A Strange Sort of King (Luke 23:33-43; Reign of Christ - C; November 24, 2013)

A Strange Sort of King

Luke 23:33-43
Reign of Christ - C
November 24, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

What a strange sort of king this Jesus is!  The symbol of his office is not a crown or a scepter, but a brutal means of torture and execution!  This does not match any notion of ours of what it might mean to be a king.

Not that we know much of what it means to be a king.  The last king we saw around here was nobody special, at least not to look at him.  That doesn’t really fit in with our idea of what it means to be a king, either, if we think about it.

Diana, our three-year-old granddaughter, knows exactly what it means to be royalty.  It means dancing around her home wearing a princess dress.  And, of course, she wears a tiara, because, really what’s the good of being a princess if you can’t wear a tiara.  That’s what princesses do on her source for her ideas about being a princess, the television show Sophia the First. 

Of course, our modern kings and queens are quite different from their ancient counterparts and from the media-fueled fantasies of three-year-olds.  They reign, but do not rule, as the British say.  They are sort of like flags, only they can walk and talk.  They are symbols of their countries, roving representations with no real power.  Real power is invested in parliaments that are elected.  There are a few of the unlimited kind of kings still around but they are in places like Qatar and Swaziland, so we don’t really have any experience of them.  Absent any experience of our own we fill in the blanks in our imagination from the legends of King Arthur, the fabrications of the Walt Disney Company, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

We are inclined to view kings through a romantic filter.  A real king with real power—of the sort that the ancient world knew—would not be welcome.  As Dennis in The Holy Grail tells King Arthur who claims to rule by virtue of the sword Excalibur, given him by the Lady of the Lake, “…strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government…you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you.”  We might keep a king around for ceremonial occasions, but the real thing?  No, thank you!  We like our kings firmly controlled by constitutions.

But in the ancient world a king—with or without a sword thrown at him by a “watery tart”—was not bound by any constitution.  When it came to his power over his people, he answered to no one but his own conscience—if he had one—and from his decisions there was no appeal.  The only limit on a king’s power in the ancient Roman world was the emperor. 

It was because Jesus threatened the emperor’s power that Pontius Pilate murdered him.  He did it casually and almost without thought.  But he did not do it carelessly.  There was nothing careless about the arrangement of Jesus’ death.  Jesus was crucified, a form of execution reserved for non-Roman rebels and traitors.  The sign tacked up on his cross with its inscription, “This is the king of the Jews,” was deliberate.  The full weight of it doesn’t come across in English.  There was no word in Greek for emperor.  The emperor was known as basileus, “king.”  “This is the Emperor of the Jews” was an insult both to Jews and to Jesus.  Emperor of the Jews?  There is no Jewish empire and there is no Jewish emperor!  And that was precisely the point of Pilate’s sarcastic mockery.  Jesus’ claim is false and ridiculous.

So just what is Jesus doing there, being executed on a cross?  It is not as if he didn’t know this was coming.  Ever since his staged entrance into Jerusalem at Passover, the Jewish freedom festival, with all the traditional Jewish gestures of royalty, Jesus knew that the powers-that-be would have to react.  And he knew that they would react violently.  That’s how real kings react to threats to their power.  The first rule of power is that if you do not use your power to protect your power you will lose your power.  Everyone knows this.  The Jewish leaders know this and they scoff, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, God’s chosen one.”  The Roman soldiers agree, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”  So does one of the thieves, “Are you not the Messiah?  Save yourself and us!”  Messiahs and kings act to save themselves.  Everybody knows this.

And yet Jesus does not save himself.  In fact, he is strangely passive.  Earlier, when he and his disciples were going out to the Mount of Olives, he made sure that they had two swords among them, but when an unnamed disciple used one of the swords, Jesus rebuked him and healed the victim of his disciple’s violence by restoring the ear that had been cut off.  Jesus refused to use the weapons that he had to resist those who came to arrest him.

Jesus is supposed to be this dangerous revolutionary, but he doesn’t look or act very dangerous.  At every turn Jesus refused to oppose Roman force with force of his own.  He did, in the words of one of the criminals crucified with him, nothing wrong.  But he was executed anyway. 

The Romans were a violent and brutal regime, but they claimed to be doing justice.  They claimed to be doing only what they had to do to keep order and establish peace.  Like every bully in history, they blamed their victims.  When Jesus goaded them into a violent reaction without himself giving in to violence, he unmasked the Roman regime.  He stripped away their pretensions to be doing justice.  The Romans were not interested in justice; they were interested in power.  They had no divine claim to rule the world.  They didn’t rule the world by right.  They were just bigger and meaner than their neighbors and willing to bully them into obedience.

Here is the double irony of the cross.  While it appears that Jesus is at the mercy of the Romans, in fact they fail to make him play their game.  They can strip away his garments, but they cannot strip him of his integrity.  They can kill him, but they cannot force him to give up his humanity.  The crucifixion was supposed to be a demonstration of Jesus’ weakness, hence the irony of labeling as the Jewish emperor.  The double irony is that, instead, the cross became a demonstration of Roman weakness and of the illegitimacy of the Roman emperor.

If Jesus had opposed Roman violence with violence of his own, the Romans could simply have said, as they said so many times about rebels and thieves, “You see, we are simply protecting the public good, establishing and maintaining order.”  But when they use violence to silence awkward questions and dissenting voices, they show how threatened they are.  Once Jesus decided to commit himself utterly to the Reign of God, Pilate could no longer control him.  From that moment on, Jesus reigns and rules, even if his throne is the ancient equivalent of an electric chair.

Jesus has a different idea about power than Pilate.  “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them,” Jesus told his disciples, “and those in authority over them are called benefactors.  But not so with you; rather the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves.” 

Jesus has a different idea about power and that is because he has a different idea about God.  Pilate is expecting God to act like a king.  Pilate is expecting a bigger version of himself.  Pilate is expecting to find God in halls of power, in the Roman forum, in the Oval Office, in the Kremlin.  But that’s not where God chooses to be. 

God is not the one who stands behind kings and keeps them in power.  The reign of God isn’t coming with invading armies or a coup d’état.  The reign of God will not come by a decision of the Council of Bishops. 

God chooses to be with the one on the cross.  And the one on the cross chooses to be with his society’s outcasts, misfits and rejects.  God’s power is at loose in the world in the least likely places and among the least likely people.  On the festival of the Reign of Christ we remember the king whose throne is a cross and who takes the side of the weak, the king who turns kingship upside down.

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