Christians have long called Jesus their king as a way of describing his place. The trouble is just how much that limits him.
Jesus isn’t limited to our imaginations
Proper 29B | John 18:33-37
Jesus is not a king.
Kings are humans. People who claim a title, sit in a seat of absolute power, and are served by people who have no power at all.
Humans have a pretty complicated relationship with kings. Anglicans especially. It is hard to denounce the kings of the world when most Anglicans throughout the world still pray for the English crown.
And let us not kid ourselves. We all have thoughts about kings, power, rulers of the world. We all have thoughts. And we believe in a God who commands – who gave us Jesus so that we might know the way of God better. So our thoughts, our beliefs, and our reasoning try to make sense of how divine authority compares with human authority.
Or, in other words, if kings are so terrible, why does God act like one?
The easy answer.
Well…because God is the only one. God is the good king. And God isn’t human.
But unlike Snickers, none of this satisfies us.
The hard answer.
Maybe God isn’t actually a king. Maybe the similarities between humanity and God here don’t apply or don’t fit.
We want to explain something that we can’t. And we want to make connections that seem real and necessary. Because consistency in the gospel, and in everything, is as important to us as certainty.
Another answer.
God can be first in our hearts and not be king. Because kingship is entirely human. It stems from huamity. Supremacy and the need to control other people is human sin.
What was entirely unique about the God our ancestors knew as YHWH is that here was a god who didn’t belittle or control the people. In a world in which gods were so like the tyrant kings of humanity, ours was a god who reflected an entirely different ethic.
God’s command isn’t tyranny when we are in communion with them.
Scripture gives us a few examples to draw on.
More than half of Hebrew Scripture deals with negative examples of kings.
In Exodus, we see the rigid, disconnected, and brutal paranoia of Pharaoh.
In Judges, we see God bend over backward to avoid anointing kings for the Hebrew people. Giving them judges to lead, inspire, and order them. But the people insist on being ruled by this particular form of centralized, supreme authority.
In essence, a godhead.
In the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, we see tyrant after tyrant assume the throne. And with it, selfishness, cruelty, and further distancing from the ways of God.
There are bright spots in the history, of course. Kings who weren’t totally depraved. Kings who reflected something of the justice of God during their reigns. But the story, the whole story, reveals an arc of devastation, division, and ultimately destruction as the kingdom is broken, the Temple is destroyed, and half of the people are enslaved…by another king.
Are we getting the point yet?
Then comes Jesus who wears a mantle the people associate with a king. The revolutionary replacement king. The one who will come, liberate them by conquering and destroying their enemies, and restoring new glory to the kingdom that had been divided and demoralized for almost eight centuries.
And Jesus is like Nah. That’s not me.
And this doesn’t include the number of times people try to grab Jesus to force him to become king. They literally want to put the crown on his head and make him king against his will. They want to force him to display supreme authority over them.
So does Jesus ever accept the mantle of king? No. Never. At no point does he take it.
This is why the Temptation in the Desert is so important. Because Satan, the Adversary, tries to get Jesus to become a divine king and he refuses.
So in other words, making Jesus a king is satanic!
Every time we try to do it then, it feels like we are operating under the wrong impulse.
The Right Place
So what are we supposed to do with Jesus?
Tradition has long used the metaphors of kings, monarchs, and rulers to describe the position and place of the divine in our lives. Many have sought to redeem this language, transform it into a new concept, and grant in it, a message of new hope. I am totally on board for that mission.
I also know that the reason that God doesn’t want us to give singular authority to human beings doesn’t disappear from us when we give that authority to God. Because the granting of that power to one creates a new helplessness in us. And I don’t think that fits either.
I keep going back to the image of Jesus ducking and evading their attempts to crown him. And then here is a candid conversation with Pilate: a guy who knows little about his people and really couldn’t care less about their internal politics as long as they keep paying taxes.
If we cast this in our minds, maybe they’re in a royal palace or maybe it’s the Saratoga or Starbucks. And Pilate is just sizing him up. People call him King of the Jews, but he sure doesn’t look like a king. Then again, neither did David.
Pilate asks him point blank.
“Are you the King of the Jews?”
And Jesus says that his kingdom isn’t from this world.
“So you are a king?”
That’s what you say. Because that’s what they say. That doesn’t make it true.
If not king, then what?
Calling Jesus a king is easy. It’s a shorthand that makes sense. Yeah, there’s baggage, but we do it because we want to express something that is otherwise alien to us.
Which kind of begs the question: why don’t we just say that?
So what is it that we are trying to express?
“Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”
A daily prayer that proclaims the good news that God is first.
And the way of life and love and hope stems from this.
We need a way to express the good news of God’s ways being above or before our own without expressing supremacy. Because the language of master and slave, king and servant betrays the generosity and hope embedded in this arrangement. Particularly for those of us who don’t feel enslaved to our sin.
Like we’ve done nothing wrong.
Here’s one way I’ve seen it in action.
When I started at seminary, the dean told us that he doesn’t take attendance at chapel. We had to participate in chapel daily. It is not only how we learn, but how we grow. He told us that he doesn’t take attendance, because we should want to be at worship. That’s literally what this is all about.
Of course, people tested it, and one year the dean threatened to take attendance if more of us didn’t take it seriously. And of course our regular attendance shot back up.
But notice the posture. It isn’t about a supreme authority in action, but the grace that is evident throughout that story.
We don’t need a king because we should want the dream of God to be our dream.
And this doesn’t only mean our dreams are trash (though they are), but that only God’s dream is for everybody.
The point isn’t what we can’t do, but what in Christ Jesus we can.
Being transformed
And this is the root of our relationship; to power, authority, commitment, each other. The way we are called to be together as a people broken and renewed; in need of healing and instead being made whole.
This is the joy of our work in the world.
As much as we desire the certainty of a king’s power, a king’s order, a king’s reign in glory, God keeps giving us something completely different: death and resurrection.
A Jesus who died and rose again.
Something no king can offer. No temptor or job recruiter. No elected official or CEO can offer us this kind of answer to our deepest dreams. They may try. Offer the world. Everything you could want. But not the thing you truly want.
To be transformed into a true blessing. To be part of the spark that transforms the world. Not in those ways of violence and control, but in God’s way. In Shalom. Peace. Justice. Wholeness. Completeness. Togetherness.
That is our love and our hope.