King of Kingss

I love living in the twenty-first century. I will admit there are parts of the twentieth century I liked better, but all in all, it’s nice to live in this day and age when we have all this amazing technology. When I think of the things that have been invented just in my lifetime it boggles the mind. I find that many of the students I teach cannot imagine life before there were VCRs, microwave ovens, home computers, and even compact disks. You should see the looks on their faces when I tell them that when I was a child I had only seven TV stations. And they don’t really understand that there were no cars or airplanes during the civil war. I guess we are all the product of our times.

I remember a time when there were practically no homeless people. This was America. We didn’t have homeless, except for the few winos who lived on skid row who chose that life, or the hobos who rode the rails from one town to the other. To allow people to be homeless went against the American Way. This is why the homeless problem in our country offends me so. But I realize that for many of you, the homeless have always been around. They are just a part of the landscape, like ATM machines. Now I’m not reveling in the good old days. There were a lot of things pretty bad about the good old days. At least today, nobody would dare say anything openly racist or else the entire world might cave in on him or her.   Notice all that is happening with the Republican Party and the Obama administration.

And we are all a product of our time regarding our world leaders and governments. We live in a representative democracy. We can’t imagine living any other way. There is nobody in the world that does not live in some form of democracy. It’s true that there are a great many countries with some very, very restrictive laws and oppressive governments, but every country allows their people to vote in some way or another, although the elections may well be pre-determined (as those in Florida and Ohio were). And even if the elections are fixed, the pretense of the election must be followed, for in the world’s eyes, only a democratic form of government in some form is considered civilized. Even under Henry the VIII there was Parliament. The king couldn’t do whatever he wanted. He had to have the permission of the elected members of Parliament. This is how court intrigue was created. Politics have been around a long, long time.

But it wasn’t always so. It has only been since the signing of the Magna Carta back in 1215 (or 1225, depending on your point of view), that it was recognized that the people had any rights at all. Before that time, people lived under the sovereignty of the king. And the power of the king was total and complete. Whatever the king said was law, and the people had no rights of any kind. Let’s face it, under the ancient idea of kingship, all the subjects are basically slaves. Some are highly paid slaves, but still, they are slaves. And most of the time, the people didn’t mind. Having a king gave them a sense of security. He protected them. The king and his armies took care of roving bands of bandits. The king kept the invading Vikings, Goths, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Huns, Mongols, and various barbarian hordes away, with various degrees of success.

The king, in ancient times, was generally king because he was the strongest, or the wisest, or the best fighter. People trusted in their king (or queen, in many cases). A good king would share food with his people during the hard times. A good king might give money to a widow to support her and her family. A good king might arrange for great national celebrations. He or she might declare a holiday, and even the poorest of the poor, the lowliest citizen would feast and celebrate. Of course there were bad kings, too. But they didn’t usually last too long. There was no concept of personal liberty. You didn’t even think of doing what YOU wanted to do. Your place in life was pretty well spelled out. The king was, literally considered to be a god, in many instances. And before we look down on these people, we should remember that it was a king who gave us common law (Henry II) and the first laws (Hamurabi). If fact, the whole concept of democracy is that a whole bunch of people are smarter than one guy. Of course, we prefer living under a democracy and I wouldn’t have it any other way. We really have no concept of the ancient idea of a monarch. But this is not about the merits of a monarchy versus a democracy. It is, as it is every Sunday, about religion.

Today is the feast of Christ the King in the Roman Church. This is the last Sunday before Advent, the Christmas season, Black Friday notwithstanding. The ancient prophesies of the Messiah, the anointed one, stated that one day a king would come and restore the ancient kingdom of the Jews. According to Christian thought, Jesus is that king.

To make valid that claim, the New Testament tells us that he was a descendent of King David (of Goliath fame) through both Mary and through Joseph, and so of royal blood. Of course there is no way to verify this, and it doesn’t really matter if he was or wasn’t. The Romans killed him because the Jews testified that Jesus had claimed to be a king. He never actually did…exactly. He had always referred to himself as the “son of man”, which in those days, simply meant …a man, except that, in the context of Jesus’ words it carried with it the suggestion that he was the Messiah as foretold by the prophet, Daniel, who referred to the messiah as the “son of man”. This was very smart on Jesus’ part, because if questioned about calling himself the “son of man”, he could always argue that he simply meant he was a human. But when he was hauled before the high-priest Caiaphas, and asked if he was the son of God, he said that he was.

This was enough to convict him, and by saying that, he had indirectly (in the minds of the priests) admitted to being the messiah and a king, something, which would have appeared ludicrous and blasphemous to them. Blasphemy carried the death penalty. According to the story, however, the Jews were unable under Roman law to inflict capital punishment, so they took Jesus to the Romans. It seems unlikely that this would be true, though, since the penalty for blasphemy was to be stoned to death, and we had already seen one crowd try to stone a woman to death for adultery.  So I’m guessing they took Jesus to the Romans so Romans could do the dirty work because the priests knew that a lot of people would be pissed about the execution of Jesus.

Jesus was taken before the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate. Judea was pretty much the hellhole of the Roman Empire and if Pilate was there, it was because he had pissed off somebody. According to the Gospel According to John, “So Pilate went back into the praetorium and summoned Jesus and said to him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’

Jesus answered, “Do you say this on your own or have others told you about me?”

Pilate answered, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests handed you over to me. What have you done?”

Jesus answered, “My kingdom does not belong to this world. If my kingdom did belong to this world, my attendants would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not here.”

So Pilate said to him, “Then you are a king?”

Jesus answered, “You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

Eventually, as you all know, the Romans end up killing Jesus. But I think it’s important to point out that Jesus never claimed to be a king in the earthly sense of the word. But it should also be remembered that when Pilate asks Jesus if he is any kind of king at all, Jesus insists his only purpose was to testify to the truth. To this, Pilate will ask, “But what is truth?” But Jesus refuses to say anything else in his own defense.

Throughout the history of the Jewish people, God had been compared to an earthly king. The Hebrew blessing had been (and still is)”Blessed are you, Lord God, King of the Universe…” But it is important to keep in mind that this is only an analogy, and the Orthodox Jews and the Traditional Christians have always been very good at putting the “anal” in analogy. However, we make a big mistake when we confuse any analogy with reality. Life may be like a journey is some ways, but it is not a journey. It just is. And God was indeed, like a king in many ways, under the ancient idea of king, but S/He is not a king in any earthly way. In fact, when Jesus teaches his followers to pray, he instructs them to say “our father”, not “king”. Jesus changes this relationship between God and Humankind. We are not subjects to a king, we are now members of a family. And with the idea of God as a father, we have all now become brothers and sisters.

When the ancient church spoke of Jesus as a king, they were giving the people of that time a vision of Christ as someone who leads them, who protects them, who provides for them, someone who basically takes the place of an earthly king, and this worked fine in those days when people understood the concept of king, but it falls short today. We no longer see ourselves in service to a king. We see the government as the servant of the people. And Jesus’ words fall in perfectly with this idea of government. Jesus reminds us that we are all a part of that creative divine power and that we are all servants to one another, just as he considered himself a servant to us. Whoever wishes to be the greatest among us, must be a servant to all.

Jesus told us that we are all family, one big family. And as in any family, some of the members are kind of weird. But, hey, they’re family. This is the vision of God that Jesus shared with his followers.  The crown he would wear was a crown of thorns. This was the truth Jesus never told Pilate.  I hope Pilate eventually found his truth.