Trying to make Christ into a king, we misunderstand the nature of power and its purpose. Especially our foolish attempts to wield it for good.
The problem is power
Proper 29C
Luke 23:33-43
Here we are, at the end of the church year; the Last Sunday After Pentecost. Next week will be the first Sunday in Advent, kicking off Year A with the gospel of Matthew. So this is the last we get of Luke for awhile. Which is a shame. I love this gospel.
And we’re ending this church year with Jesus hanging from the cross between two other dissidents. It is, after all, what we might call “a down ending.”
But to get behind this a little bit, we need to remember a few things about what brought us here. How Jesus got on that cross, for starters. But almost more importantly, why. And what that means.
Last Week
Last week we were at the Temple. Jesus spent days tearing up the Temple when he predicts it’s demise.
In the ensuing chapter and a half, Jesus calls his followers together to eat the Passover dinner; to remember their people’s history and share food together. He told them to eat and remember, everything.
Then Jesus is betrayed, he prays in the Garden and is then arrested. The officers beat him. They bring him before the Council who convict him without confession. They hand him over to Rome to die, but he isn’t guilty of a Roman crime, either. Pilate sends him to Herod, Rome’s puppet king in Israel. Nothing but a united front with Rome.
Back in Pilate’s hands, the Temple authorities demand Jesus’s death. To keep the peace, Pilate condemns him to execution by crucifixion.
Jesus is sentenced to hang on a cross until he dies. A punishment used by Rome exclusively for revolutionaries and terrorists as a show of violent power and dominance.
That’s how Jesus got onto that cross. Now the why.
The Cross
There’s a bit of a problem in each of the narratives around Jesus’s execution. Two problems, actually. One is how unlikely it would be that Jewish authorities would be so keen to get Rome to use it. Not only is it a stretch on their end, but it minimizes Rome’s part in an entirely Roman execution.
And the second problem is that crucifixion was a Roman propaganda tool. They used it to prevent rebellion by publicly killing rebels. They had other ways of killing the rest.
So, it is far more likely that Rome killed Jesus because they thought he was a threat. Perhaps because he was threatening “the peace.” But let us firmly and consistently say that “the Jews” did not kill Jesus.
This detail, while significant, does not actually change why Jesus is on the cross much at all.
He’s there because the Temple authorities, the Council, Herod, and Pilate saw Jesus as an existential threat to their shared power and authority in the region.
Powerful men killed Jesus to maintain their power.
Now, for us to understand what this actually means, we have to recognize the twist.
The Twist
The story’s twist in Luke is that Jesus is thoroughly innocent of all the charges. He never confesses, there is no evidence, direct or circumstantial. And the testimonies are false.
The arresting officers beat an innocent man.
A religious council convicts an innocent man.
The king hands over an innocent man to Rome.
A Roman leader condemns an innocent man.
Then Rome executes an innocent man.
Now, a skilled prosecutor could look at the other gospels of Matthew and Mark and make from them a case for a confession of heresy in a religious court. And in the gospel of John, he totally goes Yeah, that’s me. Of course, nowhere is Jesus guilty of Roman law.
But in Luke’s telling, Jesus is innocent across the board.
So when we get to the end of the Passion, we have an innocent man dying on a cross between two terrorists. Two men who have certainly threatened the authority of Rome. An act Jewish revolutionaries tried many, many times to gain independence from Rome.
For many years freedom fighters sought to dislodge the cruel dictatorship which constantly imposed violence and brutality upon the people. In the years after this, several different leaders will rise to start armed revolts. Finally, in the mid 60s CE, a mass revolt in Jerusalem wins a moment’s sense of pride before the swift boot of empire murders and destroys much of Jerusalem.
Revolution
An innocent man hangs between two men who envision freedom. And one of them mocks Jesus. What revolution is this? I thought you were planning to free us all. But you can’t even free yourself!
It is not hard to imagine the taunts because we’ve heard the same in our own era.
