November 22, 2009 Des Moines

Christ the King Sunday

John 18:33-38

Born For This

According to the Christian calendar, today is the last Sunday of the year. I realize that the 3^rd Sunday of November doesn’t otherwise resound with any real note of finality, but there you have it. The annual retelling of God’s “Big Story” that begins with the impatient longing of Advent, and moves on into the birth and life and execution of Jesus, and finally through the gift of the Holy Spirit and the season of reflection on our own ministry under the power of it, finally reaches its climax today: on a Sunday that tradition has labeled “Christ the King” Sunday.

Put into the arc of that larger, still-unfolding story, it is a day set aside to overlook all the evidence of such a holy reign to the contrary and peek ahead to the ultimate fulfillment of God's intent. But more than just that, I can't help but believe that its more immediate value is prompting us to wonder how the promise of that fulfillment might influence the living of our lives even today.

Because let's face it: as I have hinted already, evidence to support the assertion that Christ is King hardly meets the eye. In fact, a casual observer might be forgiven for concluding that Christianity is on the decline.

· All over the country dwindling congregations are disbanding and leaving their church buildings to become restaurants and gift shops, marriage chapels and art galleries.

· Denominational offices are hemorrhaging staff members and programs as contributions dry up like a desert arroyo.

· “Christian” colleges are less and less distinguishable from “public” ones.

· “Christian” leaders betray themselves to be every bit as capable of duplicity, greed, corruption, hypocrisy and vindictiveness as anyone else.

· The voices of Christians in the public square are just as likely to be drowned out by adherents of other religions – or no religion – as they are to be heard, let alone valued.

Which is to say that this notion of the “kingship of Christ” remains more a matter of principled faith than observable fact. But even as a faith-claim assumed, I don't pick up any unanimity about what such a kingship might actually mean. Mandatory communion? Aramaic as a second language? Cheaper flights to Israel? Thorny crowns as haute couture? Jesus' face on the $1 bill? Just what are the implications of any such “rule” of Jesus?

Pilate, the Roman Governor in the story, had some of the same questions on his mind, albeit from a more proprietary point of view. He was obviously of the mind that Caesar – the guy who paid his salary – was king and quite understandably became a little nervous anytime there was so much as a hint that someone might be encroaching on that title. “So,” he asked this rather dusted up Jesus who had been rather rudely dragged before him, “are you a king?”

What follows is one of those comedic little interchanges that John seems to be so fond of – Jesus and his listeners talking past each other; using the same words to mean completely different things. Remember when Nicodemus, a Jewish leader, was told by Jesus that he needed to be born again? Nicodemus took him literally. “How is a person supposed to be born again? It isn’t physically possible. After all, we’ve grown since then, and would no longer fit.” To which Jesus responded, “I’m not talking about being born again, I’m talking about being born again!”

It happens several other times in John’s gospel, including here. Pilate asks, “Are you a king?” Jesus replies, “No, I’m not a king; I’m a king.” Back and forth it goes. Pilate, busy trying to save his job, while Jesus is busy trying to save the world. Finally – perhaps out of exasperation, or perhaps feeling some pity for Pilate – Jesus sets aside the “king” language and comes at the essence of it from a different angle: “I came to bear witness to the truth. This is the reason I was born – this is the reason I came into the world – to testify to the truth.”

Really? That isn't the way we typically hear explained the purpose of Jesus' coming – not that there has ever really been a consensus about that, either. Theologians through the centuries have scratched their heads in private and conversed in conclaves and debated vigorously from stumps about the reason Jesus came. They’ve talked about Jesus as a “substitute” and Jesus as a “sacrifice” and Jesus as a “mediator” and Jesus as a “ransom” and Jesus as the incarnation of God’s own self. Even Jesus, himself, used different ways of describing why he came. Talking to his disciples one day about his metaphorical “sheep,” he declared that “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” Back in that conversation with Nicodemus about being “born again,” and presumably talking about himself, Jesus noted that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

Now that's more like it – we are used to “salvation” talk. Sin and salvation: now those are words we know. We aren’t quite sure what to do with all this “truth” talk. “I was born to bear witness to the truth...”? What do you think that means – “bearing witness to the truth?” The truth about what?

As it turns out, Pilate had the same question, though it is usually translated to sound more like Plato or Descartes read in a college philosophy class: “What is truth?” But I suspect Pilate's interest was aiming at something a little less abstract: “What,” I think he was really asking, “is 'the truth' as you see it?”

Unfortunately, Jesus either deferred the question, or John chose not to report his answer. All we know is that the question is left dangling there between them like a grape becoming raisin. What “truth” did Jesus believe had become so forgotten or misunderstood that its witness warranted his coming among us – and presumably even his dying?

It’s ironic that that which Jesus spoke of so wondrously in his time has in our time become almost synonymous with that which we would just as soon not hear. Truth, to say it another way, has in many circles gotten a bad rap – “bad news” instead of “good.” Harry Truman alluded to that connotation in a 1956 interview printed in Look magazine: “I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.”

That whole “truth as hell” thing perhaps accounts for the old Slovenian proverb that counsels one to “Speak the truth, but leave immediately after.”

Economist Thomas Sowell, once with the U.S. Labor Department under President Kennedy and now a Senior Fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, once mused that “There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously.”

And journalist Herbert Agar, playing on Jesus’ own words, wryly observed that “The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.”

At one time or another I suppose that all of those may be – well – “true,” but does it necessarily hold that truth is always distasteful – that it always causes us to hold our nose? Is truth always sour and unpleasant – fingernail scratches on the blackboard that necessarily make us cringe? Didn’t Jesus, after all, characterize his message as “Good News”? Isn’t that what the word “gospel” finally means?

So what is this “good news” at the core of Jesus’ reign as King – this “truth” – to which Jesus came to bear witness? If the New Testament is any indication, then I think one of Jesus’ later disciples – another guy named John – summarized it pretty well in the first of his 3 three letters wedged in just before the book of Revelation: “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (1 John 4:16)

To be sure, God has been referred to in a lot of other ways – quite often in ways that have more to do with judgment and vengeance and eternal torment – but perhaps those confusions only confirm what Jesus was trying to clarify. After all, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth” (Vladimir Lenin). And God knows we have begun to believe a lot of nonsense just because it is endlessly repeated.

“That's why I was born,” Jesus said; “Precisely because of all these masquerading lies, I was born to bear witness to the truth.”

...the truth about who we are, and who God is, and what God finally values and desires:

That the only peace this world can know

Can only come from love.