NewCreation

Homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King, B

The Homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King. And this week we don't have Mark's Gospel; we have a chunk from John's Gospel. But in fact today's readings do follow on subtly from Mark's Gospel of last week. If you remember, one of the remarks which Jesus made as part of his simultaneous coming and going is: "You will see the Son of Man coming in clouds." And that was a reference to the passage of Daniel which we get today as our first reading, and which is then picked up again in our reading from the Apocalypse. In other words, the feast of Christ the King is bringing out the final dimensions of what Jesus was talking about last week, but we're going to look at how it's brought out in John's Gospel. So just remember: the coming of the Son of Man is represented in the book of Daniel as the royal rite of kingship already in heaven beginning to be enacted on earth by the one who is coming. Jesus is indicating that he is that one coming. In other words, that his kingship is going to be manifest here. And in the book of the Apocalypse we have the same: "has made us a line of kings and priests" — it is he who is coming on the clouds, everyone will see him, even those who pierced him. In other words, the same phenomena: the one who's being seen on clouds is the crucified one, and the clouds will be the clouds of incense, when once we understand that actually that was God's sacrifice to us and we're able to rejoice and receive it. So it's the same — we're being turned into kings and priests because of this. So those two texts, if you like, continue our reading of Mark's Gospel from last week. But what we actually are given as the Gospel for this week is this fantastically subtle and delicate chunk of St. John's Gospel in the discussion with Pilate. I'm going to give a little bit of deeper background later, but first let's just go through the text. So this is after an initial discussion with the Jewish authorities, the priests. Pilate enters the headquarters again and summons Jesus and says: "Are you the king of the Jews?" Jesus answered: "Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?" Okay, here's why this is not a stupid question. And just to give a little background to what's really going on here: I don't know whether you remember it, but when in John's Gospel Jesus comes into Jerusalem on Sunday, one of the things they sing about him is "Blessings on the king of Israel" — they don't refer to him as the king of the Jews, but the king of Israel. That's part of the welcoming in of the Davidic, the messianic priest-king figure. So it's the king of Israel that he's welcomed in as. and it's that that gets the authorities excited. Is this really the one? Should we really be taking this one seriously? In other words, that's where the fear comes from, because Israel, remember, at that time was the ancient promised people and the language of the fulfillment of the ancient promised people. Now how were the temple authorities to explain this to Pilate? Explain that they had to get rid of this guy because he was going to interfere with their attempt to introduce the Yehudite — those who had come back from Judah, from Babylon, who had originally come from Judah — the Yehudite reconstruction of the people of Israel into what we would now call Second Temple Judaism, that he was a threat to that. How are they going to explain that to Pilate? Why should Pilate understand any of this? Pilate, after all, was a provincial governor, a rather nasty piece of work as everybody knows, but why he should be an expert on ancient Israel and its self-understanding — probably not part of his job description. So they probably said to him, "Well, he's saying that he's really the king of the Jews." They've probably said that. Or they have tried to explain to him what they meant by king of Israel, and he is using it nastily against them. Either possibility is perfectly clear. We don't know who's trying to fool who here. Probably the two are fooling each other. So Pilate comes in and says, "Are you the king of the Jews?" And Jesus says, "Is that something you've come up with, or did others tell you about that? Was that the explanation they gave to you?" In other words, he knows perfectly well that the real issue is whether he's the king of Israel, which is the Lord. The Lord is the king of Israel; the only king of Israel is the Lord. And that if they have been selling it as the king of the Jews, then they're already downplaying themselves into a nation, a nation like the other nations, when Israel could not be a nation amongst the nations. That's the whole point of Israel. So Pilate says, "Listen, I'm not a Jew, really." He says, "I'm not a Jew, am I? Am I a Jew?" — meaning, really, do you think I understand this stuff? "Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me." In other words, Pilate understands the business of the Jews as he would understand every other nation. There is a nation called the Jews; they're one of the people who he has to govern, that's his business. He treats them as a nation. So when he's using the term "Jews" he's referring to them as if they were an ethnos, a nation, a form of — in the modern Hebrew understanding — in other words, already a very reduced understanding, rather than Israel. And then he says, which is a very reasonable thing for a ruler in charge of military and police discipline in a country to say, "What have you done?" In other words, when all comes down to… This discussion about Israel and Jews – that's not really my bailiwick. What have you done? What's the problem here? And of course there's no way of explaining what Jesus has done, or is about to do, without going into all that back history, which Pilate is not really going to understand. So Jesus says, "My kingdom" – or "my kingship," because it could refer to either the fact of an imaginary place, if you like, or the fact of the kind of power that