removed from the Great War, but fascism was on the rise, and in less than 15 years there would be a Second World War. In response to the growing popularity of authoritarianism, the pope wrote in his encyclical Quas Primas, that the faithful should gain strength and courage from the celebration of this new feast, as they were reminded that Christ must reign in their hearts, minds, wills, and bodies, and that the leaders and nations would see that they were bound to allegiance to Christ, not the state. It is Jesus alone who is our sovereign, and the one to whom all of our praise and adoration is directed because he is the only one worthy of any of it. More folks need to remember that right now, I suspect.
Curiously, the Gospel for this last Sunday of what we call Year B doesn’t feature Jesus in a very kingly position. Instead, he is face-to-face with Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, moments before his death. Why this story for this day? Perhaps because it illustrates how wrong we often are about what kingship, sovereignty, or power really look like. The regalia of the Roman governor? Or the rags of an itinerant preacher? The whole script is flipped on its heard.
So Jesus and Pilate engage in this beautifully Hellenistic battle of wits: Are you the King of the Jews? Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me? So you’re a king? You say that I am. What have you done? No answer. It’s brilliant. Jesus is no stranger to cross-examination, so he’s wise to not refer to himself as a king because that’s a political term, and if he’s a king – of the Jews, or anyone else – that’s treason because Caesar is king of, well, everything. His kingdom, then, isn’t a physical one – at least, not yet – it is in the mind and heart of the believer, where the mighty rich are sent away empty and the mighty are cast down, where the lowly are lifted up and the hungry are filled with good things; a kingdom that has, indeed, come near, but not in a way Pilate or anyone else would recognize. It’s a kingdom for those with eyes to see and ears to hear….the truth.
What is truth? That’s Pilate’s answer to that last line in our Gospel, and shame on the lectionary folks for cutting it out. What is truth has been at the heart of every political debate and every family argument for at least the past eight years, but, honestly, we all know it goes way beyond that. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 reduced regulation, enabling the handful of corporations dominating the airwaves to expand their power further. The result was the end of local news outlets, and a consolidation of media that established the Big Six – six corporations major corporations from which all forms of media became outsourced. This led to a boom in big tech that can be directly connected to THESE little things and the ways that we drink from the firehose of social and mass media daily. Whatever we want to be true can be, through confirmation bias made possible by algorithms that tell us what we want before we even know we want it. You are your own Cassar with your own truths, what could be more American than that? What else could possibly matter?
This is where, I believe, it matters that on a day when we designate for the solemnity of Jesus’ reign as sovereign of all, we get this particular encounter. Because truth is not about the loneliness of one’s own existence, but the revelation Jesus presents about the nature of humanity and of our world, namely, that none of us is their own Caesar, the center of their own existence – the very “truths” that media of all sorts and conditions feed us today. The truth Jesus offers sets us free to discover God’s will in a future that is open to possibilities because it is a future rooted in community, rooted in unity, in the counterintuitive motion of downward mobility that openly mocks and shames when the modern Pilates tell us we should move in the opposite direction.
When we declare that Christ is King, or Christ is sovereign, we lay claim to his own downward mobility and we own being members of him, over any other group, clan, or tribe. Claiming Jesus as sovereign says that his truth – strength through vulnerability, justice through mercy, and power through weakness – is our truth, despite what the algorithms would have us believe. Two kingdoms stand face-to-face: to which one will we choose to belong?
One of my favorite folk singers is a fellow named Pierce Pettis, who has a song called Lions of the Coliseum from his now out-of-print album, Chase the Buffalo, released in 1992. It speaks brilliantly to our modern experience of information overload by those who’ve co-opted this Christianity thing we love. The lions are the ones on the satellite tv preaching from their lap of luxury; with politicians and millionaires, you won’t see Mother Theresa there; the lions rob the poor for pocket change, and whose hypocrisy has made the church a museum where cobwebs hand like a rosary inside a mausoleum, whose surfaces are clean and white, while inside rotted corpses lie; so they like to keep the lid on tight. In the final verse, Pierce sings: “there’s rebel graffiti on the walls inside the coliseum, down below in the catacombs the defiant ones are meeting; hiding in the underground, blood brothers and sisters pass the cup around; and they pay no heed to the roaring sound of the lions of the coliseum.” Jesus’ kingdom is here…head…and here….heart….and here…the people. Yes, it will come in physical form – we affirm that each week – but it’s already here. Hold on to that assurance and pay no heed to the roaring sound of the lions of the coliseum.
This is the scandal, the truth, of the Gospel; that if we are members of Jesus’ kingdom, we’re not members of any other; and if Jesus is king, then nobody else is. Empires fall, all terms of office and reigns of those in power end, but Jesus shall reign wherever the sun doth its successive journeys run, his kingdom stretches from shore to shore till moons shall wax and wane no more