How is love supposed to protect us?
What good is nonviolence against violence?
The only way to beat a violent dictator is with an even stronger iron fist.
So let’s fight fire with more fire.
And the other revolutionary jumps in
We used violence. And they’re punishing him when he didn’t. Dude, get your head on straight.
Then he appeals to Jesus for mercy. His asking to be remembered is like all those requests along the way. Have mercy on me, a sinner.
In the end, the violence of empire kills the violent and the peaceful alike. Because selfishness and cruelty is empire’s primary export. But of the two, it’s the love revolution that persists long after our deaths.
Kings
This story of power: of protecting and wanting it: is a human conflict. What frightened Rome and the religious authorities so much was that Jesus didn’t seem to want power, but he was amassing incredible authority among the people at their expense. Humans were fighting over a power Jesus didn’t even want.
And to put a finer point on, Jesus rejected power. When Satan tempted him with it, he rejected it. When Peter tried to give him power and safety from power, he rejected it.
The powerful thrive on the game of power. It’s why so many are attracted to a survival-of-the-fittest mentality. Because the powerful only want to compete against others on an axis of power.
So what do they do when a prophet comes who wants to transform their power won through violence, brutality, and inhuman cruelty by shaming them for their evil and inviting them to turn their lives around and learn to love?
They kill him, of course.
They kill him because he’s trying to draw them out of the power axis and that threatens their dominance.
But what do we do when we see that? Do we except the Jesus message? Or do we take up the power axis and fight fire with greater fire?
The King Who Didn’t Want a Crown.
In 1925, Pope Pius XI declared that the Last Sunday After Pentecost would be called The Feast of Christ the King. So this identity for today is neither old nor Episcopal. But it persists.
Pius XI created the feast because he believed secularism reduced the power of the church and crippled its cultural supremacy.
My friend David Henson got right to the point this week:
It is a feast about power.
Not about love. Or sacrifice. Or servanthood. Or grace. Or mercy. Or justice.
It’s about power.
He’s the pope who said after all “if there is a totalitarian regime – in fact and by right – it is the regime of the church, because man belongs totally to the church.”
So, maybe it should not be called Christ the King Sunday, but Christ the Fascist Sunday.
Because that’s more in keeping with the spirit of its origins.
Pius XI played the role of the humans from The Lord of the Rings. He sought to seize the power on behalf of the church. An act which would suddenly put him at its top.
Jesus refused the crown, but humans are obsessed with crowning.
So don’t put the crown on his head.
The moral fallacy of putting the crown on Jesus’s head is that it puts our desire for a “good king” in place of God’s reminder that kings aren’t good.
The greater image for Jesus than King is the Innocent One. Not because he was incapable of sin, but because he stood apart and against this central axis of power.
He was innocent, not powerful or weak. Innocent of the violence of empire and rebellion. Innocent of using power or seeking to replace it.
Pius XI sought, not to put Jesus “in charge,” but the church. To make the pope a divine king; a desire hardly removed from American blue laws, for instance.
Imagine Past the Power
People ask why I reject Christ the King so much and I can say there is literally nothing less Christlike in the church today.
But in that way, it isn’t without use.
It reveals our sin and will to power. It demonstrates our own unwillingness to examine the desire in our hearts. And perhaps most importantly, it exposes our failure of imagination.
Why do we follow the part of all those people in the gospel who try to put a crown upon Christ’s head and he keeps evading it when we could follow his example instead. To tie a towel around our waists and wash each others’ feet. Or feed the hungry multitudes because they look like sheep without a shepherd. Or stand up to the brutality of empire and name it as sin.
For this Last Sunday After Pentecost, as we begin our holiday season, our great feasts of giving thanks, and making this darkening season bright, let us seek mercy, hope, and truly creative imagination. For in the lights which enlighten the coming season, we will not find power, but hope, generosity, and if we’re willing to share with each other, love. Like a bit of heaven on earth.