THE LAST SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
The Feast of Christ the King
Daniel 7:9-14
Revelation 1:1-8
John 18:33-37
Year B/ Proper 29
Apparently this past week has
been one of the bloodiest in
Yogi Berra once said “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re
likely to wind up someplace else”. Thus, the question of “Who’s in charge?”; in the world, in the church, and in your life journey, is
the deepest of questions for all of us.
In the Book of Daniel and the
Book of Revelation, in glorious imagery we are told that God and God’s own
Anointed One is the Alpha and Omega, the Lord of Lords and King of Kings. Well,
thank heavens! Now we know who’s in charge. Now we can call back all our troops
and fold up our legal systems and leave the doors unlocked at night. But then
we come to the gospel reading.
Today, the Feast of Christ
the King, is half a year removed from Holy Week. Yet we
are presented with Jesus standing before Pilate. In the dark of the night Jesus
had been bound and taken to the Jewish high priests for questioning. As dawn
broke he was taken to the Praetorium, the headquarters of the Roman occupation
forces for interrogation. According to John it was the day before Passover. It
was expedient that Jesus be put to death quickly. They didn’t want all this
messy business to interfere with their observance of
Passover!
The chief priests had charged
him with blasphemy, but Pilate had no interest in these religious squabbles. It
was the political issue of power that was his interest. The chief priests said
Jesus had claimed to be a King and no one dare question the authority of Caesar
and expect to keep breathing for very long. Standing there bloody, bruised and
swollen, Pilate could see that Jesus posed no threat to
For Pilate truth was bound up
in the facts that the strong ruled the weak, the powerful judged the actions of
the powerless. All this Pilate knew to be ‘true’. But perhaps even Pilate,
secure in the knowledge that he was safely on the side of power, was plagued by
the possibility that there was a truth, a reality, beyond even that of the
It makes you wonder if Pilate
ever lay awake in the middle of the night haunted by it all. Did he ever dream
of Jesus and this conversation about truth? Dreams play a prominent role in
scripture. Daniel was haunted by his dream of four beasts, symbolizing the four
pagan empires of the times. Even John mentions Daniel’s dream. We know about
dreams and nightmares and fantasies. You don’t have to be five years old to
know that your bed can become a scary place in the middle of the night; what
with all the questions we so skillfully ignore in the busyness of broad
daylight.
In the 13th
century, a wealthy and arrogant young man had his life so transformed by the
power of God that he literally begged Pope Innocent III for permission to start
a new religious order. But the Pope utterly refused, saying there would be no
more discussion of any new order. But one night the Pope had a deeply
disturbing dream. He saw the entire church beginning to fall over and there in
his dream the church was propped up by the young man from
Kingdom dreams are not
nightmares or fantasies. They are the in breaking of the Holy Spirit asking us
what is true for us. The answer to the question about what is true and who we
are willing to trust with our very life is the ultimate question for all of us;
whether we are at the end of our life or somewhere in between. I think we are
often well aware of that, but we’re frightened to trust this God. If Jesus is
the Anointed One of God, just look what happened to him!
The earliest images of the
crucifixion were very formal, showing Christ as King fully clothed, often in
priestly garments, with a crown upon his head, his eyes wide open and at peace.
His body does not writhe in agony, hanging from the cross as much as it seems
to float in front of it, seemingly disconnected from it.
While this probably doesn’t
strike you as unusual, it should. The disciples had grown very familiar with
Jesus. They lived in intimate surroundings with him. When they traveled with
him there was nothing that would not be known or shared. The disciples saw him
weary. They saw him frustrated. They saw him in joy and in despair. Yet, in
spite of that intimate relationship with him, they ultimately fell to their
knees before him and acknowledged him as the Cosmic Christ – the Anointed One
whom they saw, not as God’s messenger, but as God’s message! What brought about
this phenomenal change was nothing less than the shattering experience of the
resurrection. They had seen hints of it before; on the mountain top, in the
storm at sea, but nothing prepared them for the Easter event.
It was only later gothic
artists who portrayed Jesus beaten to a bloody pulp; the Jesus who hangs naked
up on the cross in untold agony, hanging by flesh and bone until his last
breath was finally squeezed out of him. Two images and two distinct pictures –
and both bear the truth. The resurrection affirms, not only that ultimately God
is in charge, but that God is not aloof and removed from our situations; that
God entered this world and all it’s suffering to show us how deeply we are
loved and that the power of that Love will have the last word.
There is a poignant story about
a group of bird watchers who saw a very rare bird’s nest precariously jutting
out from the side of a cliff. The group asked a little boy with them if he
would be willing to be tied to a rope and let down over the side of the cliff
to grasp the precious nest. He thought about it for a minute and then said, “Yes, as long as Daddy holds the rope”.
Every one of us understands what it means to trust someone that much. The
question is, are we willing to trust God that much?
Jesus said, “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens
to my voice”. For truth is about the
God’s kingdom is not a
circumscribed piece of real estate. Jesus did not stand before Pilate, nor does
he stand before us, to offer us better answers to social questions, religious
issues, or political problems. He came to trample death and to give light to
those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, every kind of death, every
situation that faces us. But it takes listening to his voice and trusting it more
than we fear anything else. For the power that enabled a powerless young Jew to
set the world on end is the very power that summons every one of us to
transform our lives. Those who are willing to loosen their grip on the world
enough to be ravished by this power will indeed find their lives upended, but
also transformed.
And when those moments come
in your life, part of the transformation means that you will cease to think of
Jesus as someone who is nice, comforting, or personally therapeutic. Those
moments put a stop to thinking of him as a religious symbol, a religious
resource, like a sophisticated rabbit’s foot. Those moments mean we will listen
and listening we will experience him as an indescribable and magnetic presence,
coming as he does from the God of all Creation, the God of our redemption. Then
and only then will we will come to know who is ultimately in charge. And when
that happens, the truth shall set us free.
AMEN
The Rev. Virginia L. Bennett,
D.Min.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church