he personally has; the same word produces both – "my kingdom" or "my kingship is not from this order." We usually translate it as "from this world," but that suggests that we mean something otherworldly, and there's something much more subtle going on: not of this order, not the present order of things. "If my kingship or my kingdom were from this order, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews." In other words, he regards the Jews handing him over to Pilate as part of the order of this world, and the high priest handing over as part of the order of this world, and his followers would have prevented that. Remember, those followers almost tried to prevent that, but he held them back, because it was quite important that the high priest handed him over, because essentially they were giving to Pilate the power to be high priest. We'll see that all of this is full of the irony which characterizes John's Gospel. So Pilate answered him, "So you are a king?" And it's not so much a question as it is a – you know, and I say "ah yes" – at least you know you're being clear: "You are a king." It's more or less an affirmation. "So you're saying that you really are a king, and I'm trying to understand this, you know." And Jesus said, "You say that I'm a king – that's your language. But for this I was born, and for this I came into the world: to testify to the truth." So he now begins to bring out something rather deeper than the ordinary use of king. Here he's talking about, if you like, the principle and rule of how everything works. He's come to bear witness to something which is true about humans and about the structuring of this order. There is the structuring of this order which throws people out, and which is order at the expense of the cast-out one; and there is the one who reveals that from within, the one who, in being cast out, tells the truth about the order of this world. That is the kingship, the principality, the revelation of the principle which governs everything, which he is about to reveal. "For this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." So this is harking back to the discourse he'd made a few chapters earlier about the sheep, and about how he was going to give his life for the sheep, and the sheep hear his voice. So he's bringing together two different understandings of a kingship. And it's worth our while just stopping and thinking about that on this feast, because the Feast of Christ the King is about the shepherd version of kingship: the one who is the good shepherd who looks after the sheep, which was one of the ancient terms for the king. It was a Davidic term. It was one of the ways in which it was understood that the king's job was to look after his flock and, if necessary, to suffer for them. And then there is the notion of king as scapegoat, which is curious to us unless we've read René Girard, but was very much alive in the ancient world — the notion that on certain occasions kings would self-sacrifice, or at least be thought to self-sacrifice, on behalf of their people. They would bear the sins of their people, they would be killed. And of course the Oedipus story is the story of a failed account of this. But there were many Middle Eastern peoples who understood perfectly well that occasionally you sacrifice a king, and this is how the king shows his love for his people — and in fact that probably means scapegoating a king and casting them out. Simon Simon says — written about how this practice has actually been practiced until quite recently amongst certain African groups, certain African tribes. So this is very much part of the ancient world. The link between the shepherd and the scapegoat would have been much more apparent to them in the role of the king than it is to us. But Jesus is saying it's more than that. "I'm going to be occupying this space to show how those two are the same thing, and I'm going to be revealing the lie that structures all of us into societies that are built on casting out. And those people who are at risk of being cast out, those people who are at risk of being sacrificed — they will understand my voice and they will follow me. They will hear me because they'll know what I'm doing; they'll understand that I'm speaking the truth." And of course that is what's going to happen in the scenes immediately after this chunk of the Gospel in St. John's Gospel. Pilate is going to bring Jesus out twice on different occasions, slightly differently dressed. He's going to bring him out as the two different scapegoats, the two different goats for the sacrifice: the one who is going to be the sacrifice for the Lord — that's the one who would be sacrificed at the Temple — and the one who is going to be sacrificed for Azazel, that's the one who's going to be driven outside the city. And of course, Jesus is in fact going to combine both of those roles, and be taken outside the city where the sacrifice of the Lord — that is, himself — and the sacrifice standing in for Azazel, also himself — he's going to be blamed. All the sins will fall upon him. All of that is going to be lived out in real time. So we are brought to the end of the Church's year with this extraordinary dynamic picture of how Jesus occupied the space of shepherd, and of king, of scapegoat, and of voice that speaks the truth, revealing not merely a different system of power, but that underneath all our apparently solid but in fact incredibly fake systems of power, there is an entirely different understanding of power: one that is immensely friendly to us, likes us, wants to hold us in being, wants to invite us in, wants to speak us out of our worlds of idolatry and confusion. And that that is how the kingship of Christ is exercised in our midst. And that we are invited each year to find our way into occupying that same space, and spreading that voice, listening to it, occupying its space, and making it more alive for all of those around us. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.