November 26th, 2006 Reign of Christ (Christ the King Sunday)

Today's gospel scene from Jesus' trial before Pilate seems strangely out of place, coming just before Advent, when we begin to look forward to his birth. But perhaps even more strange is the church calendar gives us just two days when the gospel reading is directly about the event of Jesus' crucifixion. The first is Good Friday and the second is today, the last Sunday of the church year where we celebrate the kingship of Christ.

The gospel lectionary gives preachers only 2 direct opportunities a year to directly preach on our uniquely Christian claim. Our claim that the cross is the focal point for what we know about who God is and what God does, and that it is through Jesus' atoning work on the cross we are adopted into the life of God.

Perhaps this is why in the church we've lost a sustained engagement with the passion story, and why Mel Gibson's movie was so popular—most Christians move directly from “Hosanna to the King” on Palm Sunday to Resurrection on Easter Sunday, skipping right over the passion and death of Jesus, so that in the words of Bishop Kenneth Leach:

Christianity goes disastrously and dangerously wrong when Jesus is worshipped, but not followed. We call out the name, “Lord, Lord”-- but do not follow what he said. His name appears on banners and stamps and placards, but it might as well be Elvis Presley or Donald Duck or Superman—for no notice is taken of Jesus' teachings or his demands. There is a devotion, a loyalty of a kind, but it is not to Jesus the person who lived, taught, healed, died and rose. It is to Jesus the mascot, a cultic idol. [And I would add here—Jesus the fire insurance policy.]

When this kind of distortion takes place, nothing remains of Jesus but his name or maybe an image of him. The crucifix is divested of its power and meaning and instead becomes an object of superstitious addiction when it is torn from its historical and the prophetic context of Jesus' life and ministry.”

Bishop Leach urges us who preach to imitate the apostle Paul and—preach Christ and him crucified.” For cross is the foundational statement of the Christian faith and all Christian theology

For Jews demand signs, and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified—a stumbling block to Jews (for scripture tells them cursed is any man who hangs from a tree) and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

From the very beginning Christians have wrestled with how does the violent and humiliating death of Jesus Christ show the power and wisdom of God?

Thousands of people were crucified while Judea was a Roman province. Next to the gospels, the most extensive account we have about Roman crucifixions comes from the Jewish historian Josephus who in his eyewitness account of the siege of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. tells us that hundreds of Jews were scourged and subject to torture of every description and then crucified opposite the city walls. The Roman authorities hoped that the spectacle might persuade the Jews inside the city walls to surrender in fear that continued resistance would result in a similar fate. Josephus tells us that the Roman commander permitted his soldiers to amuse themselves by nailing their prisoners in different positions. Death was slow and excruciatingly painful, and usually came as gravity did its work and the victim suffocated. Crucifixion was a public punishment designed to serve as a warning not to challenge Roman rule. Rome kept its power in the world by military might—using when necessary intimidation and violence against all who threatened its reign, its power and control over world affairs.

In today's gospel reading, Jesus tells Pilate his kingship is based on a different kind of power. “My kingdom is not from this world” This world where power is understood as the ability to control, the ability to get our way through violence and coercion—to do to others before they do to us.

Conventional wisdom and the ways of this world tell us that Jesus' crucifixion marks the end of a failed crusade. Paul is right. It was foolish by the world's standards. Jesus' life and death makes absolutely no sense by worldly standards then or now—his reaching out and accepting social outcasts, his harsh criticism of the rich and religiously devout; his extreme demands to sell all your possessions, let the dead bury the dead, lose your life for my sake, all culminating in his debasing public execution as a trouble maker. Jesus manifests the foolishness of God.

In the words of Deitrich Bonhoffer “God lets himself be pushed out of the world on a cross”—not a kingly act by the world's standards. Our culture tells us that suffering is a sign of weakness, that letting yourself be pushed around, pushed out, is a sign of weakness. In a world that tempts us to view God's kingship like we view historical earthly kings—all powerful, in charge of everything and thus able to control everything that happens, the Christian gospel begins its understanding of God and God's kingship from a very different place. To read the biblical narrative is to encounter a God who is first of all, love. And love involves a willingness to put one's self at risk, vulnerable even to great suffering, all for the sake of love.

Our uniquely Christian claim is God's self-revelation is Jesus Christ, a human being who “in the words of the prophet Isaiah: “was despised and rejected by others, a man of suffering and acquainted with grief.” Bishop Kenneth Leach writes again: Christ was broken and crushed, and yet it is when we are broken and crushed that we know him. Christ was a failure, and it is in the midst of our failure that we know him, not as another failure but as a source of life and power. God's kingly power is acting out of love and risking suffering for that love. Many people have said that without their faith in Christ crucified, life would be meaningless, its cruelty and suffering inexplicable and unbearable. That is why so often the cross speaks to people and inspires people, comforts and transforms them, saves them from despair and hopelessness.

Now please don't misunderstand me I am not saying we should resign ourselves to pain or suffering or that we should endure the pain of what we can escape. Rather what I am saying is that we know Jesus as God who has been there and done that. Jesus was killed by being mutilated on the cross, he was lied about, tortured, mocked, paraded before jeering crowds, and forsaken by friends, who fled in fear. Jesus has known abandonment, physical and mental anguish, failure, and when we find ourselves in our deepest places of brokenness and despair there is comfort that God has felt what we are feeling. God has actually experienced what we are experiencing! God is not like the earthly powers of Pilate and the Roman Empire . God is not an earthly king removed and detached from the everyday cares and concerns of God's subjects. God doesn't know about our suffering on some kind of abstract far removed intellectual level, rather God is intimately present to us and with us, whether we feel it or not.

Jesus' passion means Jesus suffered in his humanity, and the memory of that suffering (and all his earthly suffering) is embedded in God. And God as a suffering parent is also part of who God is.

The idea that God might permit suffering, but at the same time remain unaffected by it, is impossible because being unaffected is incompatible with the experience and the understanding of love and being in relation with one another. Suffering is the flip side of love. You cannot love without opening yourself to vulnerability, risking, being willing to suffer out of that love . To love at all, C.S. Lewis once wrote, is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.” Because God loves us God suffers with us, not in a powerless way, but in a powerful way that strengthens and supports us when we suffer. God suffers and loves not from a deficiency in being not out of weakness, instead God's suffering in solidarity with us comes from the superabundance and overflowing of God's essence as holy love. In our suffering, God is intimately present, sweating and pushing to bring forth transforming possibilities, life out of death—resurrection-- from our suffering. The promise of God that I claim and that I live my life, is that God is with me through each and every step of life, through the pain through the suffering, through the joy and the celebration. God is trustworthy in God's abiding love. That my brothers and sisters is true kingly power. Kingly power that saves.